Risk register · entry
Q1 · PredictablePG&E bankruptcy / Camp Fire
A worn hook on a tower unclimbed since 2001 killed 85 people and bankrupted the utility.
Documented, foreseeable risks that were ignored anyway. The failure is attention, not information.
Why this room
This is q1 because the cause was a single, observable, degrading component on an asset whose inspection regime had been narrowed to the point where the degradation could not be seen: a worn C-hook carrying 1921-vintage hardware on Tower 27/222 of the Caribou-Palermo line broke, dropping an energised conductor against the steel tower. The CPUC's Safety and Enforcement Division concluded that a climbing inspection would have identified the worn hook before it failed and prevented ignition, and that the maintenance defects were indicative of an overall pattern rather than an isolated lapse. PG&E's own records showed the same wear pattern on adjacent transposition towers, so the information required to prevent the fire existed inside the company; what failed was the attention paid to it.
The record
- The Camp Fire killed 85 people, burned 153,336 acres and destroyed approximately 18,800 structures after igniting on 8 November 2018.certain
- PG&E pleaded guilty on 23 March 2020 to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter and one count of unlawfully causing a fire, and paid the statutory maximum fine of about $3.48 million plus $500,000 in costs.certain
- The count is 84 rather than 85 because the Butte County District Attorney concluded one of the 85 deaths was a suspected suicide and could not be proved beyond reasonable doubt to have been caused by the fire; the DA's report records 84 lives lost 'as a direct result of the fire'.certain
- PG&E's inspection and patrol records for the Caribou-Palermo line go back only to 2001 (no earlier records could be located), and within them there is no record of any climbing inspection of Tower 27/222 between 2001 and 2018; post-fire climbing inspections of the line found 524 problems, 29 of them high-priority hazards.high
- PG&E Corporation and Pacific Gas and Electric Company filed voluntary Chapter 11 petitions on 29 January 2019, seeking approval for $5.5 billion of debtor-in-possession financing.certain
Sources
The book
This entry is one of 111 in the register. The full story, and what it cost the people who lived it, is in Risky Business by Claudia Zeisberger, David Munro and Joanna Reijgersberg-Siew.
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