SAN FRANCISCO — Pacific Gas & Electric shut off power to more than a million people Wednesday for what could be days on end, in the most sweeping effort in state history to prevent wildfires caused by windblown power lines. The move came after two years of catastrophic fires sent...
California Faces Historic Power Outage Due to Fire Danger
SAN FRANCISCO — Two years to the day after some of the deadliest wildfires tore through Northern California wine country, a utility announced Tuesday it will shut off power to more than 800,000 customers in the largest preventive outage in state history — to try to prevent wildfires caused by...
Controlled Outages May Be on the Way as PG&E Settles Cases
SAN FRANCISCO — Pacific Gas & Electric may cut power to try to head off wildfires as fall arrives in California and brings with it the most dangerous fire conditions that over the past two years have produced the deadliest and most destructive blazes in state history. The San Francisco...
PG&E Reaches $11B Deal With California Wildfire Insurers
SAN FRANCISCO — Pacific Gas & Electric and a group of insurers announced Friday they reached an $11 billion settlement to cover most of the claims from Califonria's wildfires in 2017 and 2018. The utility said in a statement the tentative agreement covers 85% of the insurance claims from fires...
How Much Could PG&E’s Rates Rise? What You Need to Know.
Pacific Gas and Electric’s customers were warned about the cost of massive wildfires that it may have sparked. Even before California’s largest utility filed bankruptcy proceedings at the start of the year, lawyers, policymakers and consumer advocates all cautioned that the company’s liabilities in those fires would, one way or another, hit...
Walters: Is a Recession on Our Horizon?
We live in volatile economic times, with global markets reacting moment by moment to the latest bits of data and the utterances of central bankers and politicians — even the tweets from the White House. California’s economy is much too big — the fifth largest in the world, we are...
Fighting Fire With Fire Often Falls Short in US West
KINGS CANYON NATIONAL PARK — The thick scent of smoke hung in the midday air when a trail along the Kings River opened up to an ominous scene: flames in the trees and thick gray smoke shrouding canyon walls. Firefighters were on the job. In fact, they had started the...
Agencies Try Hard to Stop Suicides of Wildland Firefighters
BOISE, Idaho — Shane Del Grosso spent some 30 summers crossing smoke-shrouded mountains and forests to fight increasingly devastating wildfires in the U.S. West. Toward the end, his skills and experience propelled him to lead a federal multi-agency team that responded to large-scale national disasters. On some days he directed...
Are California Utilities Doing Enough to Fireproof Equipment?
With much fanfare and no less hand-wringing, state regulators approved plans that for the first time set out how California’s electric utilities intend to prevent their equipment from sparking wildfires. But the plans provide scant details, and little evidence to support the companies’ claims that indiscriminately clear-cutting millions of trees and replacing...
Walters: 'Big, Hairy' Goal Could Be Newsom's First Defining Moment
The careers of political executives – presidents, governors and big city mayors – are often, fairly or not, defined by how they deal with the crises they encounter. Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Depression (and later World War II), John Kennedy and the Cuban missile confrontation, Lyndon Johnson and the...