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.
The California Public Utilities Commission is expected to allow Southern California Edison to hike customer bills by nearly 10% next month, and there may be more increases to come.
Edison’s plan would boost the average residential bill by $17 a month or about $200 a year, the commission said. The monthly bill for a customer using 500 kilowatts would jump from $171 to $188 on Oct. 1.
The five commissioners are scheduled to vote Thursday on the PUC administrative law judge’s proposal. It’s just one of multiple rate hikes Edison has asked the commission to approve in the coming year.
Scores of angry customers have written to the commission since Edison proposed the hike, asking the panel to deny it.
Some customers have pointed out that even as Edison has charged more for tree trimming and equipment upgrades meant to make its system safer and more reliable, its electric lines continue to spark fires.
The company now faces dozens of lawsuits from victims of the Jan. 7 Eaton fire, which killed at least 19 people and destroyed thousands of homes in Altadena. Video captured the fire igniting under an Edison transmission tower. The investigation into the fire’s cause is continuing.
“Please, do not let SCE pass their damages on to their customers,” Sara Green, a Crestline resident, wrote to the commission. “Let them cut executive salaries and forgo dividends, rather than pass this on unilaterally to every customer.”
Other customers have complained about increasing outages, including the preventative blackouts the company uses to try to stop its equipment from sparking fires in hot, windy weather.
William Pilling, a resident of Rovana, a small unincorporated community near Bishop, told the commission last month that he and his neighbors were experiencing “highly frequent service interruptions.”
“This is the very definition of unreliable service,” Pilling wrote. ”We are now being asked to pay more per unit for a lower quality good.”
David Eisenhauer, an Edison spokesman, said in an interview that the company was sensitive to concerns about rising rates. “We know that rate changes are challenging for customers,” he said.
“The cost of action is high, but the cost of inaction is higher,” Eisenhauer said. The increases, he said, were needed to support “a reliable and resilient electric grid that is ready to enable the clean energy transition.”
The proposed 10% hike is the result of what the commission calls a general rate case, where the agency allows utilities to propose how much they need to spend to operate and maintain the electrical grid for the next four years.
After months of hearings and debate, an administrative law judge recommended that the commission allow Edison to spend $9.8 billion on those costs this year — 13.7% more than the amount authorized for last year, according to the release. The proposal is less than the nearly $10.5 billion that Edison had initially requested.
Under the plan, Edison will get additional increases for inflation — and customers will see corresponding hikes — for each year through 2028, the commission said.
Edison says it has increased its spending aimed at preventing wildfires, including by undergrounding lines, installing new insulated wires and increasing equipment inspections in areas with high fire risk. The company has also increased the trimming of trees and other vegetation growing near its equipment.
Eisenhauer said that since 2019 wildfire-related investments have helped drive up rates.
He added that demand for electricity is “growing faster than it has in decades” leading to higher costs. In addition, he said, “threats to grid safety and reliability are becoming more frequent and more costly.”
Since 2014, Edison’s rates have risen by 80% — more than twice the rate of inflation, the commission’s public advocates office said in a May report.
More than 860,000 Edison customers — or 19% of the total — are behind in paying their electric bills, the report said. The average unpaid balance was $957.
The proposed 10% hike is one of several increases Edison has asked the commission to approve, or that state officials have already greenlighted.
In November, customers who use little electricity, like those living in small apartments or those owning solar panels, will see higher bills when the company begins adding a $24 monthly fixed charge, according to a recent Edison release.
In return, the price per kilowatt hour will fall, leading to possible savings for those using more power. For example, a residential customer using 1,000 kilowatts per month — double the average — will see their bill decline to $355 from $380, according to the release.
The commission designed the new monthly charge, which applies to customers of the state’s three largest for-profit electric companies, so that revenue increases from the new fees match the loss from the lower price per kilowatt hour.
The new fee was created under a bill pushed through the state Legislature in 2022 by Gov. Gavin Newsom. The utilities asked for the change in how electricity was billed to encourage Californians to switch to electric-powered vehicles and home appliances.
Edison also expects to raise rates for the damages from two catastrophic wildfires that investigators found the utility’s equipment sparked.
It has asked the commission for a nearly 2% increase to cover $5.4 billion in damages from the 2018 Woolsey fire, which killed three people and destroyed more than 1,600 homes and other structures in Malibu and nearby communities.
Earlier this year, the commission agreed Edison could increase rates by less than 1% to collect $1.6 billion from customers for damages from the 2017 Thomas fire. The blaze burned more than 280,000 acres in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties and left barren hillsides that helped set off mudslides in Montecito that killed 23 people. The commission must still sign off on final approval of the hike.
