The judge in charge of Pacific Gas and Electric’s criminal probation, stemming from the 2010 San Bruno pipeline explosion, found the utility was failing in its inspection and maintenance of power lines and ordered it to improve its performance to avoid starting wildfires.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup imposed new probation conditions Wednesday, saying PG&E must hire its own cadre of inspectors to make sure vegetation clearance meets state standards after outside contractors failed to identify or fix urgent problems last year.

He also required the utility to adopt a new regimen of inspection and reporting of transmission towers after it failed to spot worn equipment, including the “ancient C-hook” that broke, dropping a line and starting the November 2018 Camp Fire, the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history. (See PG&E to Plead Guilty to Killing 84 in Camp Fire.)

“A fundamental concern in this criminal probation remains the fact that Pacific Gas and Electric Co., though the single largest privately owned utility in America, cannot safely deliver power to California,” Alsup said. “This failure is upon us because for years, in order to enlarge dividends, bonuses and political contributions, PG&E cheated on maintenance of its grid — to the point that the grid became unsafe to operate during our annual high winds, so unsafe that the grid itself failed and ignited many catastrophic wildfires.

“In the past three years alone, PG&E wildfires killed at least 108 and burned 22,049 structures,” the judge said. “It will take years, now, for PG&E to catch up on maintenance so that the grid can safely supply power at all times. The conditions of probation herein have been aimed at requiring PG&E to do so.”

Distribution Line Shortcomings

PG&E’s vegetation clearance around power lines has been stepped up but still lags years behind, the judge said. The company contracts out its line inspections and tree-trimming work, which has proven problematic, he said.

“PG&E is fond of handing up records indicating completed work,” Alsup said, but spot-checks performed by a court-appointed monitor showed the records were untrustworthy.

In 2019, the monitor “checked the work, putting boots to the ground and independently inspecting over 550 miles of lines in high fire-threat districts,” the judge said. The monitor found 3,280 “risk” trees that PG&E’s contractors hadn’t identified, including 15 instances of urgent conditions that could have resulted in harm to people or property if left unfixed, the judge said.

“In one instance, PG&E contractors had recently marked an urgent condition — where a tree was 1 foot away from a primary conductor — as ‘tree work complete,’” Alsup said. “Similarly, a tree touched a primary conductor right outside the driveway of a home.

“In another case, the monitor identified a tree within inches of a primary conductor. The leaves of the tree bore burn marks from the ongoing intermittent contact,” the judge said. “That tree had been identified for routine compliance work in November 2018, and tree-trimming contractors reported they had completed the work in February 2019, although clearly they had not.”

To remedy the deficiencies, Alsup ordered PG&E to hire, on its own payroll, inspectors to examine power lines before and after vegetation-clearance work.

“PG&E shall employ a sufficient number of inspectors to manage the outsourced tree-trimming work,” Alsup wrote as a new term of the company’s San Bruno probation. “The pre-inspectors must identify trees and limbs in violation of California clearance laws that require trimming. Post-inspectors must spot-check the work of the contracted tree-trimmers to ensure that no hazard trees or limbs were missed.”

He instructed the utility to prepare a detailed plan by May 28.

Transmission Line Problems

The judge set the same date for PG&E to offer a new transmission inspection plan.

“For transmission towers, the problem is defective and worn-out hardware on the towers themselves,” Alsup wrote. “The Butte County [Camp] Fire, for example, started because an old C-hook had become so deeply gouged from decades of swaying against the plate on which it hung that the C-hook simply broke and fell, causing the attached power line to fall onto the metal tower, spewing sparks onto the wind-blown dry grass below.”

The transmission tower, part of PG&E’s century-old Caribou-Palermo line, had “supposedly been assessed just days before the fire … [the subject of an unusual] nonroutine enhanced inspection,” Alsup said.

“PG&E refused to say why it sent contractors to inspect the line but conceded that the line’s age was a factor,” he said. “Inspectors climbed the 100-foot-tall towers, presumably searching for equipment deficiencies, yet reported zero instances of cold-end hardware issues such as worn-out C-hooks.”

