A damning report about the cause of the deadliest wildfire in California history poses a huge setback to Pacific Gas & Electric as it tries to resolve a complex bankruptcy and prove to its customers and elected officials that it takes safety seriously, the New York Times reported. PG&E repeatedly failed to properly maintain a power line built nearly a century ago even though it cuts through a heavily wooded and mountainous area that experiences strong winds, a 700-page report by the California Public Utilities Commission concluded. A live wire broke from the line, called the Caribou-Palermo, in November 2018 and ignited the Camp Fire, which killed 85 people and destroyed the town of Paradise. The report, which the commission posted on its website over the Thanksgiving holiday with no announcement, could jeopardize PG&E’s future as an independent business. The company was already on probation after being convicted of six federal criminal charges for causing another disaster — a gas pipeline explosion that killed eight people in San Bruno, south of San Francisco, in 2010. Critics of the company, including a group of California mayors and Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), have proposed selling PG&E to Warren E. Buffett’s holding company, breaking it up, having the state take it over or turning it into a cooperative owned by its customers. The report has also raised fresh questions about why the utilities commission did not identify PG&E’s safety lapses in previous investigations and audits of the company. The report did not address that issue but implied that the problems could have been discovered years earlier. It said that “long-duration exposure to higher winds, age and historical inspection methodologies likely all contributed” to the equipment failures that caused the fire.
