The main purpose of this ongoing blog is to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day and are archived on each prior post. I’ll refer to extreme or temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉
Main Topic: Climate Crisis Wildfires Imperil Utilities Accused of Causing the Spark
Dear Diary. Huge Wildfire events over the last few years fueled by the climate crisis have put a strain on utilities that deliver electric power to millions of customers across California. Beyond damage from wildfires themselves, many people hurt by conflagrations want to play the old blame game to get compensation for property damage and rightfully so. Litigation from people hurt by wildfires affect utilities bottom line such that electricity becomes more expensive for their customers. If utilities were to go bankrupt California would be in a very dark (as in major blackout) crisis.
This is not to write that utilities should be held blameless in order to prevent a deeper crisis. Customers should be compensated by utilities in reasonable settlement amounts, punishing utilities for haphazard wiring near brush that can be ignited after high winds blow then down.
I’m I’ve often written that electric lines should be built underground in order to prevent sparks that can cause wildfires. Logically, this would save utilities money in the long run, but the process of putting electric lines underground is much more expensive than above ground wiring on utility poles, so tisk tisk we don’t see any solution evolving out of each fire crisis. Sone utilities figure that it is better to write checks to aggrieved, hurt customers than to build power lines underground. Will innovation cut down on power line related fires? Future California regulatory law might improve this situation however. We will see.
In any case, Southern California is bracing for more high winds that could spark fires starting tomorrow:
Here are more details from the Washington Post on the strain utilities are incurring from down utility lines in California:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/01/18/wildfires-utilities-edison-lawsuits
Costly wildfires imperil utilities accused of causing the spark
Southern California Edison is the latest large power company destabilized by its alleged role in igniting fires.
January 19, 2025 at 12:10 p.m. EST

A burned utility pole is suspended in the air by power lines In Altadena, California, on Tuesday. (Daniel Cole/Reuters)
By Evan Halper and Brianna Sacks
Investigators are still examining the scorched landscape for clues to the causes of deadly blazes tearing through Los Angeles, but Altadena residents Sophie and Hagop Mehtemetian are not waiting for a culprit to be officially named.
They and many others who lost everything in the Eaton Fire have seen enough evidence.It points, they say, to a suspect familiar to wildfire victims across the west: their local electric utility.
Videos and photographs from eyewitnesses show fire sparking under two steel power transmission towers in the foothills above the Mehtemetian home. Fire officials confirmed the Eaton Fire ignited there, according to documents obtained by The Post, and was quickly carried into residential neighborhoods by fierce winds.
The Mehtemetians are among the first of what attorneys expect will be more than 10,000 plaintiffs signing onto lawsuits against Southern California Edison, the company that operates the power lines. Their complaint calls the Eaton Fire “a preventable tragedy” caused by Edison’s negligence. “Everyone saw that tower spark,” said their attorney, Greg Kirakosian. Damages from the Eaton Fire, which destroyed more than 7,000 homes and killed 17, could top $7 billion, according to plaintiffs’ attorneys.
Edison says it is still investigating and until Friday had notbeen permitted by fire officials to inspect its equipment on the charred hillsidewhere the fire ignited.
If Southern California Edison is found to be at fault, it will be the latest in a tragically familiar pattern. Climate change has become an existential threat for utilities in a way it was not less than a decade ago, escalating the risk posed to communities by electrical power lines and poles that are often decades old.

In this photo provided by Pasadena, California, resident Matt Logelin, flames burn beneath transmission towers owned by Southern California Edison in Eaton Canyon in the early evening of Jan. 7. (Matt Logelin/AP)
It’s a crisis that spreads far beyond the break lines that contain wildfires. Utilities that serve entire regionsof the West are being financially destabilized by the billions of dollars in legal liabilities for the devastation caused by fires, as well as billions more needed to modernize outdated infrastructure.
In Los Angeles, community leaders and investors fear Southern California Edison risks being hobbled by wildfire judgments, as have utilities in Northern California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon and Utah in the last few years.
The long-term implications are dire. Wildfires and storms are shaking utilities when demand on regional power grids is increasing exponentially. Regional planners fret Southern California Edison will be so consumed with wildfire liabilities that it will delay upgrades required to meet the surging demand for electricity.
“Fires on a scale this large with associated liabilities that can bankrupt even big power companies is a new trend,” said Kevin Schneider, a power systems expert at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. In the case of the fires in Los Angeles, he said, utilities throughout the nation are watching how Edison is impacted and “may see this as a big enough event to fundamentally change the way things are built.”
Edison knew it was facing extreme fire risk the day the Eaton blaze erupted, with powerful Santa Ana wind gusts blowing as strong as 80 mph slamming into its utility lines, threatening to send sparks flying into dry vegetation below.
The utility cut off power to hundreds of homes in Altadena and beyond. But the high-voltage lines were built to resist such weather, and powering them down brings their own risks, making the situation a tough balancing act for the company.
“Until we know exactly what started this fire, it is impossible to say what Edison should have done differently,” said Gerald Singleton, an attorney representing victims of the fire. “But it is hard to understand how they could not have powered down that transmission line.”

