‘This fire could have been prevented': How utilities fought removal of old power lines

Los Angeles Times

6 days ago

The abandoned power line suspected of igniting the Eaton fire could have been removed years ago under a rule proposed by state Public Utilities Commission staffers, but the regulation was weakened amid opposition from Southern California Edison and other utilities, according to records and interviews.
State regulators have long known that old transmission lines could set off wildfires, and in 2001 they proposed a safety rule that would have forced Edison and other electric companies to remove abandoned lines unless they could prove they would use them in the future.
Amid opposition from the utility companies, the Public Utilities Commission studied the proposal for several years, ultimately watering it down to allow the old lines to remain up until executives decided they were 'permanently abandoned,' records show.
One of those old transmission lines, Edison's Mesa-Sylmar line that last saw service during the Vietnam War, is at the center of dozens of lawsuits claiming it ignited the devastating Eaton fire on Jan. 7. The inferno roared through Altadena, killing 19 people and destroying 9,400 homes and other structures.
Edison has said a leading theory of the fire's cause is that the century-old line somehow briefly re-energized, creating an arc that sparked the wildfire. The investigation is continuing.
Raffy Stepanian, an electrical engineer who was part of the commission's safety team that proposed the 2001 rule to take down abandoned lines, said commission members dialed back the regulation under fierce lobbying by the state's utilities.
'There was a lot of pressure on us to agree with utilities on everything,' Stepanian said, adding that the utilities 'pretty much wrote those rules.'
Now retired from the commission, Stepanian lives in Altadena. His house survived the Eaton fire, but homes adjoining his property were destroyed.
'This fire could have been prevented,' he said.
Edison, responding to questions from The Times, said the company kept the Mesa-Sylmar transmission line in place because it thought it might need the line in the future. It last transported electricity in 1971.
'We have these inactive lines still available because there is a reasonable chance we're going to use them in the future,' said Shinjini Menon, Edison's senior vice president of system planning and engineering.
Menon said the company inspects and maintains the dormant lines to ensure their safety.
Loretta Lynch, the commission's president in 2001 when the changes were proposed, said she remembers the safety staff coming to her and explaining why the rules needed to be strengthened. But the effort met with resistance from utility executives, she said.
Ultimately, the commission allowed the utilities to debate the rules at dozens of workshops over two years.
The weakened proposal was approved in 2005, less than two weeks after Lynch's term had expired. Lynch's departure left just three people on the five-member commission, which was chaired by Michael Peevey, the former president of Edison International, Southern California Edison's parent company.
'The folks who were trying to improve safety got pulled into a back room with a bunch of industry participants and what happened was a final decision that rolled back safety regulations,' Lynch said.
In an interview this week, Peevey acknowledged that in the hindsight of 20 years, a time when utilities have repeatedly sparked some of the biggest wildfires in the state, the commission might have acted differently.
'If we knew then what we know now, perhaps we would have come to a different conclusion,' he said.
The other commissioners who approved the rule were Susan Kennedy, who was chief of staff for former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Geoffrey Brown, an attorney and cousin of former Gov. Jerry Brown. Brown said he couldn't recall the details of the vote. Kennedy had no immediate comment.
In the years since the commission's 2005 decision, abandoned power lines have continued to pose a threat, with hundreds of miles of the unused transmission lines running like spider webs through California.
In 2019, investigators traced the Kincade fire in Sonoma County, which destroyed 374 homes and other structures, to an abandoned line owned by Pacific Gas & Electric.
After the Eaton fire, PUC executive director Rachel Peterson was called before the Assembly Utilities and Energy Committee to address how the agency monitors abandoned power lines.
'If we wanted to know where all of the inactive lines are, is there a place where we can get that information?' asked Assemblywoman Rhodesia Ransom (D-Tracy).
'Not as of today, Assemblymember,' Peterson replied. 'And I would, I guess, I'd say in part because the service territories are so large and the pieces of equipment are so numerous that a registry of a specific element may or may not exist. However, we'll take that back and look at it.'
'Is there a timeline requirement for them to remove abandoned lines?' asked Assemblywoman Pilar Schiavo (D-Santa Clarita).
'There's no timeline,' Peterson responded.
