SAN FRANCISCO — Eight years ago, federal investigators announced that a “litany of failures” by California’s largest utility had caused a massive gas explosion that killed eight people, injured 58 and incinerated a neighborhood in the San Francisco suburb of San Bruno.

Two days after that announcement, under blue skies at a baseball diamond on the edge of San Francisco’s financial district, the city’s mayor, Ed Lee, threw out the first pitch for a charity event sponsored by that same utility, Pacific Gas & Electric.

“PG&E is a great local company who gets it,” the mayor, who died in 2017, said at the event.

For critics of PG&E, Mr. Lee’s praise was a symbol of a recurring frustration: Despite evidence that the company was responsible for repeated safety violations and involved in deadly wildfires, lawmakers in California continued to benefit from political donations from the company.

Investigators are now determining whether PG&E equipment was responsible for the state’s deadliest wildfire, the November inferno in and around Paradise that killed 85 people and destroyed more than 13,000 homes. A PG&E spokeswoman on Saturday confirmed that the company had canceled a plan to pay $130 million in bonuses after an outcry by the families of fire victims.