Eaton Fire on 1/13/25 (Photo: CalFire)
Several Lawsuits Filed Against Southern California Edison Over Eaton Fire
Suits claim that SCE failed to deenergize before the red flag wind events
By Evan Symon, January 14, 2025 2:45 am
Multiple lawsuits were filed against electric services company Southern California Edison Monday, alleging that the company failed to prevent the Eaton Fire that has raged in the Altadena-Pasadena area for the past week.
Since Tuesday of last week, the Eaton Fire has grown exponentially, due to dry conditions and high winds. As of Monday evening, the fire is currently over 14,100 acres in size and has caused 16 deaths, 100,000 to be evacuated, and roughly 7,000 destroyed structures. It is also currently at 33% containment.
As fire crews have been battling the blaze and keeping it from spreading into La Cañada Flintridge and Sierra Madre, victims and nearby residents alike have demanded to know what caused it. The official CalFire investigation is still under investigation as of Monday, with fire crews being more concerned with stopping the blaze. SCE also has an investigation currently in progress looking to see if any of their equipment contributed to the blaze.
However, lawsuits filed on Monday have pointed to Southern California Edison (SCE) at least being partially responsible for the Eaton Fire. According to the suits, SCE should have known about the dangers that the winds posed when it comes to wildfires, especially during a dry spell in the area. At least four lawsuits have said that SCE should have deenergized when red flag wind warning were announced.
One of the suits covers hundreds of home owners and renters, and was filed on behalf of one of the evacuees of the area, Michael Kreiner.
“We are committed to holding Southern California Edison accountable for their alleged negligence and to seeking justice for victims who have lost their homes, livelihoods and loved ones,” said Patrick McNicholas, one of the lawyers in the case.
In another suit, filed on behalf of veteran FedEx employee Evangeline Iglesias, who lost her home in the fire, alleges that SCE is guilty of negligence, premises liability and violations of the public utilities code because they failed to deenergize.
“The property damage and economic losses caused by the Eaton Fire is the result of the ongoing custom and practice of Defendant of consciously disregarding the safety of the public and not following statutes, regulations, standards, and rules regarding the safe operation, use and maintenance of their overhead electric facilities,” said the Iglesias suit. “Despite repeated and clear warnings, the company failed to de-energize all of its electrical equipment in the area that day. Data shows that there were more than 300 faults on Southern California Edison’s lines in the vicinity of the fire’s origins.”
Amidst all the suits, SCE responded on Monday. This included Edison International CEO Pedro Pizarro, who noted that “We’ve seen in your reporting the videos, we’ve seen the photos, so we know that there was fire there. We don’t know what caused it. Again, there was the obvious signature that we would see normally, but we have not been able to get up close to those lines because firefighters have determined that it hasn’t been safe to do that yet.”
Multiple lawsuits against SCE
SCE said in another statement that “distribution lines immediately to the west of Eaton Canyon were de-energized well before the reported start time of the fire.”
They also noted that “SCE filed two Electric Safety Incident Reports (ESIR) related to current wildfires, one for the Eaton Fire and another for the Hurst Fire. ESIRs are filed with the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) for incidents that meet certain criteria, such as significant media attention or a governmental investigation. These brief reports contain preliminary information and are provided within two to four hours after a triggering event. To comply with CPUC requirements, these reports are often submitted before SCE can determine whether its electric facilities are associated with an ignition.”
Legal experts noted that the success of the suits will likely be tied to if SCE is found responsible for causing the fires, or if they are partially to blame, such as if they didn’t clear the proper amount of brush beforehand.
“It is still early, but based on everything right now, all of these lawsuits will depend on who is at fault,” explained environmental lawyer Angela Pataki to the Globe on Monday. “If it turns out to be natural causes or arson, then SCE will probably have a better time. But, as anyone who has gone out to Eaton Canyon knows, the power lines span there right at the beginning of the trail. There’s a lot of lines out there. So SCE needs to prove that none of it caused it and that they played no fault in the fires acceleration. The wind and dry conditions were not their fault of course, but we need to take a look into upkeep they made, into brush clearing, and so much more. They said they deenergized, so we need to make sure they did.
“But, objectively, SCE has been doing everything they are to do in these situations. They are working with investigators, doing their own investigations, and have even started filing reports with CPUC and other organizations. But then again, CalFire or someone else could find something too. It’s just very early. A lot of these lawsuits are being filed now as there will be a lot of them coming up for sure.
“SCE does not want to be like PG&E in the aftermath of the Paradise Fire and shell out tens of billions. Edison’s stock is already dropping. They, like the victims, want fairness here.”
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November 4, 2020
Sounds like a bunch of ambulance chasers knee jerk filing lawsuits before any verifiable facts are out. Show me the failed equipment, show me some pictures. Since the 2018 PG&E Paradise fire, SCE has gone full speed in rebuilding its plant with replacing structures, reconductoring with at least minimally insulated conductors and covering every bit of exposed conductors on structures, the rebuilding work initially began in 2008 after the advent of “customer minutes of interuption.” Before the early 90s and deregulation there was a quiet policy of “maintenance by storm,” but you didn’t see the crazy wildfires like you do now, so there’s some politicians and bureaucrats deflecting as hard as they can from their own criminal negligence in maintaining forests and clearing other fire hazards as well as not maintaining an adequate amount of fire fighting personnel and equipment that need a large chunk taken out of their wildly over salaried posteriors. On the other hand, I’ve seen “investigations” done by government employees who either hadn’t a clue what they were looking at or had an axe to grind that led to unnecesary multiple millions of dollars fed to the litigation machine. Show me the facts, not a bunch of heated rhetoric.
