Electric utilities face billions in liability with aging lines

Electric companies in the western U.S. are facing mounting lawsuits alleging that their failure to prepare for extreme weather has resulted in repeated, catastrophic wildfires that have taken scores of lives and caused billions of dollars in damages.

Hawaiian Electric is the latest utility to face allegations of negligence. Maui County sued the power company for damages on Thursday over its alleged role in the devastating wildfires on Maui this month that have killed more than 100 people and burned the historic town of Lahaina to the ground.

The Maui County complaint is the 12th lawsuit filed against Hawaiian Electric. The suits allege that downed power lines operated by the company contributed to the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century.

The suits accuse the utility of negligence for failing to shut off power even after the National Weather Service had issued a “red flag” warning of an increased fire risk due to high winds from Hurricane Dora and drought conditions on the island.

Hawaii Electric pushed back against some of those claims in a statement Sunday.

The credit agency Fitch has said the litigation could pose an existential threat to the company. Pacific Gas & Electric in California filed for bankruptcy in 2019 when facing billions of dollars in liability for wildfires.

The allegations leveled against Hawaiian Electric echo lawsuits brought against PG&E in California over the 2018 Camp Fire, Berkshire Hathaway’s PacifiCorp in Oregon over the 2020 Labor Day wildfires and Xcel Energy in Colorado over the 2021 Marshall Fire.

Before all these catastrophic wildfires, the companies did not shut the power off despite high winds that can knock down power lines and combine with dry or outright drought conditions to create a high fire risk.

The wildfire risk posed by aboveground power lines is well documented. More than 32,000 wildfires were ignited by transmission and distribution lines in the U.S. from 1992 to 2020, according to U.S. Forest Service data.

Paul Starita, an attorney who represents Lahaina residents in one of the suits against Hawaiian Electric, said utilities are not doing enough to harden their infrastructure against extreme weather and clear brush to prevent catastrophic fires.

“They’re just not doing it,” said Starita, senior counsel at Singleton Schreiber, a law firm that has represented 12,000 victims in fires caused by utilities. “And when you know the system has a problem — shut down the power,” he said.

The industry suffers from a culture that is slow to change and has historically had a financial incentive to not overspend on infrastructure because their performance has been judged on how much money they save their customers, said Alexandra von Meier, an electric grid expert.

“The industry just is changing more slowly than the climate is,” said von Meier, an independent…