US Government Says Southern California Edison Should Pay for LA Fire Costs

The U.S. asked a federal court to force Southern California Edison to pay for fighting a pair of wildfires that were believed to have originated from its power lines, including the Eaton Fire in January in Los Angeles County that killed more than a dozen people and destroyed thousands of structures.

The federal government on Thursday filed suits in Los Angeles seeking to recover the costs of suppressing the Eaton Fire, as well as the costs for fighting the Fairview Fire east of Los Angeles in September 2022 that killed two people. The US said both fires were the result of the utility’s negligence in the maintenance, operation or use of its power lines and equipment.

Utilities in the western U.S. have battled increasingly larger blazes as climate change has exacerbated extreme weather events. As a result, they’ve shouldered increased wildfire-related liabilities, with the 2018 Camp Fire driving PG&E Corp. into bankruptcy. California has attempted to stabilize the utilities by setting up wildfire compensation funds for victims, but that fund is at risk of being depleted in the wake of the January wildfires in Los Angeles.

Southern California Edison, a unit of Edison International, has seen scores of lawsuits related to the Eaton Fire, with complaints alleging that the utility’s equipment was involved in starting the wildfire. The cause of the fire, which devastated the Altadena neighborhood and killed 19 people, is still under investigation. The 2022 Fairview wildfire began in September and burned 28,000 acres, according to CalFire.

The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

In its lawsuit filed Thursday, the U.S. said the Eaton Fire was ignited by “faulty power infrastructure or sparks from faulty power infrastructure” owned and operated by Southern California Edison. The government said the utility knew about the potential dangers posed by high winds and power lines but failed to take action to prevent the ignition of a fire, noting that it issued a press release the day before the blaze highlighting its crews’ preparations for “extreme winds and possible outages.”

The U.S. said Southern California Edison operates three transmission lines in the Eaton Canyon area where the fire appears to have started and admitted that it had detected a “fault” in one of the lines around the time of ignition.

The U.S. is seeking the costs of suppressing the Eaton Fire and rehabilitating more than 8,000 acres of National Forest Lands that burned in the blaze, which it estimated at more than $40 million, and the amounts it paid to fight the Fairview Fire and rehab 14,000 acres.

At the same time as the Eaton Fire, another blaze in Pacific Palisades driven by the same intense winds burned more than 20,000 acres.

The cases are U.S. v Southern California Edison, 25-cv-8356 and 25-cv-8357, both in US District Court, Central District of California.

Top photo: Structures burn during the Eaton Fire in Altadena, California on Jan. 8.