I checked google earth the best I could, there appears to be a transmission corridor going in a north to north east direction from town, fires aren’t normally associated with transmission tower construction. The vicinity distribution construction appears to be underground, although I can’t be sure without distribution circuit maps or physically being there. There doesn’t appear to be a reason for distribution overhead construction away from the housing tract. There are several things: I think the plaintiff’s attorneys are barking up a very wrong tree; Due to the clearance and strength provided by tower construction there is little chance of a fault; I’m not sure, but due to extremely low fire risk of the transmission tower construction those circuits are probably not required to be deenergized; if there is a ban on energized overhead circuitry whenever the wind blows there will be no electricity for maybe six months out of the year. That’s the type of end result mindless litigation brings.
I went back and looked at google earth. There is an east-west overhead distribution line along new york drive that dead ends around creekside court. There is a distribution line that goes along north altadena drive and dead ends open wire and breaks west with the old bundled tree conductor about roosevelt ave, no overhead along housing perimeter south of roosevelt. There is overhead distribution along north altadeda x new york. There is overhead distribution h-frame construction going east from the area of new york, altadena and veranda, then breaks south over eaton canyon drive about kinnaloa canyon road. There is overhead construction on brambling lane headed east from cul de sac, I think it deadends there with a transformer pole. There is overhead distribution at the fork of pasadena glenn rd and vosburg street. The housing east of Eaton canyon trail head appears to be fed from underground.
Another culpable group that needs a pound of flesh extracted from their carcasses are the enviro-fascist organizations and their dirtbag army of attornies. It’s been some years ago, there was a deteriorated pole replacement job on the south slope of the San Gabriel mountains I only spent one day on… In the morning, a harmless acting individual stopped by and asked the foreman what we were doing. The foreman explained, even detailed how the job was to be done – which was the least environmentally harmful way possible, nearly a hand set. The person thanked the foreman and tottered off. By that afternoon there were more than one environmental group and their attornies involved and even some members of congress and the state legislature. The larger job was called off. On the way down the hill I observed electrical structures with daylight shining through. If any one of those structures had come apart there could have been a fire, and the enviro-fascists were preventing the work to fix the problem. There are environmentalist goat roping stories to tell about the more recent sce DPV2 transmission line and some quite unbelievable wacko environmentalist harassment surrounding the uber circus called the sdg&e sunrise powerlink transmission project. I think the point was to make those jobs so expensive and burdensome to complete that there would be no more of them.
I want to clarify that I am no shill for any power company and my commentary here stems in large part from wanting to figure out what really happened here. Attorneys are about money, either taking it or protecting it, most will only know that electricity comes out of the wall while having a talent to arguing and twisting both sides of an issue. I was deposed to a case of a severe workplace injury that went through any number of legal firms and safety departments of several companies, and there were quite a number of glaring facts that were missing or misinterpreted. The culpable party settled, but one clearly innocent party was forced to settle also. Some observations: I saw some video of flames directly at the base of a tower east of housing in Altadena. While just two sparks can torch off a runaway fire (I’ve seen it), a high wind will carry sparks that originate maybe 50 or more feet in the air away from the tower, the fire will probably torch off some distance from the tower. The conductors and suspension insulators will be pushed by the wind (unless the insulators are veed), but this would have been factored in by the engineering of the tower. If a conductor did get too close to the tower there should be some burn marks. There is a possibility of a gunshot insulator string failing, but that would be obvious. Something large enough to go phase to phase or phase to ground would probably be too heavy to be blown about at condctor height. From what little I know about modern transmission relay settings and automatic controls, I believe they are quite sophisticated and may open increadibly fast. Any faults or unusual occurances will be detected and recorded / documented. To conclude, I believe the cause of the fire to be a methhead buzzed enough to wander out in bad weather for some inexplicable reason and, accidently or on purpose, got a fire going. I’m not there to see it myself, but it’s what makes the most sense to me.
In the workplace injury referred to above, the litigation was largely based on the flawed report of a young CalOsha inspector who focused on the end result of the accident rather than the cause of the accident, what set the tragedy in motion. This should have been an open and shut case, but the investigator was ignorant of safe work practices along with cause and effect, although the inspector was genuinely acting in good faith (I eventually spoke with him after the case was settled). When I was deposed, it seemed as though the plaintiff’s attorney was after me personally, as though my work practices directly caused the accident, although 5 years, at least hundreds of workers, and many millions of dollars of material was rotated in and out of the location I reported to. After that unnerving encounter, I contacted a local CalOsha office to obtain a copy of the investigation. There, a couple of female employees without sufficient command of the english language, tried to get rid of me by palming me off on one another every day for a couple weeks. I think it be sheer persistence that I was eventually placed in contact with a competent CalOsha employee in another part of the state, and I promptly recieved a lightly redacted cd version of the report. In less than 5 minutes it was blindly clear what caused the accident. The lengthy, extremely costly litigation (in part involving the largest legal firm in the world) and eventual settlement by an entirely innocent party was enabled by the well intended yet incompetent ignorance of the state employed government investigator.