Less than a month after emerging from bankruptcy triggered by a string of devastating wildfires in 2017 and 2018, PG&E Corp. has now been found responsible for California’s biggest blaze of 2019, Bloomberg News reported. The California energy giant’s power lines sparked the Kincade fire which burned 77,758 acres and destroyed 374 structures in Sonoma County wine country, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said yesterday. Investigators have sent a report on the incident to the Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office, only a month after PG&E pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter for a 2018 conflagration that was the most deadly in state history. Brandon Gilbert, an assistant to Sonoma County District Attorney Jill Ravitch, said his office recently received the reports and will start reviewing them. PG&E said that it doesn’t have access to Cal Fire’s report or the evidence it collected. PG&E’s equipment was long suspected of causing the Kincade fire that started on Oct. 23, as the utility had reported that one of its transmission lines malfunctioned near the location and time of the start of the blaze. The company said in May that it could book a loss of at least $600 million stemming from damages tied to the wildfire. The Kincade fire likely won’t cause the same kind of financial trouble for PG&E as the string of catastrophic blazes in 2017 and 2018 that were blamed on its equipment and pushed it into bankruptcy more than a year ago. PG&E estimated liabilities from those fires at $30 billion. The company emerged from chapter 11 at the start of this month after having settled claims from the earlier fires for $25.5 billion. The Kincade blaze wasn’t included in the bankruptcy settlement with victims.
