Posted on 03/23/2020 1:26:08 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Pacific Gas & Electric said Monday it will plead guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter in connection with the 2018 fire in Northern California that killed 84 people and decimated three towns.
Pacific Gas & Electric said Monday it will plead guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter in connection with the 2018 fire in Northern California that killed 84 people and decimated three towns.
The utility said in a statement it will also admit to a single count of unlawfully starting a fire.
Advertisement Under a plea agreement with the Butte County District Attorney’s office, PG&E will pay the maximum fine of about $4 million.
The company has also agreed to fund efforts to restore access to water for the next five years for residents impacted by the loss of a canal destroyed by the fire.
"Our equipment started the fire. Those are the facts, and with this plea agreement we accept responsibility for our role in the fire," PG&E CEO and President Bill Johnson said.
The blaze that destroyed the towns of Paradise, Magalia and Concow was started by sparks from a PG&E transmission line that failed on November 8, 2018, state investigators concluded.
Butte County officials have said 85 people died in the Camp Fire. It wasn’t immediately clear why PG&E pleaded guilty to 84 counts of manslaughter instead of 85.
The utility filed for bankruptcy in 2018 as it faced billions of dollars in claims from people who lost family members, homes and businesses in wildfires in 2017 and 2018.
The utility has been struggling to emerge from one of the most complex bankruptcy cases in U.S. history and a deadline has been set for it to do so by June 30.
The Nov. 8, 2018 was fanned quickly by strong winds, forcing thousands of people to quickly flee as they tried to escape in their cars as flames from the narrow canyon communities. Survivors described caravans of vehicles engulfed by flames.
The dead were found in burned-out cars, in the smoldering ruins of their homes and next to their vehicles, apparently overcome by smoke and flames before they could get inside them.
In some cases, all that remained of the dead were charred fragments of bone so small that investigators used a wire basket to sift and sort them.
Is there a jail big enough to house PG&E
Yeah, who’s going away?
Pacific Gas & Electric..
What an odd name to give a child.
He’s looking at a lot of years with these charges.
We were over the ridge...talked to some trapped in the center of town by radio during the fire. Nasty business all the way around.
I worked for a company that sold equipment to PGE.
Many years ago, they were a high quality organization.
But like a lot of things in California, things went downhill.
How does a CORPORATION plead guilty to manslaughter?
You can’t put a CORPORATION in jail.
But you CAN make a CORPORATION pay a sh*tload in fines to the govt.
That’s what this is all about.
Once PG&E goes to jail, how are utility consumers in California going to get electricity and natural gas? Seems like they could be in a “freeze in the dark” situation, adjusted for California’s weather.
And where are all the environmentalists that for years got California’s governors to not allow culling of brush and dead trees that exacerbated the wildfires. Oh, I know. Now they are off sounding the alarm about climate change flying all over the world in private jets for big climate change powows.
Then the state senate and assembly should plead guilty as well.
Sadly, you can't even do that. Any fine they get will be paid by their customers. (Us)
By the way, they deserve punishment. In 2010, they blew up the entire town of San Bruno through incompetence.
They should be put into receivership and the court should appoint a CEO.
EXactly they are the real guilty ones here not the power company
That would work for me.
Just heard on the radio that their sock rose today.
The Electric Chair for the corrupt PGE and their even more corrupt PUC “regulators” (a- missing money- grabbing wh@res). But alas, PGE would just impose another of their “discretionary power outages” and the chairs wouldn’t work. What a corrupt state Californication’s become!!!! Worse than communist Cuba or Iran or North Korea
They blew up an entire town in 2010.
Maybe they can make it a state run organization and hire Dennis Kuchinich as the head.
He was always the champion for “Cleveland Public Power” the joke of a municipal electric company up there.
What exactly did PG&E do to cause these fires?
If the state is going to blame PG&E for the wind slapping their wires together, then the state is full of sh*t.
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