Federal prosecutors sued Southern California Edison, saying its equipment ignited the 2019 Saddle Ridge fire, which burned nearly 9,000 acres and damaged or destroyed more than 100 homes in the San Fernando Valley.
The complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Tuesday claims that Edison was negligent in designing, constructing and maintaining its high-voltage transmission line that runs through Sylmar. Equipment on the line is now suspected of causing both the 2019 fire as well as the Hurst fire on Jan. 7.
Edison has acknowledged that its equipment may have ignited the Jan. 7 fire, but it has been arguing for years in a separate lawsuit brought by Saddle Ridge fire victims that its equipment did not start the 2019 fire.
Lawyers for the victims say they have evidence showing the transmission line is not properly grounded, leading to two wildfires in six years. Edison’s lawyers call those claims an “exotic ignition theory” that is wrong.
In the new lawsuit, the federal government is seeking to recover costs for the damage the 2019 fire caused to 800 acres of national forest, including for the destruction of wildlife and habitats. The lawsuit also requests reimbursement for the federal government’s costs of fighting the fire.
“The ignition of the Saddleridge Fire by SCE’s power and transmission lines and equipment is prima facie evidence of SCE’s negligence,” states the complaint, which was filed by acting U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli.
“The United States has made a demand on SCE for payment of the costs and damages incurred by the United States to suppress the Saddleridge Fire and to undertake emergency rehabilitation efforts,” the complaint said. “SCE has not paid any part of the sum.”
David Eisenhauer, an Edison spokesman, said the company was reviewing the federal government’s lawsuit and “will respond through the legal process.”
“Our hearts are with the people and communities that were affected,” he said.
The 2019 wildfire tore through parts of Sylmar, Granada Hills and Porter Ranch, killing at least one person.
The fire ignited under a transmission tower just three minutes after a steel part known as a y-clevis broke on another tower more than two miles away, according to two government investigations into the fire. The equipment failure on that tower caused a fault and surge in power.
In the ongoing lawsuit by victims of the 2019 fire, the plaintiffs argue that the power surge traveled along the transmission lines, causing some of the towers miles away to become so hot that they ignited the dry vegetation underneath one of them. Government investigators also found evidence of burning at the base of a second tower nearby, according to their reports.
The lawyers for the victims say the same problem — that some towers are not properly grounded — caused the Hurst fire on the night of Jan. 7.
“The evidence will show that five separate fires ignited at five separate SCE transmission tower bases in the same exact manner as the fire that started the Saddle Ridge fire,” the lawyers wrote in a court filing this summer.
In that filing, the lawyers included parts of a deposition they took of an L.A. Fire Department captain who said he believed that Edison was “deceptive” for not informing the department that its equipment failed just minutes before the 2019 blaze ignited, and for having an employee offer to buy key surveillance video from that night from a business next to one of its towers.
Edison has denied its employee offered to buy the video. A spokeswoman said the utility did not tell the fire department that its equipment failed because it happened at a tower miles away from where the fire ignited.
Roberto Delgado and his wife, Ninoschka Perez, can see the towers from their Sylmar home. They told The Times they saw a fire on Jan. 7 under the same tower where investigators say the 2019 fire started.
The family had to quickly flee in the case of each fire.
“We were traumatized,” Delgado said. “If I could move my family away from here I would.”
The Jan. 7 fire burned through 799 acres and required thousands of people to evacuate. Firefighters extinguished the blaze before it destroyed any homes.
Roberto Delgado and his wife were praying the rosary on the night of Jan. 7 when they heard two loud booms that shook their Sylmar home. Then came a flash of light so bright that in the dead of night they could briefly see out their window the rocks and gullies of the San Gabriel foothills behind their house.
Seconds later, Delgado said in an interview, the couple saw flames under two electric transmission towers owned by Southern California Edison — even more shocking because they had seen a fire ignite under one of those towers just six years before.
