The state Public Utilities Commission on Thursday signed off on a $45 million penalty against PG&E related to the 2021 Dixie Fire, the largest single fire in California history.
CPUC safety investigators blamed the nearly 1-million-acre Dixie Fire on PG&E’s delayed response to an outage on July 13, 2021. That outage happened after a diseased 65-foot tall Douglas fir fell onto a PG&E powerline near the Cresta Dam along the Feather River in Butte County.
Separately, the CPUC found PG&E failed to identify the at-risk tree during prior patrols, despite evidence of damage from disease and an earlier fire.
The settlement includes $40 million in stockholder money to be spent on digitizing PG&E’s vegetation management records over five years. It will also upgrade vegetation management patrols and equipment inspections.
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The remaining $5 million will be split evenly between the general fund and payments to groups representing the Greenville Rancheria and the Mountain Maidu Native American tribes.
The Dixie Fire took weeks to extinguish, destroying more than 1,300 structures and leaving four injured.
Investigators noted that while the fallen tree triggered the outage at 7 a.m. that day, it took until nearly 5 p.m. before a
PG&E technician arrived. By the time he did, the fire was already going.
The CPUC’s Safety and Enforcement arm found the utility failed to “adequately consider” the risk posed by high temperatures the day of the fire, adding that “no sense of urgency was demonstrated by PG&E to determine the cause of the (electrical) fault in a fire prone area during a severe time of year.”
PG&E told regulators it now requires a technician to respond within one hour of a reported outage in a high fire risk area.
In a statement Thursday, PG&E said it’s settled civil claims with the counties and individuals impacted by the fire and agreed to upgrade its fire safety response. “We are working hard to make our system safer every day,” the utility said.
As for the fire, the company said that while it accepts Cal Fire’s finding that a tree falling on its line was the cause, “PG&E believes we acted as a prudent operator.”
“There is no evidence that PG&E consciously and willfully disregarded a known risk” before the fire, it said, adding that PG&E complied will all regulatory requirements. The company performed eight inspections in the five years before the fire, it said, and crews found the tree canopy green with no indications it posed a hazard.
As for the allegedly delayed response, PG&E called its handling of the outage “reasonable and appropriate” under the circumstances. Its lineman, it said, did not see a tree when he arrived and checked the line with binoculars. He then “worked diligently” to respond, only to be at one point turned away by a county road crew. “Once he arrived,” the company said, the lineman “fought the fire heroically by himself before CAL FIRE arrived.’’
PG&E said while it still contests some of the fire findings regulators made based on the Cal Fire report, it doesn’t dispute the three allegations related to recordkeeping and other violations not related to the cause of the fire.