Eisenhauer said that under state law utilities are allowed to shift fire damages to customers if they have operated their system prudently and reasonably. He said the two fires were “largely driven by unprecedented and extreme weather events and other factors outside SCE’s control.”
In another proposal, Edison has asked the commission to raise customer bills by 2.1% to increase profits going to its investors, according to its customer notice. The plan would increase its cost of capital — the rate that helps determine how much profit it earns when it builds electric lines and other infrastructure.
The utility asked for the increase in investor profits after its stock price plummeted in January when lawyers claimed its transmission line had ignited the Eaton fire. The company told the commission that because of California’s high risk of wildfire, it needed to earn higher profits to encourage investors to continue holding its stock and to bolster its credit rating.
Despite Edison’s rapidly rising spending on insulated wires, tree trimming and other fire prevention work, its equipment sparked 178 fires last year — up from 90 in 2023.
Company executives said most of those ignitions were small fires that did not spread. The number of fires each year, they said, depends on the weather. Last year, heavy rain and then hot weather, they said, left more dried vegetation.
Edison has said its increased fire prevention work will decrease the number of times that it must shut off power to communities in hot, windy weather to stop lines from sparking fires.
Yet the company said at an Aug. 19 meeting that it expects the number of days of preventative power shutoffs to increase by 20% to 40% this year and that the number of customers subject to them could be twice as high.
Eisenhauer explained that the number of preventative shutoffs was expected to rise because the utility recently lowered the wind speed thresholds that trigger them. The company also added 47,000 more customers to areas believed to have high fire risk, which are subject to the preventative shutoffs, he said.
At the August meeting, Edison executives touted the success of the company’s fire prevention work.
In a presentation, Timothy O’Toole, an Edison board member and head of its safety and operations committee, noted the devastation the January fires caused in and around Los Angeles.
“Nonetheless, we remain very proud and confident in the progress we’ve made,” he said.
O’Toole said the utility’s fire prevention work had “created ever greater protection for our communities and our customers.”
Later in the meeting, Caroline Thomas Jacobs, director of the state Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety, questioned O’Toole’s repeated praise of the company’s work to prevent fires.
“Your tone sounded defensive and justifying the progress that’s made as opposed to acknowledging the humility of what an event like the January fires I would think would bring,” she said to O’Toole.
The public can comment on the proposed hike at the meeting on Thursday or in the docket for the case.
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.
Aug. 15 (UPI) — Applied Materials’ stock price slumped by double digits on Friday after the semiconductor equipment maker reported a projected decline in revenue amid tariff worries in China.
On the Standard and Poor’s 500 index, the company’s stock decreased 11% at the opening bell and was trading at $162.09, down 13.87%, at 2 p.m. Entering trading, Applied Materials was up more than 15% for the year. The stock reached $199.29 on July 15 with the record $235.99 in April 2024.
The company, based in Santa Clara, Calif., reported the sixth consecutive quarter of revenue growth, including $7.3 billion in the third quarter, but foresees a weaker situation in the next quarter. They initially projected $6.7 billion in revenue for the quarter.
“We are expecting a decline in revenue in the fourth quarter driven by both digestion of capacity in China and non-linear demand from leading-edge customers given market concentration and fab timing,” Brice Hill, senior vice president and CFO at Applied Materials, said. “We are navigating and adapting to the near-term uncertainties by leveraging our robust supply chain, global manufacturing footprint and deep customer relationships.”
CEO Gary Dickerson, during an earnings call with analysts, said the current macroeconomic situation and trade issues have fueled “increasing uncertainty and lower visibility,” mainly within its business in China.
In addition, he said their forecast does not account for pending export license applications and a substantial backlog of products.
Dickerson noted the easing of spending from customers, with Chinese clients cutting spending after increasing equipment manufacturing in the region.
President Donald Trump has proposed a 100% tariff on semiconductors and possibly a 300% rate. Exempt companies would be those with manufacturing facilities in the United States.
Applied Materials doesn’t make chips, and instead supplies equipment, services and software used by the makers of the chips. The company’s largest plant for logistics and logistics is in Austin, Texas.
On Monday, Trump extended a tariff pause until Nov. 10 on products sent to the United States from China. Originally, he threatened 145% duty, but it was later lowered to 30% plus the baseline tariffs imposed on nearly all U.S. trading partners. The baseline remains in effect.
In June, Trump announced a trade agreement with China over rare earth minerals. Under the deal, China would export rare earth minerals to the United States with both countries reducing their tariffs for 90 days. Rare earth minerals fuel energy sources for mobile devices and electric vehicles.