“We were traumatized,” he said. “It was almost the exact same thing.” In both fires, the family was forced to race to their car and flee with few belongings as the flames rushed through the brush toward their home, which survived both blazes.
Edison’s maintenance of its power lines is now under scrutiny in the wake of January’s devastating Eaton fire, which destroyed a wide swath of Altadena and killed 19 people. Video captured by eyewitnesses shows the Eaton fire igniting under Edison transmission towers.
A lawsuit making its way through Los Angeles County Superior Court is raising new questions about Edison’s role in the 2019 Saddle Ridge fire in Sylmar and whether the company was transparent about the cause of the blaze. The fire killed at least one person and destroyed or damaged more than 100 homes and other structures. Firefighters were able to contain the more recent Sylmar fire, called Hurst, before any homes were destroyed.
The lawyers contend that both fires were caused by the same problem: an improperly grounded transmission line running through the foothills of Sylmar that Edison failed to fix, which the company denies.
In a court filing, the lawyers included a deposition they took of an L.A. Fire Department captain who said he believed that Edison was “deceptive” for not informing the department that its equipment failed just minutes before the 2019 blaze ignited, and for having an employee offer to buy key surveillance video from that night from a business next to one of its towers.
Edison has flatly disputed the lawyers’ assertions, calling their claims about the 2019 fire an “exotic ignition theory” based on “an unproven narrative.”
Kathleen Dunleavy, a spokeswoman for Edison, said that the utility had complied with the requests of investigators looking into the two fires and that “there is no connection” between the incidents.
Dunleavy said Edison did not tell the fire department about the failure of its equipment in 2019 because it happened at a tower miles away from where the fire ignited. And she said it is common for any investigator to seek to obtain video that could aid in an investigation. “SCE’s investigator did not offer to buy surveillance video,” she said.
“We follow the law. Period,” she said.
Dunleavy said the company has completed tests that show the transmission line is safe. She declined to share the results and pointed to testimony by Edison’s expert in the case — Don Russell, a Texas A&M professor of electrical engineering — who said the line was properly grounded.
As for the Jan. 7 Hurst fire, the utility told regulators in a February letter that it believes its equipment “may be associated with the ignition” of the blaze. The letter said the company found two conductors on the ground under a Sylmar tower. The repairs, the letter said, included replacing equipment at several towers and more than three miles of cable.
Delgado and Perez say that on the night of the fire they heard two loud booms and a flash of light so bright they could briefly see out their window the rocks and gullies of the San Gabriel foothills.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Undergrounding of towers questioned
In dispute is whether the failure of steel equipment at the top of an Edison transmission tower on the night of Oct. 10, 2019, caused a massive power surge across the system, resulting in multiple towers becoming electrified and intensely hot.
The tower, where the steel part known as a y-clevis broke, sits just off the 210 freeway in Sylmar on land shared with a nursery. The Edison tower behind Delgado’s home where investigators say the 2019 fire ignited is more than two miles away from the nursery.
The attorneys said in court filing that Edison made a “cost-saving choice” when building the transmission line in 1970 to not include “any purposeful grounding devices” that would enable power surges to dissipate down the tower and into the earth. Instead, the company used “only insufficient concrete footings,” the lawyers said in their filing.
Mark Felling, an electrical engineer and paid expert in the case, testified that he found that the size of the cement footings under the towers along the line varied by a factor of 10. The size of the footings, he said,affects whether the tower is properly grounded.
Felling said he believed that a sudden power surge could cause some towers to become “electrified and potentially very hazardous.”
Edison has disputed that theory and said in court that the electrical surge caused by the failure of equipment at the tower by the nursery safely dispersed. The utility said it was scientifically impossible that the electrical surge caused a fire 2½ miles away.
“The undisputed material facts cannot support plaintiff’s theory that SCE caused the Saddleridge fire,” the company wrote in a motion this month, which asked the judge to dismiss the case. A hearing on the motion is scheduled for Oct. 6.
Edison’s motion included a copy of the L.A. Fire Department’s investigation, which included new details of how the company responded to fire investigators days after the 2019 fire.
