Company knew it would lose negligence case in deadly CA fire, court docs show
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Investigators linked the 2022 Mill Fire to Roseburg mill operations in Weed.
- Roseburg launched a $50M fund and settled major claims stemming from the fire.
- Court transcripts show Roseburg expected to lose a negligence lawsuit over the fire.
Filed court transcripts show an Oregon-based timber company was aware that previous fires in a giant wooden warehouse at one of its facilities would cause them to lose a negligence case after a 2022 fire ripped through a small town in Northern California, killing two women and destroying numerous homes.
The September 2022 Mill Fire started at the Roseburg Forest Products Co. lumber mill in the town of Weed in Siskiyou County. Investigators determined the fire, which spread rapidly to destroy 144 buildings and burn 3,939 acres or 6 square miles, was caused by mill operations at the Roseburg facility, Cal Fire officials announced in a June 16, 2023, news release.
The Mill Fire carved a deadly path of destruction through Weed’s historically Black neighborhood of Lincoln Heights. Lorenza Mondoc Glover, 65, and Marilyn Hilliard, 73, were killed in the fire. Three other people were in injured, according to Cal Fire. The fire burned for 12 days before firefighters fully contained the blaze.
On April 7, 2023, Roseburg filed a civil lawsuit in federal court against Illinois-based Liberty Insurance over insurance coverage. The pending lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court Eastern District of California dedicates a lot of its focus on the aftermath of the Mill Fire and how Roseburg responded to claims for damages from families in the surrounding Weed community.
Pete Hillan, a Roseburg spokesperson, said the company quickly set up a $50 million rescue fund that provided immediate assistance to about 2,500 families impacted by the Mill Fire in Weed. He said this assistance helped people find temporary shelter, clothes, food, transportation and other needs.
Hillan said the rescue fund then guided Roseburg, which is the biggest employer in Weed, on how it would seek to offer settlements as soon as possible to those impacted.
“Roseburg did what you would want a corporation to do in a situation like this,” Hillan said on Thursday.
The company spokesperson said there are some claims for damages against Roseburg that are still pending from people who were outside the Mill Fire burn zone but might have been evacuated for a few days before they were allowed to return home.
Hot ash stored in warehouse
The Roseburg lumber mill in Weed, where the fire started, produces wood veneer. The facility peels 4,500 to 5,000 logs a day into thin, high-quality sheets, or veneer, that goes into the other products including plywood and laminated veneer lumber, according to the company’s website.
Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Office records show that seven fires were reported at the Roseburg facility from 2014 through 2019, according to a September 2022 investigation by The Sacramento Bee. At the time, Hillan told The Bee that the timber company doesn’t believe any of the fires were in the warehouse also known as Shed 17.
The Bee learned that hot ash from a nearby wood-burning electricity generator had been stored inside Shed 17, and state and local officials couldn’t provide evidence that fire inspectors had ever gone inside the giant wooden warehouse.
In a transcript of an April 2024 deposition, Matthew Lawless, Roseburg’s now vice president and general counsel, explained how previous fires in the ash-holding shed would impact the company in court.
Lawless, who was Roseburg’s assistant general counsel and essentially running the company’s legal department at the time of the Mill Fire, said “because the company was aware of previous fire incidents in this ash, in the ash holding shed, and the company was of the opinion that regardless of — unless we could review security footage and find an arsonist, like, the company would lose a negligence case related to the fire.”
In a written statement released by Roseburg Thursday, the timber company said the Weed Fire Department responded to four reports of fires at Shed 17 between 2011 and 2019.
“Roseburg has never been cited for any fire safety violation, and no fire department has recommended Roseburg change its fire safety standards.,” according to the company’s statement.
Company officials said Roseburg pays the city of Weed more than $50,000 annually for fire protection services at its lumber mill, and the company said the Weed Fire Department’s fire station is located next door to Shed 17. The company said Roseburg has its own fire safety protections at the mill, including fast-attack fire trucks, fire hydrants, fire hoses and fire extinguishers.
Lumber mill reopened
In December 2022, about three months after the destructive fire and six months before Cal Fire would announce the findings of its investigation, Roseburg announced in a news release the company reached settlement agreements with four law firms representing the “majority of claims to settle the families’ property losses, personal injuries and wrongful death claims arising from the Sept. 2 Mill Fire.”
Robert Julian, an attorney hired by Roseburg as it responded to claims for damages from the Mill Fire, gave a deposition in the company’s pending federal lawsuit on May 30, 2024. Julian said Roseburg’s then general counsel and chief operating officer wanted to resolve the claims for damages quickly.
“As I discussed it with Stuart Gray, we believe liability was reasonably certain in a trial, and so he wanted a quick way to resolve a massive number of claims,” Julian said in a transcript of his deposition.
Numerous sections of the filed court transcripts were redacted under an court order to seal that information from public view. The depositions from Lawless and Julian were included with a Dec. 12, 2024, motion filed by attorneys representing Liberty Insurance.
On Nov. 10, 2022, Roseburg announced in a news release that employees had returned to work at its Weed lumber mill where full operations had resumed.
Roseburg officials said they reviewed and updated procedures that included:
▪ Removing the mill’s “ash mixer” that a manufacturer designed to mix and cool the mill’s ash with water.
▪ Installing a replacement mixer to mix the ash with water and cool the ash.
▪ Updating how the mill produces, stores and removes its ash from the new ash mixer.
▪ Updating emergency response processes.
▪ Conducting team member training for handling ash with the replacement ash mixer and a new storage facility.
“We carefully considered the concerns our neighbors, regulators, investigators and our community may have had about the resumption of full operations,” Hillan, the Roseburg spokesperson, said in the November 2022 news release. “We’ve trained our team members, tested the equipment and updated our operational protocols so that we are confident in safely resuming operations.”