Despite uncertainty, Applied Equipment in its report wrote that “we remain very confident in the longer-term growth opportunities for the semiconductor industry and Applied Materials.
The company’s adjusted earnings of $2.11 per quarter was short of the $2.39 expected by LSEG.
Net income hit $1.78 billion, or $2.22 per share. One year ago, it was $1.71 billion, or $2.05 per share.
The gross margin was 48.8% compared with 47.3% one year ago, and the operating margin was 30.6% vs. 28.7% in 2024.
The company specializes in materials engineering solutions for semiconductors, flat panel displays and solar photovoltaic industries. The company’s revenue in semiconductor equipment is No. 1 in the world, followed by the Dutch company ASML.
Sales at all three Applied Materials units rose: Semiconductor Systems at $5.43 billion, Applied Global Services at $1.60 billion and and Display t a$263 million.
The company’s market capitalization is $151.06 billion. It was founded in 1967 as a startup.
BBC gameshow Destination X viewers couldn’t help but laugh as one of the contestants blamed a ‘dodgy’ challenge as they were left furious over the results
They were branded “sore losers”(Image: BBC/TwoFour)
A contestant on Destination X, Josh, has blamed his defeat on a “dodgy” task, claiming he was “cheated”.
Josh is one of the six remaining contestants in Rob Brydon’s BBC gameshow, where he’s vying for a £100,000 prize in the reality competition that’s been likened to a blend of The Traitors and Race Across The World.
Despite gaining an advantage in yesterday’s episode, tonight’s show (Thursday 14 August) saw him paired up with record-breaker Nick for a challenge, but they didn’t fare well against their competitors.
When they struggled to answer questions about clues they’d spotted in Venice, both Josh and Nick tried to argue that a faulty buzzer was to blame for their poor performance.
Nick and Josh fumed over their loss on Destination X(Image: BBC)
“I feel cheated, the buzzers weren’t working,” Josh raged. “It wasn’t fair,” reports the Manchester Evening News.
Throughout the challenge, he maintained that the buzzer “wasn’t working” and was “dodgy”.
“I feel like the button was dodgy, I’m pretty sure I pressed it first and I know for a fact I’ve got very good reactions.”
At one point, he even confronted host Rob, saying: “Can I have a word? That’s out of order!”
The tense gameshow is almost reaching its end(Image: BBC/TwoFour)
One viewer responded on X: “Get over it Josh, you’re just too slow!”
Another commented: “Josh blaming the button is hilarious.”
Yet another viewer chuckled: “Josh and Nick claiming the buzzer doesn’t work. Sore losers.”
Destination X is a new BBC gameshow which sees 13 strangers attempt to win £100,000(Image: BBC)
Meanwhile, their competitor Darren found their loss amusing: “Josh and Nick weren’t very gracious in defeat whatsoever, which made it all the more sweeter. I loved it.”
Before stepping into the villa, Josh worried viewers might perceive him as arrogant, explaining: “They might think I’m quite cocky but I just believe in self love. If you can’t love yourself, you can’t start to do things.”
The 26 year old aviator continued: “I have a lot of qualities that can help me within the game such as flight training and I also know meteorology and navigation. I’m quite a social person as well. I’ve got a good mix of intelligence and sociability.”
Destination X is available to watch on BBC iPlayer
Southern California Edison’s admission that its equipment may have ignited the Hurst fire in the San Fernando Valley on Jan. 7 is being seized on by lawyers suing the utility company for another fire in the same area nearly six years earlier.
Both the Saddleridge fire in 2019 and the Hurst fire this year started beneath an Edison high-voltage transmission line in Sylmar. The lawyers say faulty equipment on the line ignited both blazes in the same way.
“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 Saddleridge fire,” the lawyers wrote of the Hurst fire in a June 9 filing in Los Angeles Superior Court.
The lawyers said the January wildfire is “further evidence” that a transmission pylon known as Tower 2-5 “is improperly grounded.”
Edison told the state Public Utilities Commission in February that “absent additional evidence, SCE believes its equipment may be associated with the ignition of the Hurst Fire.” But the company denies claims that its equipment sparked the 2019 fire, which tore through Sylmar, Porter Ranch and Granada Hills — all suburbs of Los Angeles — burning 8,799 acres.
“We will continue to focus on facts and evidence — not on preposterous and sensational theories that only serve to harm the real victims,” said Edison spokesman David Eisenhauer. He declined further comment on the case.
The Saddleridge wildfire destroyed or damaged more than 100 homes and other structures, according to Cal Fire, and caused at least one death when resident Aiman El Sabbagh suffered a cardiac arrest.
