The California Public Utilities Commission approved Southern California Edison’s wildfire mitigation plan Thursday, rejecting calls to delay action until more is known about what ignited the devastating Eaton fire.
Investigators are now looking into whether Edison’s equipment sparked the Eaton fire, which has killed at least 17 people and destroyed thousands of homes and other structures. The company’s transmission equipment may have also sparked the smaller Hurst fire, investigators say.
Michael Backstrom, Edison’s vice president of regulatory affairs, said Thursday that there were no conclusions yet about the cause of either fire. He said the company’s preliminary analysis of the Eaton fire found no anomalies that would suggest its equipment sparked the blaze.
At the meeting, William Abrams, a survivor of the North Bay wildfires of 2017, told the commission it would be “imprudent” to approve the wildfire mitigation plans of the state’s three biggest for-profit utilities — Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric — without knowing what ignited the deadly fires last week.
The commission didn’t address Abrams’ concerns or those of other speakers who asked officials to do more to keep the utilities accountable for safely maintaining their electric lines, approving the three companies’ wildfires plans on a 5-0 vote without comment.
“No one is adequately policing this,” Peggy Ludington, a Southern California resident, told the commissioners. She pointed to some of the 11 areas of concern that safety regulators had detailed in their October approval of the company’s wildfire prevention plan.
Ludington noted that safety regulators had asked Edison last year for information on the problems they had found in the splices used to repair transmission lines.
The utility said in a response to regulators sent a week later that it would be difficult to gather that information.
The company told regulators that “given the high find rate” of problems with the splices, it was considering “forgoing the inspection and moving straight to remediation.” To do that, it said, it was considering a program to replace the splices, beginning in 2026.
Edison said this week that it had been doing more work to prevent wildfires than the state has required.
“As we have been doing, SCE will continue to perform inspections in its high fire risk areas more frequently than is required,” the company said in a statement to The Times.
Backstrom said that delaying the approval of the company’s wildfire prevention plan until the causes of the fire are determined was not the right decision.
He said work that the company has done each year under the guidance of its plan has reduced the risk that its equipment will spark a wildfire by more than 85% than what it had been before 2018.
“It’s not right to freeze practices right now,” he said. “We need to execute.”
Alice Reynolds, president of the commission, spoke about the wildfires at the meeting’s start.
“California has worked extensively to significantly reduce utility-involved wildfires,” she said, calling the three utilities’ wildfire mitigation plans “the most comprehensive in the country.”
“These measures come at a cost that is added to utility bills,” she said. “We can ask whether they are enough and if the utilities can do more or do better. This week we can see they are necessary.”
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