Judge Orders PG&E to Explain Equipment's Possible Role in Sparking Kincade Fire

The federal judge overseeing PG&E's criminal probation for federal pipeline safety violations is asking the utility what role its equipment may have played in sparking the Kincade Fire.

In an order Monday, U.S. District Judge William Alsup asked the company to explain whether a broken piece of equipment discovered on a high-voltage transmission line in The Geysers area of northeastern Sonoma County could have arced, thus providing the spark that started the blaze. The fire, which destroyed 174 homes in the Geyserville and Healdsburg areas, has burned nearly 78,000 acres and is 80% contained.

Cal Fire says the fire began at 9:27 p.m. Oct. 23 as winds gusting up to 80 mph raked the higher elevations of the North Bay.

The forecast for high winds prompted PG&E to shut down power to about 180,000 customers, including many in Sonoma County. The outage, called a public safety power shutoff, or PSPS, affected only lower-voltage distribution lines. The utility has said that the forecast for high winds did not meet its criteria for shutting down higher-voltage transmission lines.

PG&E reported the day after the fire started that a 230-kilovolt transmission line near the reported origin point of the flames had suffered an outage at 9:20 p.m., just seven minutes before the blaze began.

The utility said Cal Fire personnel had identified a piece of broken equipment on one of the line's towers — a length of cable called a jumper that carries current past insulators — and added that the agency was investigating the site.

In his two-page order, Alsup directed the utility to ask whether a falling or detached jumper could "plausibly" explain arcing or sparking. The judge also asked what could have caused the jumper to fail, when and how the jumper was last inspected and whether other jumpers might be vulnerable to undetected damage.

Alsup, who is overseeing PG&E's five-year term of probation for a 2016 pipeline safety conviction arising from the San Bruno pipeline disaster, gave PG&E until Nov. 29 to respond.

PG&E Corp. CEO Bill Johnson has said repeatedly that the tower where the failure occurred had been inspected four times over the past two years and that several maintenance issues found on equipment there had been addressed.

Johnson has also said that winds forecast for the night the fire began did not meet PG&E's criteria for shutting down transmission lines — a more complicated process than shutting down distribution circuits and one likely to affect far more customers than cutting power to the lower-voltage lines.

In a media briefing Oct. 24, Johnson said transmission lines remained energized "consistent with our established protocols and procedures. ... We did not see the wind speeds in the forecast that we typically would see for a transmission outage, and so we relied on the protocol."

In answer to a reporter's question, Johnson said the "general guideline" for anticipating damage to transmission lines includes winds gusting at 55 mph or higher.

"This really accounts for debris flying into the lines," he said.

PG&E has said in recent presentations to the California Public Utilities Commission and some large industrial customers that the protocol involves an assessment of the coming weather, the age and condition of equipment that will be exposed to high winds, the status of recent repairs, local environmental conditions that could increase wear on the equipment and real-time observations of conditions in vulnerable areas.