PG&E’s federal criminal probation has ended. Here’s how to fill the oversight vacuum

While on probation, a convicted killer violated the terms, came under multiple criminal investigations, pleaded guilty to further crimes and, indeed, killed again.

It’s not the typical profile of a defendant released from court supervision, but Pacific Gas and Electric Co., the luckiest recidivist criminal in California, has nevertheless served the last day of its probation for a deadly 2010 Bay Area gas explosion. The end of the five-year term Tuesday leaves an oversight vacuum that California officials can fill only by abandoning their historically indulgent stance toward the state’s largest utility.

If they’re searching for a model of more convincing oversight, the state Public Utilities Commission, the Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom should study William Alsup, the unflinching federal judge who oversaw PG&E’s probation since 2017. Alsup has served as an indispensable voice of reasonable outrage, regarding the wayward utility with a sense of alarm, urgency and insistence that state officials too often lack.

The San Francisco-based senior U.S. district judge was as uncompromising in his assessment of PG&E — and, ultimately, himself — in ending his oversight as he had been throughout. Noting that the utility’s probationary term had seen it start over 30 wildfires that burned almost 1.5 million acres, destroyed nearly 24,000 structures and killed 113 people, the judge said it went “on a crime spree and will emerge from probation as a continuing menace to California.” As such, he judged himself “a total failure in this job with respect to PG&E.”

To the extent that’s true, it’s not for lack of trying. Alsup directed PG&E to undertake and document extensive efforts to improve maintenance of its power lines, clear combustible vegetation and stop setting California on fire. He ordered it to respond in detail to a damning newspaper investigation of its maintenance practices. And he compelled executives to join him on a tour of Paradise, the Butte County town destroyed by the Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in California history and the scene of the crimes PG&E admitted while on probation.

Unlike many state officials, Alsup pierced PG&E’s attempts to downplay its responsibility for California’s escalating wildfire toll by hiding behind climate change. As he noted, hotter, drier conditions exacerbate fires but don’t usually provide the spark. “Climate change doesn’t start the wildfire,” Alsup said last year. “PG&E starts the wildfire.”

The judge noted PG&E’s “very clear-cut pattern” of doing so back in 2019, saying he could not “turn a blind eye and say, ‘PG&E, continue your business as usual. Kill more people by starting more fires.’” He asked company lawyers, presciently, if a subsequent fire season would see “some other town burned down because you didn’t turn the power off or you didn’t cut the trees.”

The company richly deserved to remain on probation, and Alsup offered to consider extending the term if asked by the Justice Department. But federal prosecutors declined, citing the five-year federal maximum and pending state prosecutions for the 2019 Kincade Fire in Sonoma County and the 2020 Zogg Fire in Shasta County. PG&E could also face federal as well as state prosecution in last year’s Dixie Fire, the second-largest in state history, which is under multiple investigations after state fire officials attributed it to the company’s equipment.

Alsup’s extensive and frustrating experience with PG&E ultimately led him to call for a breakup of the utility on the grounds that it would be “easier to train and to instill practices that truly put safety first” in “less sprawling utilities.” It’s another astute aspect of the judge’s analysis that California policymakers and regulators should heed. PG&E has defied even the most dedicated attempts at effective oversight and reform, proving it must not continue to exist in its current form.