Updated 3:10 p.m. Wednesday
PG&E has known for years that many of its high-voltage power lines posed a wildfire threat but has repeatedly delayed action to fix them, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
The Journal's disclosures prompted a federal judge overseeing PG&E's probation for a 2016 pipeline safety conviction to order the company to produce a paragraph-by-paragraph response to the story.
Among the transmission facilities that PG&E told federal agencies needed work was the 115-kilovolt Caribou-Palermo transmission line, which suffered an equipment failure during red-flag fire conditions last Nov. 8 and touched off the deadliest wildfire in California history.
A WSJ investigation based in part on PG&E documents obtained under the federal Freedom of Information Act found that the utility told the U.S. Forest Service in 2017 and 2018 that 49 towers on the nearly century-old Caribou-Palermo line needed to be replaced "due to age." Another 57 towers needed extensive upgrades.
The Journal reported earlier this year that PG&E had delayed repairs on the Caribou-Palermo line since 2013.
State investigators have traced the origin of last November's Camp Fire to a Caribou-Palermo transmission tower along the Feather River in Butte County. The fire destroyed nearly 14,000 homes and killed 85 people in the town of Paradise and nearby communities.
Other company documents, which the Journal described as part of a regulatory dispute over the utility's spending on its power infrastructure, outlined concerns over the age of many of the company's transmission lines.
A presentation prepared by PG&E in 2017 estimated that the average age of its 50,000 transmission towers was 68 years old. The oldest towers in the network were 108 years old at the time, meaning they were built before 1910. The age estimate excluded 7,000 towers for which no date of construction could be determined.
The Caribou-Palermo transmission line was among PG&E's oldest, having gone into service in 1921. The utility announced last month that the line, which was shut down last December after having been briefly re-energized after the Camp Fire, has been permanently retired from service.
Among the other transmission lines on which PG&E has delayed work is one in the North Bay, the Ignacio-Mare Island 115-kilovolt line, also built in 1921. That line, which stretches from Vallejo to Novato, has been scheduled for work to raise sagging power conductors since 2015, the Journal reported, and the project is now scheduled for next year.
