Assembly Panel Hears Testimony on Utilities’ Culpability in Fires

The head of a California Assembly committee Friday challenged utility executives to prove they were not putting profits ahead of public safety by failing to keep trees properly trimmed away from power lines.

Diane Martinez (D-Monterey Park), chair of the Assembly Utilities and Commerce Committee, called the hearing in the aftermath of last month’s raid by investigators of the Southern California Edison Co., and the criminal conviction in June of Pacific Gas & Electric by a Nevada County jury on 739 misdemeanors for its role in a 1994 wildfire.

“The track record of the utilities gives us no great comfort,” Martinez said, adding she wanted to determine “how genuine the utilities are” in protecting the public from fires caused by power lines and faulty equipment.

State fire officials suspect equipment failed on an Edison power pole near Calabasas after Santa Ana winds blew eucalyptus branches into the pole, causing a weeklong fire that destroyed more than 13,000 acres, a dozen homes and buildings, and injured 11 people, including a firefighter who was critically wounded.

David B. LeMay, the state forestry official who supervised the action against Edison, told the committee that the search was successful, but declined to elaborate. Fifty investigators raided Edison’s Rosemead headquarters and four branch offices Sept. 29, gathering evidence relating to last year’s Calabasas fire.

James Kelly, Edison’s manager for regulatory compliance, also declined to comment on the raid, or the Calabasas fire. But Kelly told the committee that Edison would agree to the appointment of a “neutral party” to examine the circumstances of that fire.

After the hearing, Edison attorney Steve Pickett said the utility had not discussed the idea with state fire officials.

“What we’d like to see is someone who does not have an incentive to collect [fire suppression] costs do a neutral investigation,” Pickett said. “CDF [California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention] does a difficult job under difficult circumstances, but they can’t be neutral when they’re also trying to collect their suppression costs.”

Most of the hearing involved the legal responsibility of state utilities to prevent their equipment from causing wildfires, which have become more commonplace as development continues to spread into wooded rural areas.

Fires sparked by overgrown trees and vegetation brushing against power lines account for only around 3% of all fires, but although few in number, utility-related blazes tend to be especially destructive, accounting for some 40% of all fire damage in California.

Over the past decade, the forestry agency has aggressively sought to recover its firefighting costs whenever it determines who is responsible for causing a fire, said LeMay, the agency’s deputy chief of law enforcement.

Some of the legislative concern over power-line safety stems from the recent deregulation of electricity in California, which takes effect next year. The move to open the electricity market to competition followed two years of unusual and widespread service interruptions in which trees and vegetation often played a part, raising concerns about the future reliability of service.

In 1995, severe storms knocked out power to thousands of Northern California customers. And last year, the massive power grid that carries electricity to 10 Western states failed twice. First, power lines arced into trees in Idaho and Washington in July 1996, cutting electricity to customers in several areas. Then, in August 1996, power lines sagged into overgrown trees during a heat wave, knocking out power to some 7 million customers from Canada to Baja California.

The latter failures caused regulators to look harder at the tree-trimming activity of the state’s three largest utilities--Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric in San Francisco, and San Diego Gas & Electric.

In Northern California, they discovered “an appallingly bad situation” around PG&E; power lines through densely forested areas, said Wilson Lewis, an investigations supervisor for the utilities commission, which is investigating PG&E;’s tree-trimming practices.

The Assembly committee also heard from victims of a 1994 wildfire that destroyed 500 acres and a dozen homes near the Nevada County town of Rough and Ready. The Nevada County district attorney who successfully prosecuted the case--the first time a utility has been found criminally negligent for failing to trim trees--also testified before the committee.

The fire was touched off when branches from an oak tree that hadn’t been trimmed in nine years caused a 21,000-volt power line to arc.

PG&E; was fined nearly $2 million and faces a restitution hearing that may result in millions more in damage awards.

Jenny E. Ross, the deputy Nevada County district attorney, said testimony and evidence at that trial revealed that PG&E; officials repeatedly ignored warnings from its own managers that the utility’s failure to trim trees violated the law and posed an enormous risk to public safety.

One exhibit in the trial showed that between March and August 1995, for example, inspectors found 95,000 instances of “burners”--trees touching PG&E; power lines.

Ross said the jury heard testimony that PG&E; had collected $80 million from its customers for vegetation removal that it hadn’t spent, at a time when it was annually earning $1 billion a year in profits.

The utility has appealed that verdict, said PG&E; consultant Thomas H. Willoughby, who acknowledged that the company had collected $80 million for tree trimming that it did not spend. He said the utility has recently spent more on vegetation removal than it has collected from its ratepayers.

Nonetheless, Ross told the committee that, “for many years, PG&E; personnel at every level were well aware that [the utility] was violating the law. They knew funding [for tree trimming] was grossly inadequate.”

She added: “The jury concluded the evidence proved that despite the serious risk of fire [PG&E; executives] were more concerned with profits than the law.”