Chapter One: Indictment A brilliant flash broke the morning darkness on November 8, 2018, as strong winds pummeled a PG&E power line scaling the Sierra Nevada ninety miles north of Sacramento. A worn hook hanging from a century-old transmission tower broke clean, dropping a high-voltage wire that spit electricity just before sunrise. A shower of sparks set dry brush aflame. PG&E recorded an outage on the line at 6:15 a.m. Five minutes later, one of the company's employees noticed a fire under the tower as he drove east on State Route 70, a remote two-lane road running through a steep river canyon that funnels mountain winds down to the valley below. Cell phone out of range, he radioed nearby colleagues, telling them to call 911. The message reached the local fire captain at 6:29 a.m. He had risen early that morning, roused from sleep by the sound of pine needles pelting the roof of Fire Station 36. The two-engine outpost, tucked along State Route 70 at the mouth of the canyon, was clocking wind speeds as fast as fifty-two miles per hour. The call came as the captain was making breakfast for his small crew. It was already too late. Within fifteen minutes, both engines arrived across the river from the makings of a firestorm. There was no way to get ahead of it. The transmission tower, perched high along a steep, gravelly access route called Camp Creek Road, was almost completely inaccessible by fire engine. The crew struggled to stand upright as the winds whipped the flames. They were spreading with staggering speed. The captain radioed dispatchers for backup. "This has the potential of a major incident," he said. Within an hour, the fire had spread seven miles, burning through the small mountain communities of Pulga and Concow to arrive at the outskirts of Paradise, a tight-knit town of nearly twenty-seven thousand people nestled in the Sierra foothills. Residents awoke to emergency evacuation orders as softball-sized embers collided with dead trees. The fire was entirely out of control. At its fastest, it engulfed eighty football fields a minute, by some estimates. The tortured evacuation process began as thick black smoke took on a hellish orange hue. Escape routes became choke points, lines of cars inching along melting asphalt. Dozens of people were left behind, unable to escape for reasons that made their gruesome deaths even more tragic. Many were in their seventies and eighties. One man had only just gotten his wheelchair out the front door. Another abandoned his wheelchair and tried to drag himself along the ground. A couple in their sunset years died together in their recliners, holding two dogs and two cats. The fire overtook the town within hours. At noon, one of PG&E's first responders, called a troubleman, arrived at the ignition point in a helicopter. A regional supervisor had ordered emergency air patrol of the transmission tower in response to the early morning outage. The helicopter arrived to hover at a tall steel structure that, under normal circumstances, scarcely elicited anyone's attention. It had stood there for decades, becoming one with its surroundings, until the day it failed. If you think about the grid as a network of roads, transmission lines are like highways, built to carry large amounts of electricity over long distances. They pick up electrons at power plants and channel them through thick, heavy wires held aloft by steel towers as tall as fifteen stories. The wires connect to substations, or off-ramps, where the power is reduced to lower voltages and distributed to homes and businesses through networks of smaller wires akin to local streets. Transmission lines are subject to a cardinal rule. The wires must be kept away from one another as well as from the towers that support them. If the space in between them narrows too much, electricity can jump from wire to wire, or wire to tower, in what's known as an arc, a lightning-like bolt hot enough to melt metal and send sparks flying. To reduce that risk, the wires are suspended from strings of insulator discs hooked to the T-shaped arms of their towers. Peering out of the helicopter, the troubleman saw an insulator string dangling. A hook about the width of a fist had broken nearly in half, dropping the insulator and the wire it held. An arc of electricity surged from the wire as it fell, scorching the tower in a blast of molten steel and aluminum. The Camp Fire, named for the road near its place of origin, burned for seventeen days, destroying more than one hundred fifty thousand acres and nearly nineteen thousand structures, most of them homes. It didn't take long for investigators with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection to determine that PG&E's transmission line, known as the Caribou-Palermo, had almost certainly ignited it. Hours after Paradise had been consumed, a Cal Fire crew made its way to the tower where the PG&E helicopter had been seen hovering earlier that dark afternoon. Half a rusted hook dangled from the string of