In August, 2020, a flurry of dry lightning strikes sparked over 900 fires across California. “You could smell the smoke and everything,” says Benjamín…
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In 2020, California had over 9,900 wildfires, which burned a record 4.25 million acres and killed 33 people, according to the state’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CalFire). It is time for California to rethink its approach to wildfires, stakeholders said.
Both wildfires and utility-owned power lines run throughout California’s federally-, state- and privately-held forest lands. Regulated utilities have caused less than 10% of California s wildfires, according to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), but a California constitutional provision makes utilities financially liable if their equipment is involved in, without causing, a fire’s ignition.
As a result, the state’s three dominant investor-owned utilities (IOUs) and their customers have incurred costs for fires involving their equipment on lands where public agencies efforts to avoid fires has been inadeq