Delgado said his rosary and prayers were important to surviving the fires.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Failure to report power surge
L.A. Fire investigator Robert Price arrived at the dirt road leading up to the hillside transmission line where the fire had ignited the night before to see the yellow crime scene tape lying on the ground and an Edison truck driving out, Price said in his report.
Price also wrote that Edison’s equipment recorded a fault that resulted in a surge of electricity about three minutes before Delgado reported the fire to 911 at 9 p.m. But the company did not tell the Fire Department about the fault, Price wrote.
Instead, L.A. Fire Capt. Timothy Halloran learned from a news report that Sylmar resident Jack Carpenter had recorded a large flash of light on his dashboard camera at 8:57 that night as he was traveling west on the 210 freeway.
Halloran traced the flash to a transmission tower built on land used by Ornelas Wood Recovery Nursery. Halloran interviewed employees at the nursery, who told him that an Edison employee had offered to buy the surveillance footage from the nursery’s camera, according to a deposition Halloran later provided to lawyers representing the victims.
A nursery employee also had taken photos of the broken steel equipment he found at the foot of the tower, according to Price’s report. The employee told Halloran that an Edison crew came the day after the fire and cleaned up the shattered pieces.
Halloran said in the deposition, according to a June court filing, that the company’s failure to report the fault and its offer to buy the nursery’s surveillance video made him believe that the company’s actions were “deceptive.”
Price said in his report that he also saw Edison crews cleaning the towers along the line three days after the fire’s start. An Edison employee told him that the utility cleans the towers once a year but had decided to clean them that day “because they were dirty from the smoke and fire,” Price wrote.
The cleaning did not prevent fire investigators from finding burn marks at the bottom of a second tower not far from where Delgado and his wife live, which Price said may be related to the “catastrophic failure” of equipment at the tower by the nursery.
In his final conclusion on the fire, Price wrote that it was “outside my expertise” to determine whether the failure of equipment at the tower above the nursery “could cause high voltage to travel back through the conductors … and cause a fire, possibly through the tower’s grounding system” more than two miles away.
“Therefore the cause will be undetermined,” Price wrote.
Dunleavy said that Edison had notified the California Public Utilities Commission about the fire before it began cleaning up the broken pieces of equipment found under the tower at the nursery. That cleanup and the company’s repairs, Dunleavy said, were needed to “ensure safety and reliability” of the line.
She added that it was common practice for utilities to wash down equipment after a fire before the system was reenergized.
According to an L.A. Fire investigator, Edison’s equipment recorded a fault that resulted in a surge of electricity about three minutes before Delgado reported the fire to 911 at 9 p.m.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
State utility investigators find violations
Also investigating the 2019 fire in the days after its start was Eric Ujiiye at the Public Utilities Commission.
The commission’s safety staff investigates fires that may have been caused by electric lines to determine whether the utility violated safety regulations.
Ujiiye said in his report that he found that Edison violated five regulations, including failing to safely maintain its equipment at the tower by the nursery.
Even though Price’s investigation for the L.A. Fire Department stated that the cause is undetermined, Ujiiye said in his report that he believed that the failure of equipment at the tower by the nursery “could have led to a fire ignition” at the pylon more than two miles away.
The commission’s staff asked Edison to perform tests to show that the towers on the line were properly grounded. According to a written response from Edison, the utility objected to the request as “vague and ambiguous.” But the company agreed to do the tests, which would be observed by the commission inspectors.
Terrie Prosper, a spokeswoman for the commission, said that the agency’s staff was planning to meet with Edison at the transmission line to witness the tests. However, COVID-19 pandemic restrictions delayed that meeting and the requested undergrounding tests. She said that commission staff later learned that Edison had performed similar tests soon after the fire. Those test results “sufficed,” Prosper said, and the company “was not made to re-do the tests.”
Prosper said the commission did not fine or otherwise penalize Edison for the five violations because the LAFD report said the cause was undetermined. She said company had corrected the violations.