Terrie Prosper, a commission spokeswoman, wrote in an email that the commission expects the companies to inspect and safely maintain the dormant lines just as it does for those that are energized.
'Requiring utilities to remove power lines prematurely … would be shortsighted and could significantly raise bills for utility customers,' Prosper wrote. She declined to make officials available for interviews.
Edison said earlier this year that the unused transmission line in Eaton Canyon may have become energized through induction, a process where magnetic fields created by nearby live lines cause the dormant line to electrify.
The company built two transmission lines that run parallel to the dormant Mesa-Sylmar line. They were energized when videos captured the Eaton fire igniting under one of the Mesa-Sylmar transmission towers.
After the 2019 Kincade fire, PG&E said it had agreed with the commission to remove 262 miles of lines that had no future use. The company said it would prioritize the removal of those where the risk of induction was high.
'At the right conditions, failing idle facilities can pose significant wildfire and safety risks,' PG&E wrote in its plan to remove the lines.
Edison says it has 465 miles of idle transmission lines in its territory. Kathleen Dunleavy, an Edison spokeswoman, said the company could not release the locations of those lines because it was 'considered confidential.'
How to define 'abandoned'
State utility rules have long stated that 'permanently abandoned' lines must be removed so they 'shall not become a public nuisance or a hazard to life or property.'
But utilities and commission safety staff sometimes disagreed on what lines had been abandoned.
In 2001, when the commission and its staff proposed strengthening the rule, Edison was challenging the agency's finding that it had violated it by failing to remove an electric line at a Lancaster home that had been demolished. A man who Edison said was attempting to steal equipment had climbed the pole and been electrocuted, according to commission documents.
Edison told the safety staff that it had a pending order for service to be re-installed to the property, arguing it was not abandoned. Staff later discovered there was no such work order, according to the commission's investigation into the death.
To strengthen the rule, the commission said in a January 2001 order that it would define permanently abandoned lines as any line out of service 'unless the owner can demonstrate with appropriate documentation' how it would be used in the future.
Edison and other utilities objected to that proposal and a dozen other rule changes the commission had proposed, asking for the plan to be debated at a workshop, documents show.
Ultimately, an administrative law judge at the commission allowed 50 days of workshops over the course of two years. The judge also allowed Edison and other utilities to pay $180,000 to choose and hire a consultant to facilitate the workshops, according to commission documents.
The goal of the workshops, according to a commission document, was 'to gather parties' views and attempt to narrow disagreement.'
At the workshops, one or two of the commission's safety staff defended the proposal while listening to comments from dozens of employees from the electric utilities and the telecommunications companies, according to an utility industry website that kept executives apprised of the developments.
The companies did not just want to debate the commission's proposed rule changes. Documents show the companies suggested 50 other changes to the safety rules, including some that would significantly weaken them.
Lynch, the former commission president, called the workshops 'the worst way to go about fact-finding on what is needed to ensure safety' and said the utility-paid facilitator had 'unheard of' powers in drafting the workshop notes, which were incorporated into the commission's final decision.
In the final wording, gone from the proposal was any requirement for utilities to document how they planned to use dormant lines in the future. Instead the language revised the rule to define permanently abandoned lines as those 'that are determined by their owner to have no foreseeable future use.'
With that definition, utilities could keep their old unused lines up indefinitely if executives believed they might be used in the future.
The commission's vote 'perverted the entire intent' of the proposal meant to strengthen the rules, Lynch said. Instead the commission's final decision reduced safety requirements.
'It's very Orwellian,' she said. 'Up is down.'
In an interview in July, Connor Flanigan, Edison's managing director of state regulatory operations, pointed out that commission staff had been given the power to block a company proposal at the workshops, which were open to the public.
'When the commission holds these proceedings, they try to be very transparent,' he said.
The document outlining the commission's final decision includes quotes from Edison executives praising the workshop process.
'Like most parties, SCE achieved some, but not all, of the rule changes it sought,' the executives said.