Edison is being sued by insurance companies, including State Farm and USAA, to recoup the cost of damages paid to their policyholders. Homeowners and other victims are also seeking damages. A jury trial for the consolidated cases is set for Nov. 4.
In their June 9 filing, the plaintiffs’ lawyers also claimed Edison wasn’t transparent with officials looking into the cause of the 2019 fire. One fire official characterized the utility’s action as “deceptive,” the filing said.
Edison discovered a fault on its system at 8:57 p.m. — just three minutes before the blaze at the base of its transmission tower was reported to the Fire Department by Sylmar resident Robert Delgado, according to the court filing.
But Edison didn’t tell the Los Angeles city Fire Department about the fault it recorded, the filing said. Instead the fire department’s investigation team discovered the failure on Edison’s transmission lines through dash cam footage recorded by a motorist driving on the 210 Freeway nearby, the filing said.
When Timothy Halloran, a city Fire Department investigator, went to the location of the flash shown on the motorist’s camera, he found “evidence of a failure on SCE’s equipment,” the filing said.
Halloran said in a deposition that employees of the business located where the evidence was found told him that Edison employees “attempted to purchase” footage from the company’s security camera on the night of the fire, the filing said.
“The video footage shows a large flash emanating from the direction of SCE Transmission Tower 5-2,” the filing said.
Halloran testified in his deposition that he believed Edison was trying to be “deceptive” for attempting to purchase the security camera footage and not reporting the system fault to the Fire Department, the lawyers said.
Halloran didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Edison’s maintenance of its transmission lines is now being scrutinized as it faces dozens of lawsuits from victims of the devastating Eaton fire, which also ignited on Jan. 7.
Videos showed that fire, which killed 18 people and destroyed thousands of homes, starting under a transmission tower in Eaton Canyon. The investigation into the cause of the fire is continuing.
Victims of the 2019 fire say they’ve become disheartened as Edison has repeatedly asked for delays in the court case.
“Many plaintiffs have not yet been able to rebuild their homes” because of the delays, wrote Mara Burnett, a lawyer representing the family of the man who died.
Burnett noted that Aiman El Sabbagh was 54 when he suffered a fatal cardiac arrest during the incident. His children, Tala and Adnan El Sabbagh, “feel they were robbed of things they treasured and worked hard for with no apparent recompense in sight.”
Both the Saddleridge and Hurst fires included a similar chain of events where a failure of equipment on one tower resulted in two or more fires igniting under different towers elsewhere on the line, according to lawyers for the plaintiffs.
Edison designed and constructed the towers that run through Sylmar in 1970. They hold up two transmission lines: the Gould-Sylmar 220 kV circuit and the Eagle Rock-Sylmar 220 kV circuit.
In the case of the Saddleridge fire, investigators from the Los Angeles Fire Department and the California Public Utilities Commission found that at 8:57 pm on Oct. 10, 2019, a Y-shaped steel part holding up a transmission line failed, causing the line to fall on a steel arm.
The failure caused a massive electrical fault, lawyers for the plaintiffs say, that sparked fires at two transmission towers that were more than two miles away.
State and city fire investigators say the Saddleridge fire began under one of those towers. And they found unusual burning at the footing of the other tower, according to a report by an investigator at the utilities commission.
The utilities commission investigator said in the report that he found that Edison had violated five state regulations by not properly maintaining or designing its transmission equipment.
This year’s Hurst fire ignited not far away on Jan. 7 at 10:10 p.m. It also began under one of Edison’s transmission towers.
According to Edison’s Feb. 6 report to the utilities commission, the company found that its hardware failed, resulting in equipment falling to the ground at the base of a tower.
The lawyers for the plaintiffs say that they now have more evidence of the fire’s start. They say that investigators found that the hardware failure set off an event — similar to the 2019 fire — that resulted in five fires at five separate transmission tower bases on the same line.
One of those fires spread in high winds to become the Hurst fire. Officials ordered 44,000 people to evacuate. Air tankers and 300 firefighters contained the fire before it reached any homes.
In a high-stakes gamble, Wall Street hedge funds are offering to buy claims that insurers may have against Southern California Edison if the utility is found liable for causing the devastating Eaton fire in Altadena.
The solicitations are legal, but have alarmed California state officials — who loathe the idea of investors profiting from a disaster that claimed 18 lives and destroyed more than 9,400 homes and other structures.
“I think everyone in this room looks at a catastrophe, like what happened in Southern California, and our natural instincts are to say, ‘What can we do to help?’” Tom Welsh, the chief executive of the California Earthquake Authority, which manages the state’s wildfire fund, said at a recent public meeting. “There are other actors in the environment who look at that situation in Southern California and ask instead, “What can I do to profit?’”