April Maurath Sommer, executive director of the Wild Tree Foundation, which has challenged Edison’s requests to have utility customers pay for fire damages, questioned the commission’s handling of the 2019 fire.
“You would think that the Public Utilities Commission would use fines to address really egregious behavior in the hope it would deter future behavior that causes catastrophic fires,” she said.
Maurath Sommer noted that Edison has been repeatedly found to have failed to cooperate with investigators looking into the cause of devastating fires. For example, commission investigators said in a report that the utility refused to provide photos and other details of what its employees found at the site where the Woolsey fire ignited in 2018. The Edison crew was the first to arrive at the scene of the fire that destroyed hundreds of homes in Malibu. Edison argued that the evidence was protected by attorney-client privilege.
Edison’s Dunleavy said the allegation by commission investigators was later resolved. “We take our obligation to cooperate with the CPUC seriously,” she said.
Prosper of the commission said, “Public safety is, and will remain, our top priority,”
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1.Fire fighters kept an eye on the wild fire burning behind Olive View Medical Center.(Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times)2.A firefighting plane drops red Phos-Chek, a fire retardant, to protect Olive View Medical Center from wind driven Saddle Ridge wild fire in October 2019.(Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times)3.Interstate 5 and California State Rute 14 were closed to traffic through Newhall Pass due to the Saddle Ridge fire.(Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times)4.Firefighters cleared brush and mopped up a hillside along California State Highway 14 due to fire in 2019.(Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times)
Another fire in Sylmar
At about 10:30 on the night of Jan. 7, Katherine Twohy heard a loud crack and saw a bright flash. Edison’s transmission towers in Sylmar skirt around the edge of the Oakridge Mobile Home Park, where Twohy, a retired psychologist, lives.
“I was just coming in my back door and there was just this incredible flashing of white lights,” Twohy said. “Incredibly blue-white lights.”
She walked to her living room window where she can see two Edison towers, which are separated by more than a hundred yards. Twohy said she could see flames at the base of each one.
“The fires had made little circles around the base,” she said.
Twohy said she saw flames under the same towers the night the Saddle Ridge fire ignited in 2019.
“I thought, ‘Oh my god, it’s just like last time,’” Twohy said.
In court, lawyers representing victims of the 2019 fire have seized on Edison’s admission that its equipment may have sparked the Jan. 7 fire.
“The evidence will show that five separate fires ignited at five separate SCE transmission tower bases in the same exact manner” as the 2019 fire, they wrote in a June court filing.
Delgado’s home sits next to the dirt road leading up to the towers. The Jan. 7 fire melted his backyard fence but did little more damage. In the days after the fire, he found that some of the same Edison employees he spoke to in 2019 as a witness reappeared.
“I saw the exact same people from Edison show up,” he said. “I told them your towers almost killed my family again.”
Times staff writer Kevin Rector contributed to this report.
Southern California Edison’s plans to compensate Eaton fire victims for damage were met with skepticism Thursday from lawyers representing Altadena residents, but drew tentative support from others who say the initiative could help shore up the state’s $21-billion wildfire fund.
The utility announced its Wildfire Recovery Compensation Program this week, saying it would be used to quickly pay victims, including those who were insured, while avoiding lengthy litigation.
The announcement comes as state officials consider ways to shore up the state’s fund to compensate wildfire victims, amid fears that it could be fully exhausted by Eaton fire claims. Fees that attorneys receive as part of victim settlements could further strain the fund.
State Sen. Henry Stern (D-Calabasas) said Edison’s new program may have some merit as potentially “a more efficient way” than lawsuits to make sure victims are fairly compensated.
He pointed out that lawyers were “coming across the country to represent” Eaton fire victims. “Are they really getting their money’s worth when they pay 30% to these lawyers?” Stern asked.
Mark Toney, executive director of the Utility Reform Network, said Edison’s program had the potential to reduce costs that otherwise must be covered by the wildfire fund, which was established in part by a surcharge on the bills paid by customers of Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric.