Workers dismantle power lines damaged during the Eaton Fire in Altadena, California, on Tuesday. (Joel Angel Juarez for The Washington Post)
The transmission towers under suspicion were built in the 1970s and 1980s, Raymond Fugere, Edison’s director of asset and system intelligence and the utility’s wildfire safety expert, said in an interview. They carry four high-voltage lines, as well as a fifth that they de-energized long ago but still routinely inspect.
Fugere said that the utility thoroughly reviewed its data that signals problems with the power grid for at least 12 hours before the fire sparked. The review “showed us nothing,” he said, no “anomalies, operations or interruptions of any sort on that line.” He said two inspections of the transmission line in 2024, one with a drone, also uncovered no issues.
The utility says it had powered down many of the local electricity distribution networks which are fed by the high-voltage transmission line running through Eaton Canyon. But experts say de-energizing a transmission line is a much more complicated task, disrupting power for potentially tens or hundreds of thousands of customers for a prolonged period of time, and creating its own risks for evacuation efforts.
“Once folks turn off the transmission line, they have to manually reinspect every portion of it,” said Cody Warner,an energy scholar at the University of California at Berkeley. “A big branch might have come down and landed on top of it, but you can’t know that because the power is off and the sensors not running. So you have to deploy helicopters, drones and trucks to check every segment of the line to make sure it can be powered back on.”
“It is a tough decision,” said Warner. “We are really in an unprecedented time for weather conditions and fire risk. There are no benchmarks to use historically. These are tough calls.”
Fugere said it’s still too early in the investigation to say whether Edison will rethink its future policy for powering down transmission lines. “Obviously as we get more information, and if information said we have to do something different, we will continue to improve,” he said.
The company had been working to avoid another crisis after it paid out a $2.2 billion settlement for the role its equipment played in sparking the 2018 Woolsey Fire, which charred 100,000 acres and killed three people after erupting at the border of Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

A structure and a motorcycle burn at an RV park during the Woolsey Fire in Malibu, California, on Nov. 10, 2018. (Kyle Grillot for The Washington Post)
It has invested heavily in wildfire mitigation, spending $1.8 billion on upgrades and inspections last year alone. That includes installing 1,750 weather monitoring stations on roughly 1,200 circuits to create “situational awareness to make sure we know when we need to de-energize,” Fugere said.
There is more utilities can do. The question is at what cost. Burying major power lines underground, for example, could more than triple the cost of residential electricity, Warner said. Energy prices in California are already among the highest in the country; a recent state legislative report found that wildfire mitigation efforts to date have inflated rates statewide by as much as 13 percent.
California has created a wildfire fund that utilities can dip into to keep lawsuits from tipping them into bankruptcy, which would help keep Edison from sliding into insolvency if it is found to be at fault. The fund has $14 billion in it right now. But the burden of maintaining the fund will fall largely on ratepayers as global warming continues to exact its price, say experts.
“When the grid was originally constructed, climate change was not an issue. If you think about the miles and miles of transmission and distribution lines, it has now created a huge challenge,” said Meredith Fowlie, faculty director of the Energy Institute at UC-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
Utilities are finding that failing to modernize risks catastrophe. Fires raged through Maui in the summer of 2023, destroying 2,200 buildings and killing 102 people, where Hawaiian Electric had not invested in a system to power down its utility lines during fire events. The company was ultimately forced to pay nearly $2 billion as part of a settlement in which Hawaiian taxpayers and some landowners paid an additional $2 billion.
Electricity rates in Hawaii were already the highest in the country. The settlement is now pushing them higher and hobbling the company’s flexibility to make other investments, observers say.

Downed power lines block a road as people feed chickens outside a burned home in the aftermath of a wildfire in Lahaina, western Maui, Hawaii on Aug. 11, 2023. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images)
Only weeks before the inferno on Maui, the company PacifiCorp was found liable by a jury for sparking deadly Oregon wildfires in 2020. The company could be on the hook for tens of billions in damages in fires that killed several people and burned thousands of properties. Analysts warn PacifiCorp could be sunk financially by the lawsuits.
“The final result for the utility industry may be ominous, “Warren Buffett, the investment guru and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, which owns PacifiCorp, wrote last year about wildfire risks more broadly. He warned in his February letter to shareholders that mounting liabilities could cause investors to abandon the sector, pushing power companies toward government ownership.
Another big power provider, Xcel Energy, is battling dozens of lawsuits alleging it touched off the 2021 Marshall blaze in Colorado, that state’s most destructive wildfire. There are more than 500 plaintiffs. Earlier, PG&E’s neglect of wildfire safety forced the company to plead guilty to 84 counts of manslaughter and pushed it into bankruptcy after its transmission line sparked the 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85 people and destroyed nearly 19,000 homes and other buildings.
While Southern California Edison points to all the costly investments it has made in wildfire prevention since its last big settlement with victims, attorneys suing utilities argue such companies deserve little sympathy when their equipment ignites deadly fires. They note that in October, Edison’s parent company reported a quarterly profit of $516 million. They contend the company should have invested more revenue in keeping customers safe rather than boosting shareholder returns.
“We understand nobody can reduce fire risk down to zero,” said Kirakosian, the attorney representing the Mehtemetian family in Altadena. “But I do know they have safety protocols and mandates and regulations. Among them is that when you have winds of such high magnitude, shutting off those power lines is something that needs to happen.”

By Evan HalperEvan Halper is a business reporter for The Washington Post, covering the energy transition. His work focuses on the tensions between energy demands and decarbonizing the economy. He came to The Post from the Los Angeles Times, where he spent two decades, most recently covering domestic policy and presidential politics from its Washington bureau.follow on X@evanhalper

By Brianna SacksBrianna Sacks explores how climate change is transforming the United States through catastrophic events. She deploys to disaster zones for intense, on-the-ground reporting, as well as does investigative, accountabiliy, and enterprise reporting on how disasters impact all facets of life.
Related:
Here are more “ETs” recorded from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:
Here is More Climate News from Sunday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)