The investors are aiming to buy so-called subrogation claims from insurance companies. These are claims that insurers would file against Edison seeking reimbursement for the money they paid to their policyholders for fire damages if it’s determined the utility’s equipment triggered the wildfire that began Jan. 7.
For the insurers, selling the claims — even at a steep discount — allows them to get at least some reimbursement for the money they’ve paid out. For the hedge funds buying the claims, it’s a gamble that could pay big if Edison is found liable and they can cash in those claims for much more than they paid.
More than $17 billion in insurance claims for the Eaton and Palisades fires has been paid out so far, according to the California Department of Insurance.
State officials say California has a stake in the trading of fire-related subrogation claims, which was previously reported by Bloomberg, because of the potential effect on the state’s wildfire fund.
That fund, which currently has about $21 billion, would be used to cover most of the costs of damage claims should Edison be found liable for starting the Eaton blaze. While the cause is still under investigation, a leading theory is that a decommissioned transmission line in Eaton Canyon was reenergized and sparked the blaze, Edison has said.
The wildfire fund is managed by a state board called the Catastrophe Response Council. At its last meeting in May, Welsh told the board that solicitations from New York brokers and investment firms began landing in his email inbox in March.
Ronald Ryder at Oppenheimer & Co., a New York investment firm, told Welsh in an email on April 15 that his company was currently trading the subrogation claims. Ryder wrote that there had already been 10 transactions worth more than $1 billion in recovery rights for the Eaton fire as well as the Palisades fire in Pacific Palisades, where the city of Los Angeles faces potential liability.
In another email, Ryder told Welsh that investors were bidding 47 cents on the dollar for the claims related to the Eaton fire. For the Palisades fire, the bidding was 5 cents on the dollar, Ryder wrote.
Welsh warned the council that “speculative investors” might hold onto the Eaton claims and “really try to get outsized profits by demanding settlements from Edison of 75, 80, 85 cents on the dollar.”
If that were to happen, the wildfire fund could pay out “hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars” more than if the claims were settled directly by the insurers, he said.
“That would really, very negatively impact the durability of the wildfire fund,” Welsh said.
Oppenheimer declined to comment, and Ryder didn’t respond to messages.
Under a 2019 state law, the state wildfire fund would be expected to reimburse Edison for most of the insurers’ payments to policyholders if its electrical equipment is found to have started the Eaton fire. The Palisades fire, which occurred in territory serviced by the L.A. Department of Water and Power, isn’t covered by the state fund.
California lawmakers created the wildfire fund in 2019 to protect the state’s three biggest for-profit utilities — Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric — from bankruptcy if their equipment sparks catastrophic wildfires.
The possibility of large settlements paid out by the wildfire fund has led to dozens of lawsuits against Edison, even before the cause of the fire has been determined.
If found responsible for the fire, Edison would negotiate settlements with the insurers, as well as with homeowners and others who have filed lawsuits, saying they’ve been harmed. The utility would then ask the state wildfire fund to cover those amounts.
If the insurers have sold their claims, however, the investors who bought them would reap the returns. Attorneys who handle the complex transactions would also get a cut and “generally take a very high percentage off the top,” Paul Rosenstiel, a catastrophe council member, said at last month’s meeting.
Already, Gov. Gavin Newsom and other state leaders are worried that the $21-billion wildfire fund could be depleted by damage claims from the Eaton fire.
Welsh recounted how a hedge fund had profited in 2019 by buying insurers’ subrogation claims against PG&E after its transmission line was found to have started the 2018 Camp fire that killed 85 people and destroyed much of the town of Paradise. Bloomberg reported at the time that hedge fund Baupost Group made a profit of hundreds of millions of dollars by buying the claims at 35 cents on the dollar and later getting a settlement valued at much more.
To stop hedge funds from profiting on the claims, Welsh said, the earthquake authority is now considering changing its claim administration procedures to make the settlements less lucrative for those investors.
One possible change being discussed, according to authority staff, would require a utility that ignited a wildfire to prioritize settling the claims of victims and insurers who have not sold their subrogation rights before those claims owned by hedge funds.
More than 30 million Californians across the state could see their electric bills go up to pay for the devastating Eaton fire, as officials scramble to shore up a state wildfire fund that could be wiped out by damage claims.
One early estimate places fire losses from the Eaton fire at $24 billion to $45 billion. If Southern California Edison equipment is found to have sparked the blaze on Jan. 7, as dozens of lawsuits allege, the damage claims could quickly exhaust the state’s $21-billion wildfire fund.
“Everyone is concerned about this,” said Michael Wara, director of Stanford’s climate and energy policy program, who was involved in the fund’s creation. “If we need to put more money into the fund, where will it come from?”