“If Edison is determined to be the cause of the fire, anything they can settle early reduces the costs that otherwise would be paid later,” Toney said.
The utility has released few details of how the program would work, leaving victims who are already coping with uncertainty with more questions. And lawyers who had been seeking to represent victims in lawsuits against Edison were quick to urge caution.
“Without admitting fault or providing transparency, Edison is asking victims to potentially waive their rights,” said Kiley Grombacher, one of dozens of lawyers involved in litigation against Edison for the Jan. 7 wildfire that killed 19 and destroyed 9,000 homes in Altadena.
According to Edison, the program would be open to those who lost homes or businesses as well as renters who lost property. It would also cover those who were harmed by smoke, suffered physical injuries or had family members who died.
“People can file a claim even if they are involved in active litigation,” said Kathleen Dunleavy, an Edison spokeswoman.
Dunleavy said the company would be releasing more information soon, including on eligibility requirements.
At a Thursday meeting in Sacramento of the Catastrophe Response Council, which oversees the wildfire fund, officials said they were creating criteria that Edison must follow in designing the program, including having measures to prevent fraud and clear eligibility standards.
Sheri Scott, an actuary from Milliman, told the council that the firm estimated that losses from the Eaton fire ranged from $13.7 billion to $22.8 billion.
“We heard from our guest today that we might run out of money very quickly,” said Paul Rosenstiel, a member of the council appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom.
He urged state lawmakers to consider changing the law that created the fund so that less money was at risk of flowing to third parties who aren’t fire victims.
PG&E created a program to directly pay victims of the 2021 Dixie fire, which burned more than 960,000 acres in Northern California. It created a similar program to compensate victims of the 2022 Mosquito fire, which burned nearly 77,000 acres in Placer and El Dorado counties.
PG&E said it offered Mosquito fire victims who lost their homes $500 per square foot and $9,200 per acre for those whose lots did not exceed 5 acres. To aid in rebuilding efforts, victims who decided to reconstruct their homes were eligible for an additional $50,000.
Lynsey Paulo, a PG&E spokeswoman, said in an email that the company paid nearly $50 million to victims of the Dixie fire through its program. That money went to 135 households, she said.
“PG&E’s program was designed to provide claimants with resources to rebuild as quickly as possible and help communities recover,” she said.
Richard Bridgford, a lawyer who represented Dixie fire victims, said that PG&E’s offer was lower than victims won through lawsuits, and that only a fraction of those eligible for the PG&E program decided to participate, he said.
”Victims have uniformly done better when represented by counsel,” said Bridgford, who now represents victims of the Eaton fire.
Edison’s announcement of its program came as fire agencies continue to investigate the cause of the Eaton fire. Edison said in April that a leading theory is that a dormant transmission line, last used in 1971, somehow was reenergized and sparked the blaze. The company says the new compensation program “is not an admission of legal liability.”
“Even though the details of how the Eaton Fire started are still being evaluated, SCE will offer an expedited process to pay and resolve claims fairly and promptly,” Pedro Pizarro, chief executive of Edison International, the utility’s parent company, said in a news release. “This allows the community to focus more on recovery instead of lengthy, expensive litigation.”
The utility said it had hired consultants Kenneth R. Feinberg and Camille S. Biros, who had worked on the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, to help design the program.
If Edison is found responsible for the fire, the $21-billion state wildfire fund would reimburse the company for all or most of the amounts paid to victims through the new program or through lawsuits and insurance claims.
Half of the fund’s $21 billion came from charges to electric bills of customers of Edison, PG&E and SDG&E. The other half was contributed by shareholders of those three companies, which are the only utilities that can seek reimbursements from the fund.
The state law that shielded Southern California Edison and other utilities from liability for wildfires sparked by their equipment came with a catch: Top utility executives would be forced to take a pay cut if their company’s safety record declined.
Edison’s safety record did decline last year. The number of fires sparked by its equipment soared to 178, from 90 the year before and 39% above the five-year average.
