Southern California Edison faces lawsuits over Los Angeles wildfires

LOS ANGELES – Southern California Edison, a unit of utility Edison International, was hit on Jan 13 with multiple lawsuits claiming its electrical equipment started one of the major wildfires raging in the Los Angeles area, according to court filings.

The suits appear to be the first of hundreds or even thousands that will arise from the wildfires that have engulfed parts of Southern California in the past week.

The lawsuits were filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on behalf of home owners, renters, business owners and others with properties destroyed by the Eaton fire in the Pasadena area.

At least 24 people have died

since the fires began on Jan 7 and more than 90,000 residents have been forced to flee their homes. More than two dozen people are reported missing, the authorities said.

The Eaton fire in the foothills east of Los Angeles has scorched roughly 57 sq km, nearly the size of Manhattan. That fire is the second most destructive inferno in California history, according to one complaint.

In one of the suits, multiple eyewitnesses are cited as observing a fire at the base of a transmission tower owned by Southern California Edison.

Some of those witnesses shared videos of the incident on their social media accounts, including a post by Instagram user @jeffrey.ku of a video of a fire at the base of a transmission tower that he said was taken shortly after the start of the Eaton fire.

It also referred to Mr Brendan Thorn, who was interviewed by local ABC News. Mr Thorn said in the interview that he lives near Eaton Canyon and saw “knee-high” fires around transmission towers shortly after the fire began.

Southern California Edison did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on the lawsuits.

On the morning of Jan 13, its chief executive said in a TV interview that the company was continuing to investigate the fires and had not identified any electrical anomalies from its equipment around the time the Eaton fire broke out.

“It’s pretty typical you see those when you have a spark coming from equipment,” Edison International CEO Pedro Pizarro said during a CNBC interview on the morning of Jan 13 when asked about the company’s investigation into the Eaton fire.

“There could be some other mechanism here. Unfortunately, we have not been able to get close to the lines yet,” he said.

Edison International’s shares were down nearly 12 per cent to US$57.24 on Jan 13. They have declined by about 27 per cent since the fires broke out last week.

Southern California Edison, on Jan 9 and Jan 10, filed safety incident reports on the Eaton and Hurst fires, respectively.

The company said it has received notices from insurance companies to preserve evidence related to the Eaton fire, adding the fire could allegedly be attributable to its utility facilities, which prompted it to release its Jan 9 report.

It also added that no fire agency had suggested its electric facilities were involved in the ignition of the fires.

But a day later, in the Hurst report, the company noted they had found a downed conductor in the area but did not know if the damage occurred before or after the start of the fire. REUTERS