Last week we filed a new lawsuit setting forth our latest evidence that it was a PG&E equipment failure — in particular the failure of a piece of hardware that secured an insulator on PG&E’s 100 year-old transmission tower near the Poe dam — that started the Camp Fire. As discussed in this post, the lawsuit was covered by both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chico-Enterprise Record. While PG&E was still claiming that it was too soon to say what caused the fire, our lawsuit zeroed in on the exact source of the ignition.
Now PG&E all but admits that our allegations are true. Mirroring our filing, PG&E just announced publicly that “A suspension insulator supporting a transposition jumper had separated from an arm on the tower” and that a “c hook” used to support the insulator broke away, allowing an electrified wire to contact the metal tower.
Of course, as we told the Chico-Enterprise Record, if PG&E had properly installed, maintained, and inspected its hardware, it would not have failed in the winds of November 8, and the fire beneath the tower never would have started. Still waiting for PG&E to admit that part of our suit.