SAN FRANCISCO -- Pacific Gas & Electric was charged with manslaughter and other crimes Friday after its equipment sparked a Northern California wildfire that killed four people and destroyed hundreds of homes last year, prosecutors said.
It is the latest legal action against the nation's largest utility, which pleaded guilty last year to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter in the 2018 Camp Fire ignited by its long-neglected electrical grid that nearly destroyed the town of Paradise.
Shasta County District Attorney Stephanie Bridgett announced the 31 charges, including 11 felonies, saying the utility failed to perform its legal duties and that "failure was reckless and criminally negligent, and it resulted in the death of four people."
If the utility is convicted of manslaughter, the punishment would be a fine for each person killed in the Zogg Fire last year near the city of Redding. A corporation "can't go to jail, so we're talking fines, fees, the ability for the court to order remedial and corrective measures," Bridgett said.
"One of our primary functions here is to hold them responsible and let the surviving families know that their loved one did not die in vain," she added.
The utility's CEO, Patti Poppe, said failing to prevent the fire was not a crime.
"This was a tragedy, four people died. And my coworkers are working so hard to prevent fires and the catastrophic losses that come with them. They have dedicated their careers to it, criminalizing their judgment is not right," Poppe said in a statement.
The wind-whipped Zogg Fire began Sept. 27, 2020, and raged through rugged terrain and small communities west of Redding, burning about 200 homes and blackening about 87 square miles of land.
In March, state fire investigators concluded that the blaze was sparked by a gray pine tree that fell onto a utility transmission line. Shasta and Tehama counties have sued the utility alleging negligence, saying it had failed to remove the tree even though it had been marked for removal two years earlier.
The district attorney determined that the company was "criminally liable" for the fire.
The charges Friday include enhancements for injury to a 29-year-old firefighter who was hit by a falling tree that fractured his spine, paralyzing him from the chest down. They also include felony arson counts linked to several fires started by the utility's equipment in Shasta County over the past year, Bridgett said.
Pacific Gas & Electric, which has an estimated 16 million customers in central and Northern California, filed for bankruptcy protection in 2019 after its aging equipment was blamed for a series of fires.
Company officials have acknowledged that the utility hasn't lived up to expectations in the past but said changes in leadership and elsewhere ensure it's on the right track and will do better.
The utility also remains on criminal probation for a 2010 pipeline explosion in San Bruno that killed eight people, giving a federal judge oversight of the company. The judge and California power regulators have rebuked the utility for breaking promises to reduce the dangers posed by trees near its power lines.
The company emerged from bankruptcy last summer and negotiated a $13.5 billion settlement with some wildfire victims. But it still faces both civil and criminal actions, including charges from the Sonoma County district attorney's office over the 2019 Kincade Fire that forced nearly 200,000 people to evacuate.
In the meantime, most of the roughly 70,000 victims who have filed claims for the devastation caused by the utility's past misdeeds are still awaiting payment from a trust created during the bankruptcy. The trust, which is run independently of the utility, is facing a nearly $2 billion shortfall because half its funding came in company stock.
