Judge orders PG&E to respond to newspaper report about power lines sparking wildfires
A U.S. District Judge ordered PG&E must respond "paragraph-by-paragraph" to the WSJ report by July 31.
A federal judge has ordered PG&E Corp. to respond to a newspaper report claiming that the company has long known that parts of its system for transmitting electricity across Northern California were dangerously outdated.
The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday reported based on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act that the company has for years declined to pay for upgrades to hundreds of miles of its high-voltage power that could fail and spark fires.
PG&E spokesman James Noonan said Wednesday afternoon that the company is aware of the judge’s order and is currently reviewing it. “PG&E’s most important responsibility is the safety of our customers and the communities we serve,” Noonan said.
Related: PG&E is already starting fires again, just weeks into the season
‘Paragraph by paragraph’ court-ordered response
Just hours after the report appeared on the Journal’s website, U.S. District Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California, who is overseeing the aftermath of PG&E Corp.’s 2016 safety-related felony conviction Wednesday, ordered the company to respond “paragraph-by-paragraph.”
“The offender (PG&E) may not evade response by saying, for example, that it cannot know what documents the Wall Street Journal reviewed. The offender should know the extent to which the story is accurate or not since the report covers what PG&E knows internally,” Alsup wrote. The judge also noted that the company has in the past responded to his request ”by filing thousands of records and leaving it to the judge to find the needles in the haystacks.”
“This time, the offender must provide a fresh, forthright statement owning up to the true extent of the Wall Street Journal report,” Alsup wrote.
Alsup has been overseeing PG&E’s probation following the company’s August 2016 conviction on six felony counts stemming from the 2010 pipeline explosion in San Bruno. The blast killed eight people and injured dozens more. Alsup inherited the case after Judge Thelton Henderson, who oversaw the trial, retired in 2017.
Alsup on Wednesday also asked the company, which is currently in bankruptcy, to address reports from a local ABC News affiliate that the company has recently made large contributions to political candidates. Alsup asked the company to catalog its political contributions since 2017 and “explain why those campaign contributions were more important than replacing or repairing the aging transmission lines described by the Wall Street Journal article and removing or trimming the backlog of hazard trees, and increasing vegetation management.”
The judge also asked the company to explain why $5 billion in dividends paid out prior to its bankruptcy filing weren’t instead used to address safety issues.
A spokesman for PG&E said the company would issue a statement shortly.
Read the judge’s request for information:
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