California steps up PG&E oversight after new failures in wildfire-safety program

California regulators moved to ramp up their oversight of PG&E, saying the state’s largest utility was falling behind on wildfire safety less than a year after exiting bankruptcy.

The Public Utilities Commission voted 5-0 to move PG&E Corp. into “enhanced oversight and enforcement” after concluding that the company was doing a poor job of trimming and removing trees near the most hazardous power lines.

The move places Pacific Gas and Electric into the first of a 6-step disciplinary process. If PG&E reaches the sixth and final step, the PUC could revoke its license and arrange for a takeover.

“The shortcomings of PG&E ... triggered this step, which is a big deal,” said Commissioner Genevieve Shiroma just before the votes were taken.

A series of horrific wildfires, capped by the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, drove PG&E and its Pacific Gas and Electric Co. subsidiary into bankruptcy in 2019. The PUC instituted the 6-step enhanced oversight program as a condition of approving the company’s exit from bankruptcy last summer.

Commissioner Clifford Rechtschaffen said the program is unique to the PUC and might be unique to all regulated utilities in the United States.

The company has been blamed by Cal Fire for two major wildfires since the Camp Fire: the October 2019 Kincade Fire in Sonoma County and last September’s Zogg Fire, which killed four people in Shasta County. The Sonoma County district attorney recently filed criminal charges against PG&E over the Kincade Fire, and Cal Fire has referred the Zogg incident to the Shasta DA.

The PUC focused its investigation on PG&E’s so-called enhanced vegetation management program — its expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars to remove and prune trees that could come into contact with power lines.

PUC executive director Rachel Peterson said the utility, in effect, has been trimming the wrong trees. Much of its work has involved clearing trees away from relatively low-risk wires, she said.

“PG&E is not doing the majority of (vegetation) work — or even a significant portion of the work — on the highest risk lines,” Peterson said in a written report to the commission.

The company, in a written statement released after the PUC vote, said: “We have already implemented significant improvements to our Enhanced Vegetation Management program and will continue to do so as outlined in our 2021 Wildfire Mitigation Plan.”