Lawyers are pursuing claims against a Berkshire Hathaway unit in Oregon in a case that could expand liability exposure for utilities whose power lines are found to start fires.
Excerpt from this Wall Street Journal story:
Wildfires are posing new financial risks for utilities outside of California as victims of recent fires possibly sparked by power equipment seek compensation for their losses.
Pacific Power, an Oregon utility owned by PacifiCorp, a unit of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., faces more than $1 billion in potential liability costs from lawsuits related to a spate of fires that swept the state in 2020. Those incidents killed at least nine people, destroyed thousands of homes and burned more than a million acres of land and timber.
PacifiCorp declined to comment on the pending lawsuits. In court filings, it has disputed that its equipment ignited the fires in question and denied that it was negligent in operating its system.
Historically, it was California utilities that faced the highest liability risk when their power lines ignited fires and damaged property, due to a legal precedent in the state that established that such situations amounted to “inverse condemnation.” Now, lawyers suing Pacific Power are pushing for the company to be held to the same strict standard in Oregon.
So far, judges overseeing two cases have ruled in favor of those arguments. Lawyers on Friday also filed a wildfire suit alleging inverse condemnation against a utility in Washington in connection with a 2020 blaze.
Attorneys say those cases could lead to similar claims against other utilities throughout the West, where wildfire risk has grown substantially within the past decade. Severe drought, exacerbated by climate change, has heightened the consequences of power-line failures, which have sparked deadly and destructive wildfires in California and elsewhere in the region.
In California, utilities have faced steep liability costs as a result of wildfire suits. PG&E Corp., which serves most of Northern and Central California, sought bankruptcy protection in 2019 after its power lines sparked nearly 20 destructive fires, including the Camp Fire, which killed 84 people in 2018. The company settled the claims for $25.5 billion.
Similar fires have become more common in Oregon, where more than a dozen fires ignited in 2020 and transformed into massive blazes as strong winds picked up. The causes of most of the fires are still under investigation by state and federal agencies, but local officials said at the time that downed power lines likely ignited or fed a number of the blazes.