The wildfire fund was created to shield the state’s three big utilities from bankruptcy in the event one was found liable for massive fire damages.
At a meeting last month, members of the state Catastrophe Response Council, which oversees the fund, were told that Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislative leaders were being urged to extend a monthly surcharge on electric bills beyond its planned expiration in 2035. The fee, called the non-bypassable charge, adds roughly $3 a month to the average residential bill.
“They are asking the people of California to put more money into the fund,” said council member Paul Rosenstiel, a former investment banker and Newsom advisor, according to a transcript of the meeting. “Some of them are asking for an extension of the non-bypassable charge.”
The fee is paid by customers of the state’s three big for-profit utilities — Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric.
Rosenstiel didn’t respond to a request for comment. At the meeting, he didn’t say who was lobbying the governor and lawmakers to extend the surcharge to ratepayers.
California utility executives have told their investors they have been talking to Newsom and legislative leaders about shoring up the fund. PG&E executives have said that they have asked that no new money come from utilities or their shareholders, which would likely leave electric customers to pay more.
“We continue to advocate that we don’t think there is a good case that investors should contribute to the fund,” Patti Poppe, PG&E’s chief executive, told Wall Street analysts in an April conference call.
A Siller Skycrane removes Southern California Edison’s tower 208 from a hillside in Altadena in May. The idle transmission tower, suspected of sparking the Eaton fire, will be examined at a lab.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Pedro Pizarro, chief executive of SoCal Edison’s parent company Edison International, was asked in a recent call with Wall Street analysts about the prospects for legislation that would bolster the wildfire fund.
“Clearly the governor’s office is engaged, as are our legislative leaders,” he said, adding that he was “certainly very encouraged by the level of diligence and engagement that I’m seeing.”
Asked to elaborate, Kathleen Dunleavy, a SoCal Edison spokeswoman, said the utility was not seeking a specific solution to questions of the fund’s durability.
“Our focus is to convey the importance of a strong wildfire fund,” she said. “We are not being prescriptive in how to achieve that.”
This year, the electric bill surcharge is expected to add $923 million to the fund, according to California Public Utility Commission records. If the fee was extended an additional 10 years, it would require customers of the three utilities to pay an additional $9 billion into the fund.
That doesn’t sit well with consumer advocates, who point out customers are already on the hook to contribute half of the $21-billion fund, while also paying higher bills to cover costs such as undergrounding and insulated electric wires.
Those measures are intended to make the electric system safer. Yet despite spending billions of dollars last year on wildfire mitigation, the number of fires sparked by its equipment jumped from 90 in 2023 to 178 last year.
Altadena homes lie in ruins after the Eaton fire.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
“We think ratepayers have more than done enough,” said Mark Toney, the executive director of The Utility Reform Network, also known as TURN, a consumer group in San Francisco. “My position is that ratepayers should not pay another penny.”
Rosenstiel said at the May meeting that Newsom and legislative leaders were also being asked for the state’s general fund, which pays for schools, healthcare, prisons and other government operations, to contribute to the fund that protects utilities from wildfire claims.
The governor’s office declined to answer questions and said Newsom’s schedule didn’t allow time for an interview.
Newsom has a seat on the Catastrophe Response Council. He was a no-show at the group’s most recent meeting, sending a designee in his place.
Assemblywoman Cottie Petrie-Norris (D-Irvine), the chair of the Assembly’s Utilities and Energy Committee, acknowledged that lawmakers are concerned about the fund but said that they are still considering remedies.
“All options are on the table and are being considered and evaluated,” she said. “I have certainly not arrived at a solution yet.”
The cause of the Eaton fire, which killed 18 people and destroyed more than 9,000 homes, businesses and other structures in Altadena, remains under investigation.
Edison CEO Pizarro has said a leading theory is that an unused, decades-old transmission line in Eaton Canyon was reenergized and sparked the blaze. Video captured flames erupting under an Edison transmission tower on the night of the fire.
If Edison’s equipment is found to have started the inferno, the state’s wildfire fund is expected to cover most of the cost of damages over $1 billion, under a 2019 law that was passed after PG&E went bankrupt from its liability for the deadly 2018 Camp fire.
The first $1 billion in damages from the Eaton fire would be covered by insurance that electric customers paid for.
The total cost of the fire in Altadena won’t be known until dozens of lawsuits make their way through the courts, which could take years.
A February study by UCLA economists Zhiyun Li and William Yu estimated that the fire caused $24 billion to $45 billion in property damages and capital losses, or the cost to replace what was destroyed.
