PG&E spent millions on fire prevention; it may not have been enough

PG & E crews busy restoring power along Old Redwood road in Santa Rosa, Ca. on Tuesday October 10, 2017. Massive wildfires ripped through Napa and Sonoma counties, destroying hundreds of homes and businesses on Monday morning. less PG & E crews busy restoring power along Old Redwood road in Santa Rosa, Ca. on Tuesday October 10, 2017. Massive wildfires ripped through Napa and Sonoma counties, destroying hundreds of homes and businesses on ... more Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 80 Caption Close PG&E spent millions on fire prevention; it may not have been enough 1 / 80 Back to Gallery

Last year, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. inspected 171,057 utility poles and chopped down 236,000 trees near its power lines, essential steps for preventing wildfires.

PG&E inspectors flew over all 114,000 miles of the utility’s electricity distribution wires criss-crossing Northern and Central California, as well as 18,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines.

They used lidar, the laser version of radar, to check for tree branches growing too close to the wires, branches that could brush up against the lines and cause a spark. Other sensors deployed from the air checked for trees that might be dying, or that already had been killed by drought.

In all, the company spent $198 million in 2016 on “vegetation management.”

But those efforts and that money — all of it coming from PG&E’s customers — may not have been enough.

California fire officials are looking into whether PG&E electric lines and power poles, toppled by Sunday night’s windstorm, played a role in triggering the lethal wildfires tearing through the North Bay.

While the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection says PG&E’s equipment is just one potential cause, the state agency that regulates utilities has told PG&E to save every piece of damaged equipment from the area as evidence for the investigations to come. (On Friday, the same agency, the California Public Utilities Commission, also sent similar letters to six telecommunications companies, telling them to preserve their damaged gear from the fire zones.)

PG&E, the state’s largest utility, says that blaming the Wine Country fires on its power lines and poles at this point is premature.

State Sen. Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, wonders whether the programs that PG&E and California’s other big utility companies use to guard against fires are truly effective, for all the money spent on them. And he wants the California Public Utilities Commission to more closely scrutinize how the companies spend that money, to ensure the utilities are doing everything they should.

“Generally, the commission takes their word for it, and then what we get is a disaster or a tragedy,” Hill said.

Hill made a personal mission out of reforming PG&E and the utilities commission after a natural gas pipeline beneath San Bruno exploded in 2010, killing eight people. He also authored a bill, signed by Gov. Jerry Brown last year, that will require utilities to file annual wildfire prevention and mitigation plans to the commission — and require the commission to review them. The commission is still hiring people to implement the legislation, and the utilities have not yet started filing the reports.

“It’s just a slow bureaucracy to move — that’s the problem,” Hill said.

Elizaveta Malashenko, head of the commission’s safety division, said the agency has been adding staff to deal with fire-related issues. The push came, in part, in response to the 2015 Butte Fire in Amador and Calaveras counties, sparked by a pine tree leaning into a PG&E power line. The fire killed two people.

“We’ve learned from the Butte Fire,” Malashenko said. “The challenge for the PUC is we don’t have experts in fire management, fire issues. This is something we’ve recognized is a need, an area where we need to grow.”

While the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as Cal Fire, has primary responsibility to determine the cause of wildfires, Malashenko’s division will look into PG&E’s maintenance of its North Bay equipment, as well as its vegetation management program there. According to PG&E, the company inspected 17,542 miles of power lines in Napa, Sonoma, Lake, Mendocino and Humboldt counties last year. The utility also inspected more than 80,000 power poles so far this year in the areas hit by this week’s fires.

Power lines and poles have triggered some of the most destructive fires in modern California history. Ten years ago, Santa Ana winds blasting through Southern California touched off dozens of fires, five of them sparked by power lines. Together, those five fires charred 334 square miles.

In response, the state started considering extra measures to prevent lines from starting fires. One of the ideas: create a comprehensive, statewide map of areas at high risk for wildfires and require more stringent power-line maintenance in those areas.

The map still isn’t done, nine years after the commission and the utilities began work on it. And Hill noted that an early draft of the map, from 2016, didn’t even include the area already burned by the Butte Fire, months earlier.

“That’s ridiculous,” Hill said. “Seven years they spent, and then we had the Butte Fire — the seventh largest in the state — and it was outside what they considered a high-risk area.”

Malashenko said the map may be finished this year and ready for use in 2018.

PG&E says it increased its own fire-prevention measures in 2014, in response to the deepening drought, which lasted from 2011 to 2016.

Rather than inspecting every line from the air once a year, the company started flying over power lines in areas it considered high-risk as many as four times annually. PG&E funded daily aerial fire patrols during wildfire season, from mid-June to the end of October. And the company stepped up the pace of cutting down trees, as millions of them succumbed to the drought. The number removed last year, for example, is seven times more than the company averaged in the years before the drought, according to PG&E.

And yet, those steps did not prevent the Butte Fire, which burned more than 70,000 acres. Cal Fire pinned the blame on a tall, thin pine that leaned into a power line. A contractor working for PG&E had recently removed two tightly clustered trees nearby, while leaving in place the one that eventually toppled.

The commission fined PG&E $8.3 million for the incident, and legal actions by area residents and government agencies could eventually cost the company $750 million, by PG&E’s own estimates.

Attorney Amanda Riddle, who represents plaintiffs suing PG&E over the Butte Fire, said she was disappointed the commission didn’t do a more thorough investigation into PG&E’s vegetation management program, examining its effectiveness.

“It’s not properly designed to prevent wildfires and protect the public, and preliminary reports suggest we’re seeing that again with these North Bay wildfires,” said Riddle, who is with the firm Corey, Luzaich, de Ghetaldi, Nastari & Riddle.

David R. Baker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: dbaker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @DavidBakerSF