Managers at Pacific Gas and Electric Co. failed to address concerns from front-line workers who felt electrical equipment the utility was installing to boost efficiency made power lines more vulnerable to starting dangerous fires, a former employee alleged in recently filed court papers.

Todd Hearn, who was a PG&E lineman for more than 20 years, said he repeatedly told his superiors — including the former head of electric operations — that he was troubled by how the company used a specific kind of device designed to automatically restart a power line after it turns off.

The devices, called reclosers, allow PG&E to avoid sending workers out to fix temporary faults, which are common. But reclosers can also be risky because they shoot bursts of electricity that can start a fire if a broken line is in contact with dry vegetation.

Hearn, 50, claimed in court papers that he and several other employees were particularly concerned about a kind of recloser called TripSaver that PG&E was installing in 2017 — months before its power lines started a series of fires around Wine Country.

Hearn alleged that he told management at the San Francisco utility that the company was unsafely installing the TripSavers in areas with high fire risk such as Napa County, where he worked. But he said the company did not take the reports seriously.

After speaking up about wildfire safety problems on many occasions, Hearn was placed on leave and eventually fired, he said.

“They were playing Russian roulette with the fire areas,” Hearn said in an interview with The Chronicle. “We threw safety out the window in favor of metrics. ... It was chaos. We didn’t know what we were doing, but we were putting them up everywhere.”

Civil lawsuits against PG&E are suspended because the company filed for bankruptcy protection in January. So Hearn this week asked the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of California to let him move his case forward — a step even his attorney, Anne Costin, admitted may be unlikely.

Even if the move is unsuccessful in the bankruptcy case, Costin said it is important for her client to “say everything he knew ... so that is publicly out there.”

Regardless, Hearn and Costin are not alone. Another attorney, Dario de Ghetaldi, told The Chronicle he represents four other employees from Napa County who “raised safety issues ... about the installation of TripSavers in high-fire-threat areas.” They were all fired “for reasons that had no basis,” de Ghetaldi said.

In a statement to The Chronicle, PG&E said it was aware of Hearn’s legal motion and will respond by the Dec. 12 deadline set by the Bankruptcy Court. The company does not “comment on employment-related matters” for privacy reasons, spokesman James Noonan said in an email.

PG&E was more specific when it communicated with Hearn directly through letters, copies of which his attorney provided to The Chronicle.

In a January termination letter, PG&E told Hearn he violated the employee code of conduct by “misusing company time, misstating work activities, and fraudulent submissions of timecards for overtime compensation resulting in all-day rest periods, and delayed service time to customers.” And in a March letter to Hearn, the company told him it found his allegations, including retaliation for “continually raising issues regarding the dangers of TripSaver devices being installed in improper locations,” unsubstantiated.

Hearn denies that he acted improperly and maintains his belief that PG&E retaliated against him because of his safety complaints. As part of the bankruptcy case, he filed a claim against PG&E of about $7.6 million, mostly because of wage loss from his job, which was paying him $275,000 a year when he was fired.

Hearn also said he believed PG&E was retaliating against him for raising concerns about fire safety in messages he sent company officials after he was placed on leave and in a complaint he filed with the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health, copies of which were reviewed by The Chronicle.

It’s not clear how large a role, if any, reclosers played in the October 2017 fires. But one fire from that month that merged into a 56,556-acre complex of blazes in Sonoma and Napa counties was “caused by a downed power line after PG&E attempted to re-energize the line,” according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

De Ghetaldi said “a flurry” of TripSaver reclosers were installed in the North Bay before the 2017 disasters and he was “looking at them in relation to their role in some of the fires.”

Reclosers have been implicated in other fires, including the 2007 Witch Fire in San Diego County and a devastating 2009 conflagration in Australia that killed 119 people.

State Sen. Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, a frequent PG&E critic who focused on recloser safety after the 2017 fires, was not surprised by Hearn’s allegations.

“The facts support the claims that he’s making, and indicate, again, that PG&E did not have a sustainable recloser policy,” Hill said.

San Diego Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison have long disabled their reclosers during times of high fire risk, but PG&E was only doing a limited trial of that approach at the time of the 2017 infernos.

PG&E has since embraced the practice: The company’s 2019 wildfire safety plan said it has a program to disable 2,800 reclosers in high-fire-threat areas, and 2,100 of them could be remotely switched off during wildfire conditions as of the end of last year. The remainder can be turned off manually and the company said it was working to have all reclosers in risky fire zones equipped to be remotely disabled.

A representative of S&C Electric Co., which makes TripSavers, declined to comment on Hearn’s allegations, citing the pending litigation.

How this story was reported The Chronicle reviewed court filings and supporting documents; interviewed Todd Hearn, his attorney, and legal and technical experts; and sought comment from PG&E and S&C Electric over the course of several days.

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Hearn said the company prioritized lessening power-outage times and costs, but he and other linemen immediately started seeing issues with the equipment and were concerned they were installed in high-wildfire danger areas. He started speaking out about the dangers they posed.

By the spring of 2017, he began complaining in regional safety meetings with executives in attendance, telling anyone who would listen that the devices were failing and the company was acting against the manufacturer’s safety warning, Hearn alleged.

Hearn contends he even got a response from Patrick Hogan, who was at the time PG&E’s senior vice president of electric operations. Hogan told Hearn that PG&E “may have put the cart before the horse” and would look into a TripSaver training class and committee, Hearn alleged in court papers.

Hogan left PG&E in January, and The Chronicle’s attempts to contact him this week were unsuccessful.

Hearn’s complaint says he attended a TripSaver training class in March 2017 and was “shocked to discover that there was no safety training” on the devices. Instead, Hearn alleged he was told PG&E “was having system-wide problems with TripSavers” and the company was looking at using a new device.

PG&E continued installing the TripSavers anyway, Hearn’s complaint said. He claims he later found out about another problem: The company was downgrading high-priority power-line repairs in order to save money on overtime costs, his complaint said. He said he spoke up about that issue, too, to no avail.

Hearn said he was placed on leave in June 2018 and fired effective Jan. 22.

Despite his termination, Hearn has continued speaking out. In June, he attended a PG&E shareholder meeting in San Francisco and said he delivered letters to the board members regarding his TripSaver concerns.

Hearn still drives around his community and snaps photos of TripSavers on poles in high-fire-danger areas and is, in his own words, “a little obsessed.”

“Napa is a small town, and all my friends are here. I grew up here, and that’s why it’s a concern for me,” he said. “I have a bad feeling it can happen again.”

J.D. Morris and Matthias Gafni are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: jd.morris@sfchronicle.com, matthias.gafni@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @thejdmorris, @mgafni