The Dixie Fire — now the second largest wildfire in California history — started on the morning of July 13. According to the electrical incident report from PG&E, the first sign of trouble was around 7 a.m. when “Cresta Dam off of Highway 70 in the Feather River Canyon lost power.” A PG&E troubleman later discovered a tree had fallen on a distribution line that provided power to the Cresta Dam. It seemed as if the tree’s contact with the line started a fire.
PG&E operates 63 hydroelectric facilities in Tier 2 and Tier 3 high fire threat areas, know as “HFTD’s.” Twenty-four of its facilities are in Tier 3, which is the highest fire risk zone possible. “The Rock Creek-Cresta Hydroelectric Project” consists of the Rock Creek and Cresta reservoirs, dams and powerhouses. Cresta is one of PG&E’s Tier 3 hydroelectric facilities. That means it should have been a top priority for enhanced wildfire mitigation inspections, especially in the run-up to fire season. Not to mention, Cresta’s facilities are located in the Feather River Canyon — the same region where the deadly 2018 Camp Fire started.
In the months leading up to the Dixie Fire, however, PG&E wrote a letter to the CPUC admitting that it had “discovered” a mistake in its 2020 Wildfire Mitigation Plan: It had forgotten to include its hydroelectric substations.
Yes, you read that right. A multiple-time felon on probation and under heightened scrutiny for its wildfire mitigation efforts completely forgot to include some of its facilities in its master mitigation plan.
And it gets worse.
PG&E admitted that in 2020 it never inspected any of its hydroelectric substations in Tier 3 HFTDs, and it only inspected 20% of those in Tier 2. This, to put it mildly, is a major oversight.
The scope of a hydroelectric substation inspection under PG&E’s “Wildfire Safety Inspection Program” includes much more than just the substation. According to PG&E itself, it includes: “substations, switching stations, and hydroelectric facilities, with a specific focus on the failure mechanisms for transformers, conductors, connectors, insulators, switches, poles, and other equipment.”
So, when PG&E admitted to not inspecting the substations, it also was admitting to not inspecting a lot of other associated electrical assets and equipment, like the conductor that serviced Cresta Dam where the Dixie Fire is believed to have started.
PG&E further stated that it could only “generally” confirm enhanced inspections were performed in 2020 of hydroelectric transmission or distribution lines called “gen-ties” and “pass-throughs,” and could not confirm at all whether any enhanced inspections “included the entirety of the first half-span of line between the hydroelectric substation and the first transmission or distribution structure on the circuit.”
Two months later in May of this year, PG&E admitted that it still had not performed any ground inspections of its Tier 2 or 3 hydroelectric substations.
This is the exact same problem that led to PG&E missing problems with the Caribou-Palermo transmission line that started the Camp Fire in 2018. PG&E had failed to perform any actual up-close or detailed inspections of the transmission towers and lines. According to the final report from the Butte County District Attorney who criminally prosecuted the company, PG&E had “no record of any climbing inspections, detailed ground inspections above 10’ or aerial inspections conducted on the Caribou-Big Bend section of the transmission line,” which is the section of the line where the Camp Fire started. PG&E subsequently pleaded guilty to 84 counts of felony manslaughter and one felony count for unlawfully causing a fire.
Less than nine months after PG&E pleaded guilty, it notified the CPUC that it had forgotten to include its hydroelectric substations in its 2020 Wildfire Mitigation Plan. In the March 4 letter, the company admitted that due to this mistake, “we did not perform enhanced inspections on approximately 24 hydroelectric substations in Tier 3.” That means not a single one of PG&E’s most fire-prone hydroelectric electric facilities, including Cresta, received an enhanced inspection.
Two months later at the beginning of May, in PG&E’s “Quarterly Advice Letter” to the CPUC, PG&E admitted that as to hydroelectric substations in HFTD’s, “0 substations have been fully inspected.”
According to that same letter, “[f]ull substation enhanced inspections are counted as completed when all three planned inspection types (ground, aerial, and infrared) are completed.” As of May, PG&E admitted that it had failed to complete any ground inspections of their hydroelectric substations. And only two substations had received aerial inspections.
Curiously, in a PG&E letter to the CPUC only weeks later, the company tried to claim: “[W]e completed enhanced inspections of all Tier 3 hydroelectric substations by March 12.” But the letter then uses a footnote to clarify that PG&E only performed drone inspections to make up for the “missing 2020 WMP [or Wildfire Mitigation Plan] inspections.”
By PG&E’s own standards, this cannot be considered a complete inspection.
Just like the Camp Fire, PG&E’s failure to properly inspect its equipment almost certainly led to the Dixie Fire. The company just doesn’t seem to learn. It’s past time to ask ourselves whether PG&E even cares about safety or if it’s paying a swath of attorneys and running ads to give lip service to the public and its victims.
Alison Cordova is a retired attorney who was part of lead counsel that took on PG&E for the 2015 Butte Fire, 2017 North Bay Fires, and 2018 Camp Fire.