Serious injuries suffered by employees jumped by 56% over the average. Five contractors working on its electric system died.
As a result of that performance, the utility’s parent company, Edison International, cut executive bonuses awarded for the 2024 year, it told California regulators in an April 1 report.
For Edison International employees, planned executive cash bonuses were cut by 5%, and executives at Southern California Edison saw their bonuses shrink by 3%, said Sergey Trakhtenberg, a compensation specialist for the company.
But cash bonuses for four of Edison’s top five executives actually rose last year, by as much as 17%, according to a separate March report by Edison to federal regulators. Their long-term bonuses of stock and options, which are far more valuable and not tied to safety, also rose.
Of the top five executives, only Pedro Pizarro, chief executive of Edison International, saw his cash bonus decline. He received a cash bonus of 128% of his salary rather than the planned 135% because of the safety failures, the company said, for total compensation including salary of $13.8 million.
The cash bonuses increased for the other top four executives despite the safety-related deductions because of how they performed on other responsibilities, said Trakhtenberg, Edison’s director of total rewards. He said bonuses would have been higher were it not for safety-related reductions.
“Compensation is structured to promote safety,” Trakhtenberg said, calling it “the main focus of the company.”
Consumer advocates say the fact that bonuses increased in spite of the decline in safety highlights a flaw in AB 1054, the 2019 law that reduced the liability of for-profit utility companies like Edison for damaging wildfires ignited by their equipment.
AB 1054 created a wildfire fund to pay for fire damages in an effort to ensure that utilities wouldn’t be rendered insolvent by having to bear billions of dollars in damage costs.
In return, the legislation said executive bonus plans for utilities should be “structured to promote safety as a priority and to ensure public safety and utility financial stability.”
“All these supposed accountability measures that were put into the bill are turning out to be toothless,” said Mark Toney, executive director of The Utility Reform Network, a consumer advocacy group in San Francisco.
“If executives aren’t feeling a significant reduction in salary when there is a significant increase in wildfire safety incidents,” Toney said, “then the incentive is gone.”
One of the executives who received an increased cash bonus was Adam Umanoff, Edison’s general counsel.
Umanoff was expected to get 85% of his $706,000 salary, or $600,000, as a cash bonus as his target at the year’s beginning. The deduction for safety failures reduced that bonus, Trakhtenberg said. But Umanoff’s performance on other goals “was significantly above target” and thus increased his cash bonus to 101% of his salary,
So despite the safety failures, Umanoff received a cash bonus of $717,000, or 19% higher than he was expected to receive.
“If you can just make it up somewhere else,” Toney said, “the incentive is gone.”
The utility recently told its investors that AB 1054 will protect it from potential liabilities of billions of dollars if its equipment is found to have sparked the Eaton fire on Jan. 7, resulting in 18 deaths and the destruction of thousands of homes and commercial buildings.
The cause of the blaze, which videos captured igniting under one of Edison’s transmission towers, is still under investigation. Pizarro has said the reenergization of an idle transmission line is now a leading theory of what sparked the deadly fire.
The 2019 legislation was passed in a matter of weeks to bolster the financial health of the state’s for-profit electric companies after the Camp fire in Butte County, which was caused by a Pacific Gas & Electric transmission line.
The wildfire destroyed the town of Paradise and killed 85 people, and the damages helped push PG&E into bankruptcy.
At the bill-signing ceremony, Gov. Gavin Newsom touted its language that said utilities could not access the money in a new state wildfire fund and cap their liabilities from a blaze caused by their equipment unless they tied executive compensation to their safety performance.
In April, Edison filed its mandatory annual safety performance metrics report with the Public Utilities Commission as it seeks approval to raise customer electric rates by more than 10% this year.
In the report, Edison said that because its safety record worsened in 2024 on certain key metrics, its executives took “a total deduction of 18 points” on a 100-point scale used in determining bonuses.