Officials at the California Earthquake Authority, which manages the wildfire fund, told members of the Catastrophe Response Council in a May memorandum that the authority had “undertaken a significant project to evaluate alternatives for extending the durability of the Wildfire Fund in the face of potential large losses.”
To determine how to strengthen the fund, authority officials said they had rehired consultants who worked with Newsom’s office in 2019 to create the fund. The four firms will be paid $4.5 million, which the fund will cover, they said.
Among the consultants is Guggenheim Securities, the investment banking arm of Guggenheim Partners. Another subsidiary of Guggenheim Partners owns stock in the state’s three big utilities.
A recommendation to tap utility customers to replenish the fund, instead of the utility companies themselves, would likely have a big impact on company share prices.
“They [Guggenheim] certainly have a vested interest in the financial success of the utilities,” Toney said.
A spokesman for Guggenheim Securities said the stocks owned by the sister company didn’t pose a conflict, saying it “maintains a robust conflict management program, including strict information barriers between its investment banking department and the rest of Guggenheim Partners.”
Wara at Stanford said if Edison is found responsible for the Eaton fire, the wildfire fund would cover what insurers paid to victims and also pay for property damage not covered by insurance.
For example, families who lost their homes but received insurance payouts lower than the value of their property could seek the balance from Edison, he said. The utility would then seek to recover those sums from the wildfire fund.
The other deadly Los Angeles County inferno that ignited on Jan. 7, the Palisades fire, is not covered by the wildfire fund because Pacific Palisades is served by the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power, a municipal utility. The fund only covers blazes ignited by equipment owned by the state’s three biggest investor-owned utilities.
“They have their insurance and that’s it,” Wara said of Palisades fire victims.
At its meeting last month, the state Catastrophe Response Council was informed that insurance claims from the Eaton fire have totaled roughly $15 billion so far.
Adding to the damage bill is the potential cost of lawsuits. The possibility that the fund will pay out large amounts for Eaton fire damages has led to dozens of lawsuits being filed against Edison, even before the official cause has been determined.
Families of Altadena residents who died have filed wrongful-death suits. Edison is also facing lawsuits from L.A. County and other local governments for damages, including to public infrastructure such as water systems. Residents living outside the fire’s borders have filed suit, saying they were harmed by lead and other toxins in the smoke.
If a court found Edison negligent in maintaining its equipment, Wara said, victims could ask for compensation for pain and suffering, which would escalate the cost.
“Then the wildfire fund is out of money,” Wara said.
Pizarro has said that Edison is “committed to a thorough and transparent investigation.”
“Our hearts go out to everyone who has suffered losses,” he said.
The 2019 law that created the wildfire fund, known as AB 1054, greatly limited what Edison would have to pay for any of the claims. The company has told its investors that its maximum liability would be $3.9 billion.
The three utilities are asking legislators to ensure that state law continues to protect them and their shareholders, even if the $21-billion fund runs out of money.
Since the January fires, Edison, PG&E and Sempra, the parent company of San Diego Gas & Electric, have each spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobby in Sacramento, according to required regulatory reports they filed for the first three months of the year.
A PG&E lobbyist reported taking Assemblywoman Petrie-Norris to a $267 dinner at Paragary’s, a bistro in Sacramento, on Feb. 3.
Petrie-Norris said the dinner was with Carla Peterman, a former state public utilities commissioner who is now a top PG&E executive. Petrie-Norris said they talked about a planned March hearing on electricity affordability and didn’t discuss the wildfire fund.
The next month, a PG&E lobbyist took Dee Dee Myers and Rohimah Moly, two of Newsom’s top staff members, to the upscale Prelude Kitchen & Bar, which is a short walk from the state Capitol.
Willie Rudman, a spokesman for the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development, said the wildfire fund wasn’t discussed at the meal. Instead it “was a general meet and greet,” Rudman said, where the governor’s staff and PG&E executives “discussed opportunities for future collaboration.”
PG&E declined to answer questions. Lynsey Paulo, a PG&E spokesperson, said in a statement that the utility’s lobbying expenses were paid with shareholder funds and not money from customers.
“Like many individuals and businesses, PG&E participates in the political process on behalf of our customers and company,” Paulo said.
BEIJING — U.S.-China trade talks in London this week are expected to take up a series of fresh disputes that have buffeted relations, threatening a fragile truce over tariffs.
Both sides agreed in Geneva last month to a 90-day suspension of most of the 100%-plus tariffs they had imposed on each other in an escalating trade war that had sparked fears of recession.
Since then, the U.S. and China have exchanged angry words about advanced semiconductors that power artificial intelligence, “rare earths” that are vital to carmakers and other industries, and visas for Chinese students at American universities.
