Another flawed PG&E power line operating near Camp Fire site, victims’ lawyers say
PG&E Corp. is operating a second potentially dangerous transmission line near the spot where the Camp Fire ignited in 2018, lawyers for wildfire victims announced Thursday.
The lawyers for the tort claimants committee, which is representing victims in PG&E’s bankruptcy, said an expert it hired found deteriorating transmission-tower hooks on a transmission line near the Camp Fire site.
PG&E said the equipment cited by the lawyers will be repaired but doesn’t pose any safety risk.
The lawyers said the problems appeared to be similar to the defects on the PG&E transmission tower that’s been blamed for the November 2018 fire, which killed 85 people and destroyed much of the town of Paradise.
The problems were found on a tower on PG&E’s Cresta-Rio Oso transmission line. The tower is roughly 100 yards from a tower on a parallel transmission line, the Caribou-Palermo line, where the Camp Fire ignited.
The fire, the deadliest in California history, began after the failure of a clamp known as a C-hook, which was supposed to keep high-voltage transmission wires separate from the main tower. When the clamp failed, a jumper cable brushed against the tower, showering sparks on the dry grass below.
PG&E has permanently shuttered the Caribou transmission line.
The problems on the second line “were consistent with the issues discovered on the Caribou-Palmero Tower,” the lawyers said in a press release. “The expert noted that several of the C-hooks on the line were problematic. Specifically, the expert noted that some of the hooks were considerably rusted, some had worn a groove into their connecting parts, and some appeared to be held together by black electrical tape.”
PG&E, however, said the electrical tape wasn’t holding the hooks together. Instead, it had been left behind by utility crews that had performed maintenance. “Some linemen wrap tape around the hook so the hook doesn’t inadvertently fall to the ground during the insulator string installation. Once the insulator string is attached, the tape serves no functional purpose and if not removed is simply an artifact of the installation,” the company said in a prepared statement.
All told, PG&E spokeswoman Lynsey Paulo said the problems identified by the lawyers expert amounted to “eight minor issues” that will be fixed. “It’s not an immediate safety issue,” she said.
After PG&E responded, the lawyers issued a corrected statement acknowledging that the tape wasn’t holding together the C-hooks.
Still, the discovery could complicate PG&E’s efforts to exit bankruptcy. The utility is trying to convince a skeptical Gov. Gavin Newsom to accept its bankruptcy reorganization plan, which includes paying $25 billion in wildfire damages and reorganizing its board of directors and executive leadership to focus more intently on public safety. Newsom has been saying he would consider a state takeover of PG&E if the company doesn’t fix its chronic safety problems.
The lawyers hired the expert, who wasn’t identified, to prepare for a bankruptcy hearing on PG&E’s liabilities from the 2017 and 2018 wildfires. The hearing has been tabled now that PG&E has announced its payout plan.
PG&E has said it has ramped up inspections of thousands of miles of power lines in its vast territory in an effort to prevent future wildfires.
In a report in December to the federal judge overseeing its criminal probation from the San Bruno pipeline disaster, PG&E said its inspectors had found more than 50,000 problems on its transmission lines, including damaged C-hooks.
“All of the highest-priority conditions identified as a result of those inspections have been repaired or made safe,” PG&E’s lawyers wrote.
This story was originally published February 6, 2020 at 9:29 AM with the headline "Another flawed PG&E power line operating near Camp Fire site, victims’ lawyers say."