“Safety and compliance are foundational to SCE, and events such as employee fatalities or serious injuries to the public can result in meaningful deduction or full elimination” of executive incentive compensation, the company wrote.
Edison didn’t explain in the report what an 18-point deduction meant to executives in actual dollar terms, another point of frustration with consumer advocates trying to determine if executive compensation plans genuinely comply with AB 1054.
“Without seeing dollar figures, it is impossible to ascertain whether a utility’s incentive compensation plan is reasonable,” the Public Advocates Office at the state Public Utilities Commission wrote in a 2022 letter to wildfire safety regulators.
To try to determine how much the missed safety goals actually impacted the compensation of Edison executives last year, The Times looked at a separate federal securities report Edison filed for investors known as the proxy statement.
In that March report, Edison detailed how the majority of its compensation to executives is based on its profit and stock price appreciation, and not safety.
Safety helps determine about 50% of the cash bonuses paid to executives each year, the report said. But more valuable are the long-term incentive bonuses, which are paid in shares of stock and stock options and are based on earnings.
The Utility Reform Network, which is also known as TURN, pointed to those stock bonuses in a 2021 letter to regulators where it questioned whether Edison and the state’s other two big for-profit utilities were actually tying executive compensation to safety.
“Good financial performance does not necessarily mean that the utility prioritizes safety,” TURN staff wrote in the letter.
Trakhtenberg disagreed, saying the company’s “long-term incentives are focused on promoting financial stability.” A key part of that is the company’s ability “over the long term to safely deliver reliable, affordable power,” he said.
Trakhtenberg noted that the state Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety had approved the company’s executive compensation plan in October, saying it met the requirements of AB 1054, as well as every year since the agency was established in July 2021.
The Times asked the energy safety office if it audited the utilities’ compensation reports or tried to determine how much money Edison executives lost because of the safety failures.
Sandy Cooney, a spokesman for the agency, said that the office had “no statutory authority … to audit executive compensation structures.” He referred the reporter to Edison for information on how much executive compensation had actually declined in dollar amounts because of the missed safety goals.
A committee of Edison board members determines what goals will be tied to safety, Trakhtenberg said, and whether those goals have been met.
Even though five contractors died last year while working on Edison’s electrical system, the committee didn’t include contractor safety as a goal, according to the company’s documents.
And the committee said the company met its goal in protecting the public even though three people died from its equipment and there was a 27% increase in deaths and serious injuries among the public compared to the five-year average.
Trakhtenberg said most of the serious injuries happened to people committing theft or vandalism, which is why the committee said the goal had been met.
Edison has told regulators that if its equipment starts a catastrophic wildfire, the committee could decide to eliminate executives’ cash bonuses.
But the company’s documents show that it hasn’t eliminated or even reduced bonuses for the 2022 Fairview fire in Riverside County, which killed two people, destroyed 22 homes and burned 28,000 acres.
In 2023, investigators blamed Edison’s equipment for igniting the fire, saying one of its conductors came in contact with a telecommunications cable, creating sparks that fell into vegetation.
Trakhtenberg said the board’s compensation committee reviewed the circumstances of the fire that year and found that the company had acted “prudently” in maintaining its equipment. The committee decided not to reduce executive bonuses for the fire, he said.
In March, the Public Utilities Commission fined Edison $2.2 million for the fire, saying it had violated four safety regulations, including by failing to cooperate with investigators.
Trakhtenberg said the compensation committee would reconsider its decision not to penalize executives for the deadly fire at its next meeting.
TURN has repeatedly asked regulators not to approve Edison’s compensation plans, detailing how its committee has “undue discretion” in setting goals and then determining whether they have been met.
But the energy safety office has approved the plans anyway. Toney said he believes the responsibility for reviewing the compensation plans and utilities’ wildfire safety should be transferred back to the Public Utilities Commission, which had done the work until 2021.
The energy safety office has rules that make the review process less transparent than it is at the commission, he said.
“The whole process, we feel is rigged heavily in favor of utilities,” he said.
