The country’s largest utility pleaded guilty Tuesday to 84 felony counts of involuntary manslaughter stemming from the deadliest and most destructive fire in California history.
Pacific Gas & Electric, long accused of putting profits before customer safety, has acknowledged its neglected equipment set off the fire that destroyed most of the Northern California town of Paradise in 2018. The Camp Fire claimed the lives of 85 people, but prosecutors weren’t sure they could establish one of the deaths was the company’s fault. The blaze destroyed more than 18,000 structures and burned 153,000 acres.
At Tuesday’s hearing in superior court in Butte County, where what’s left of Paradise is located, Judge Michael Deems recited the 84 counts one by one as photos of the victims were shown on a courtroom screen.
Looking directly at the photos, PG&E CEO Bill Johnson repeatedly answered, “Guilty, your honor” to the charges.
Johnson addressed the court and acknowledged nothing he could say would lessen the anguish from the blaze the company ignited. He said:
“I sincerely hope that the actions we’re taking today will help bring some measure of peace. I wish there was some way to take back what happened or to take away the impact, the pain that these people suffered. But I know that can’t be done.”
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All in attendance wore masks at the hearing, which was livestreamed and served as a public chastisement of a company derided for its greed and stockholder-first corporate culture.
Later Tuesday, a newly released grand jury report berated PG&E for its “callous disregard” for public safety, failure to heed warnings about its aging power lines and refusal to learn from previous mistakes. The 92-page report said:
“Through a corporate culture of elevating profits over safety by taking shortcuts in the safe delivery of an extremely dangerous product – high-voltage electricity – PG&E certainly led otherwise good people down an ultimately destructive path.”
PG&E is approaching the end of a complicated bankruptcy case it used to work out $25.5 billion in settlements to pay for the damages from the Camp Fire and others that charred wide swaths of Northern California and killed dozens of people in 2017.
The bankruptcy deals include $13.5 billion earmarked for wildfire victims. A federal judge will decide whether to approve PG&E’s plan for getting out of bankruptcy by June 30. Butte County District Attorney Mike Ramsey told The Associated Press:
“We want this to be impactful because this can’t go on any longer. There is going to have to be a sea change in PG&E’s method of operation.”
Some of those changes have begun before what’s likely to be an intense fire season, following a winter and early spring with below-average precipitation.
PG&E crews have been replacing old power poles with more resilient ones less prone to toppling in heavy winds. The company undergrounded some electrical lines, cleared flammable vegetation near its equipment and increased its use of fire-monitoring technology.
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PG&E officials said they will still have to rely on the highly unpopular preventive power shutoffs they unveiled last year under certain weather conditions, albeit on a reduced, more-tailored scale.
The company said it altered its corporate culture and refocused on the safety of its 16 million customers. As part of a deal with California power regulators, PG&E will replace 11 of its 14 board members. Johnson will step down June 30.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup, who supervises PG&E’s five-year probation for an explosion in its natural gas lines that killed eight people in 2010 in a San Francisco suburb, has been highly critical of the utility for failing to take more measures to make its grid safer.
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PG&E also will plead to one felony count of unlawfully causing a fire. No executives will be charged, so no one will be imprisoned. PG&E instead will pay a maximum fine of $3.5 million in addition to $500,000 to cover the county’s costs of the criminal investigation. Johnson went on to say:
“On behalf of PG&E, I apologize, and I apologize personally, for the pain that was caused here. We can’t replace all that the fire destroyed, but we do hope by pleading guilty, by accepting accountability, by compensating the victims, supporting rebuilding and making significant, lasting changes to the way we operate, we can honor those who are lost and help this community move forward.”
The parties will reconvene for impact statements from the victims’ relatives Wednesday, and Deems is likely to formally sentence PG&E on Thursday or Friday.