insulator discs still wired to the tower. The hook, which had hung from a hole in a long metal plate, was almost totally smooth at the point of fracture, evidence of a deep groove that had formed over decades. Millimeter by millimeter, the plate had cut into the curve of the hook, which was scarcely an inch in diameter. A jagged edge a few millimeters across showed just where it had broken. The next day, the crew shared its findings with Mike Ramsey, Butte County's longstanding district attorney. Ramsey, a plainspoken prosecutor with stern white eyebrows, knew the county better than most anyone. His family had been there in the Sierra foothills for four generations to witness its evolution from a scattering of gold-mining settlements along the Feather River to a bucolic spread of communities home to more than 226,000 people. Ramsey had grown up exploring the forests with his father, the local game warden, learning the space where civilization dissolved into wilderness. The younger Ramsey had left Butte County only briefly, for college and law school, returning shortly after graduating when a position opened in the district attorney's office. He assumed the post in 1987 and had been reelected ever since. Upon taking office, he adopted a mission statement: "To do justice, as no one is above the law, nor beneath its protection." Like other counties atop California's gold fields, Butte County owed much of its early development to PG&E. The company's founders had spent the last decade of the nineteenth century exploring the canals and waterwheels that supported the region's gold miners and buying up the companies that operated them. One by one, they built out a series of hydroelectric powerhouses that generated electricity for Oroville and Chico, Butte County's largest cities, as well as neighboring counties whose populations had exploded during the gold rush. That network formed the foundation of a sprawling monopoly that would grow to encompass almost all of Northern and central California. With it came the goodwill of millions of customers as PG&E expanded its services, electrifying industries and creating jobs across the state for thousands of proud engineers. Ramsey had watched that goodwill dissipate in the years after he became district attorney. It started in the 1990s, when PG&E power lines caused several destructive wildfires in the Sierra foothills north of Sacramento. Around the same time, a young law clerk named Erin Brockovich discovered that PG&E had allowed water tainted with hexavalent chromium, a carcinogenic metal, to leach into a small town's groundwater supply in the Mojave Desert outside of Los Angeles. Brockovich helped residents sue PG&E, a story that became a Hollywood blockbuster starring Julia Roberts. In 2010, a decade after the movie's release, one of PG&E's natural gas pipelines exploded in San Bruno, south of San Francisco, destroying a neighborhood and killing eight people. Then, in 2017, more than a dozen deadly fires swept Northern California after wind-whipped branches collided with PG&E power lines. One of them started just outside of Paradise when an oak branch fell on a transmission line. Ramsey spent the summer of 2018 negotiating a settlement with the company, which might have broken state law in failing to clear the branch. It agreed to fund a power line inspection program headed by the county fire department. Ramsey recognized that the Camp Fire was different than the vegetation fires of years past. It seemed to him that a company with a history of flouting the rules might be hiding yet another set of problems. Ramsey told the Cal Fire team that his office wanted to join in their investigation. He told them to treat the transmission tower as a crime scene and to prevent anyone, including PG&E employees, from entering unaccompanied. The next week, Cal Fire supervised as company line workers began dismantling the tower. The investigators seized hooks and hanger plates as evidence. Ramsey's right-hand man was Marc Noel, who had started working for Ramsey just a few years after he took the top job. Noel had grown up in the Bay Area but made Butte County his home in 1991 and became deputy district attorney shortly thereafter. Nearly thirty years in the role had given him a gray goatee and a habit of spitting tobacco into empty cups and cans. He truly loved Butte County, which was sewn of a wholly different fabric than that of San Francisco. It was equal parts red and blue, with farms and fruit orchards all along the valley floor. It was not a wealthy, bustling enclave. The allure was its simplicity: kind, honest people living in a beautiful and secluded corner of the state. Noel had long suspected that PG&E didn't understand or respect that about Butte County, or any other part of the rural foothills. He had gotten a feel for the way the company operated after various vegetation fires, which resulted in slick lawyers heading north from San Francisco or Los Angeles to show up the local prosecutors. Not long