President Trump spoke at length with Chinese leader Xi Jinping by phone Thursday in an attempt to put relations back on track. Trump announced on social media the next day that trade talks would be held Monday in London.
Technology is a major sticking point
The latest frictions began just a day after the May 12 announcement of the Geneva agreement to “pause” tariffs for 90 days.
The U.S. Commerce Department issued guidance saying the use of Ascend AI chips from Huawei, a leading Chinese tech company, could violate U.S. export controls. That’s because the chips were probably developed with American technology despite restrictions on its export to China, the guidance said.
The Chinese government wasn’t pleased. One of its biggest beefs in recent years has been over U.S. moves to limit the access of Chinese companies to technology, and in particular to equipment and processes needed to produce the most advanced semiconductors.
“The Chinese side urges the U.S. side to immediately correct its erroneous practices,” a Chinese Commerce Ministry spokesperson said.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wasn’t in Geneva but will join the talks in London. Analysts say that suggests at least a willingness on the U.S. side to hear out China’s concerns on export controls.
China shows signs of easing up on rare earths
One area where China holds the upper hand is in the mining and processing of rare earths. They are crucial for not only autos but also other products such as robots and military equipment.
The Chinese government started requiring producers to obtain a license to export seven rare-earth elements in April. Resulting shortages sent automakers worldwide into a tizzy. As stockpiles ran down, some worried they would have to halt production.
Trump, without mentioning rare earths specifically, took to social media to attack China.
“The bad news is that China, perhaps not surprisingly to some, HAS TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US,” Trump posted on May 30.
The Chinese government indicated Saturday that it is addressing the concerns, which have come from European companies as well. A Commerce Ministry statement said it had granted some approvals and “will continue to strengthen the approval of applications that comply with regulations.”
The scramble to resolve the rare-earth issue shows that China has a strong card to play if it wants to strike back against tariffs or other measures.
Plan to revoke student visas adds to tensions
Student visas don’t normally figure in trade talks, but a U.S. announcement that it would begin revoking the visas of some Chinese students has emerged as another thorn in the relationship.
The Chinese Commerce Ministry raised the issue when asked last week about the accusation that it had violated the consensus reached in Geneva.
It replied that the U.S. had undermined the agreement by issuing export control guidelines for AI chips, stopping the sale of chip design software to China and saying it would revoke Chinese student visas.
“The United States has unilaterally provoked new economic and trade frictions,” the ministry said in a statement posted on its website.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a May 28 statement that the United States would “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.”
More than 270,000 Chinese students studied in the U.S. in the 2023-24 academic year.
Pedestrians walk past a Peloton store in Bethesda, Maryland in August 2022. The fitness company announced Tuesday it was launching a resale platform for its fitness equipment, called Repowered. File Photo by Michael Reynolds/EPA-EFE
June 4 (UPI) — Peloton is geared-up to help customers sell their bikes and treadmills online with Tuesday’s launch of Repowered, a resale marketplace that could bring in top secondhand dollars for the connected fitness company.
Repowered is currently operating in New York City, Boston and Washington, D.C., with plans to go nationwide within the year. The platform is available to sellers only and will become available to buyers, once there’s enough inventory, Peloton said.
“The official Peloton resale site where you can find great deals on gently used Peloton equipment or sell your pre-loved pieces for cash,” the company announced on its website.
According to Peloton, the platform will cut third party friction by coordinating pickups and deliveries. Sellers will receive 70% of the proceeds, with Peloton splitting the rest with platform provider Archive. Sellers can also receive up to a $600 discount on new equipment.
Peloton says the resale market aligns with its sustainability goals to “help give used equipment a second life,” while providing transparency on the product.
“If you’re buying or selling used Peloton equipment, you will have access to the Peloton History Summary that includes details like service history, warranty and more, directly from us,” the company said. “This ensures transparency about the item’s condition, giving both parties confidence in the transaction.”
The fitness company has seen a drop in the monthly subscriptions that go with their equipment, as treadmills and bikes collect dust and clothing once owners stop using them. Those subscriptions are a big part of Peloton’s revenue, according to the company’s financial records.
Last year, Peloton cut 15% of its workforce as chief executive officer Barry McCarthy stepped down. At the same time, the company noticed a spike in the resale of its equipment on Facebook Marketplace and Trade My Stuff, which manages transactions and heavy lifting for buyers and sellers. The delivery team also sets up the equipment and teaches the buyer how to use it.
After reporting a 13% decline in revenue during its third quarter, Peloton announced it would help facilitate the resale of its own equipment as part of its full-spectrum wellness offerings that include mindfulness and sleep.
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.