In last November’s Kincade Fire in Sonoma County, state investigators have focused on a broken jumper cable found hanging from a transmission tower where the fire started, the judge noted. Yet months earlier, “three separate inspections — via tower climbers in February, high-resolution drone imaging in May and ground inspectors with binoculars in July — had all failed to identify the problematic jumper cable,” he said.

“Like a broken record, PG&E routinely excuses itself by insisting that all towers had been inspected and any noted faults were addressed, at least according to its paperwork,” Alsup said. “But these transmission tower inspections failed to spot dangerous conditions.

“Was this because the inspections were poorly designed, or was it because they were poorly executed? Had someone falsified inspection reports? It is hard to get a straight answer from PG&E,” the judge said. “The offender is masterful at falling back on the inspection reports and saying, ‘See, judge, we had that very line inspected and all was well,’ or, ‘We fixed whatever they found wrong. We did our part.’ The reports, however, are a mere courtroom prop.”

The judge said that under its current protocol, PG&E contractors don’t “accurately assess the degree of corrosion on the type of hardware that broke and caused the Butte County fire. For example, contracted inspectors could not agree on the amount of wear of a deeply gouged C-hook on a line parallel to Butte County’s Caribou-Palermo line.”

Three inspectors said it was 5 to 30% worn, but an expert witness rated the wear at 30 to 50%, which would require immediate replacement, he said. “And, because PG&E’s inspection forms only ask inspectors to check ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the prompt ‘cold-end hardware in poor condition,’ any degree of wear simply went unmarked,” he said.

Alsup ordered the company to start keeping records identifying the age of all transmission equipment, including every piece of hardware on every line, and its recorded date of installation.

“In consultation with the monitor, PG&E shall design a new inspection system for assessing every item of equipment on all transmission towers,” the new probation conditions say. “Forms shall be precise enough to track what inspectors actually do, such as whether they touch or tug on equipment. Videos must be taken of every inspection.”

‘PG&E Struck Again’

Since August 2017, Alsup has overseen PG&E’s probation resulting from its conviction of six felonies related to the San Bruno explosion, in which “eight people burned to death or died from wounds. Fifty-eight survived with injuries, and over 100 homes burned,” the judge recounted in his latest order.

The catastrophe occurred when a 30-inch gas pipeline ruptured and exploded under a suburban San Francisco neighborhood, sending up flames hundreds of feet high and shaking the ground to the point that residents and emergency crews thought it was an earthquake.

A federal jury in August 2016 convicted PG&E of five felony counts of “knowingly and willfully” violating federal pipeline safety standards and one felony count of obstructing a government investigator.

Then, “one year into its probation, PG&E struck again,” Alsup wrote. The company was deemed responsible for at least 17 of the 21 major Northern California wine country fires of October 2017, in which 22 people died and more than 3,256 structures were destroyed.

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection found at least three of the fires were caused by PG&E’s failure to maintain specified clearances required by state law between its power lines and nearby trees or limbs.

In November 2018, the Camp Fire tore through the rugged foothills of Butte County and leveled much of the town of Paradise, killing 85 people and destroying nearly 19,000 structures in a single morning. It was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in state history, and PG&E acknowledged its equipment was likely responsible.

Fire investigators eventually determined that the worn C-hook on a 100-year-old transmission tower had failed.

PG&E recently said it would plead guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter in the Camp Fire and pay $4 million in fines and costs. (One death was deemed a suicide as the flames approached.) The corporation is scheduled to be sentenced May 26 in Butte County Superior Court.

After the Camp Fire, Alsup held hearings to determine what new safety measures were needed to prevent PG&E from starting conflagrations.

The judge said in Wednesday’s order that PG&E’s probation for the San Bruno convictions ends in early 2022 and cannot be extended. He urged the California Public Utilities Commission to penalize investor-owned utilities for failing to meet vegetation-clearance regulations and to link executive bonuses to safety performance.

He also said that until PG&E can assure the state its grid can be operated safely, the controversial public safety power shutoffs (PSPSs) that plagued the state last year should be continued. There were no major fires in 2019, when close to a million customers were blacked out purposefully, he noted. (See California Officials Hammer PG&E over Power Shutoffs.)

“During the high-wind events, we must continue to tolerate PSPSs as the lesser evil until PG&E has come into compliance with state law and the grid is safe to operate in high winds,” the judge said.