after the Camp Fire, he picked up Malcolm Gladwell's David and Goliath. Over the years, Noel had become something of a fire expert. He had been working arson cases since the 1990s after training with Cal Fire to investigate cause and spread. Transmission lines, though, were another matter. Never had he thought much about the hundreds of steel structures carrying high-voltage wires through the forests. He began reading anything he could find, painfully aware of how much he had to learn. In the weeks after the fire, Ramsey and Noel brought in experts from the FBI to assist in analyzing evidence. Noel took the hook and other parts collected from the suspect tower and showed them to an FBI metallurgist. It was obvious how the hook had failed. The question was whether PG&E could have prevented it from happening. The metallurgist told Noel his team would need to collect parts from towers in the vicinity. Without a basis for comparison, it would be impossible to tell whether the fire was the result of the company's negligence or simply a tragic accident. So Noel and Ramsey devised what they called the Exemplar Tower Project, a sweeping search for similar towers along the canyon. Noel boarded a county helicopter on New Year's Eve and instructed the pilot to fly low and slow along the Caribou-Palermo. He had learned, by that point, that hooks like the one that broke are supposed to fit snugly in the holes of their hanger plates. As he flew, Noel noticed something suspicious. The holes looked especially large. It was a sign that the hooks had been hanging for decades, wearing down little by little with every windstorm. Three towers in particular seemed especially similar to the one where the fire had started, with gaps between hook and plate large enough to stick a finger through. Ramsey and Noel planned to seize parts of them as evidence. PG&E launched its own investigation as Ramsey and Noel began theirs. In December, not long after the fire stopped smoldering, workers set out to inspect the Caribou-Palermo in its entirety. They climbed transmission towers perched high on the rocky, forested slopes of the canyon to look closely at the tiny pieces of hardware holding the wires aloft. The diagnosis was devastating. The linemen discovered more than a dozen critical hazards, mostly involving hooks and other connectors that had been in place for decades. Across the country, transmission lines are among the oldest parts of the grid. Many were constructed in the years after World War II as Americans moved from cities to suburbs, built homes wired with wall sockets, and bought new electric appliances. Some transmission lines are even older, developed shortly after the turn of the twentieth century to replace gas lamps and candles at a time when electricity was still something of an experiment. The Caribou-Palermo, a fifty-six-mile conduit running along the rugged edge of the mountain canyon, was a relic of that era, so old that it was once considered for the National Register of Historic Places. It had been built around 1921 by a company called Great Western Power, which had competed with PG&E until the two companies merged in 1930. The line was part of a transmission network carrying electricity from hydroelectric powerhouses along the Feather River, which cascades down the slopes of the Sierras, losing thousands of feet in elevation in a steep, rapid plunge. The line picked up electricity at the Caribou powerhouse, where three turbines harnessed the churn of the river, and carried it south to San Francisco to serve a booming population. PG&E shut the Caribou-Palermo down upon discovering the extent of its problems. Employees began a frantic search for construction and maintenance records. They came up short. The Caribou-Palermo files were incomplete. And it wasn't just that line. The company also lacked records on dozens of others. PG&E is hardly the only American utility with poor records. It's the arthritis that plagues the companies that deliver electricity and natural gas to millions of people. Many of them have been painfully slow to organize and digitize the millions of pieces of paper they have retained over the course of decades. For those whose networks of wires and pipelines span tens of thousands of square miles, it's a gargantuan, costly task that only grows more difficult with each passing year. Perhaps their employees, siloed in their various divisions, use different systems to search and file, raising the prospect of a nightmare integration process. Maybe they unwittingly disposed of critical records years ago, creating hard-to-fill information gaps. Or maybe the trouble lies not with the records themselves, but the company's means of creating them. Records are only as good as the inspection and maintenance work they are made to reflect. Excerpted from California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric--And What It Means for America's Power Grid by Katherine Blunt All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
