Business
Edison under scrutiny for Eaton fire. Who pays liability will be 'new frontier' for California
Six years ago, Pacific Gas & Electric filed for bankruptcy after it was found liable for sparking a succession of devastating wildfires, including the blaze that destroyed the town of Paradise and led to more than 100 deaths.
Wall Street investors lost confidence and ratings agencies threatened to downgrade California’s investor-owned utilities, prompting legislators to come up with an innovative solution: the establishment of a $21-billion wildfire fund, split equally between shareholders and utility customers.
Now, after two major wildfires have destroyed thousands of homes and left at least two dozen dead in and around Los Angeles, the state’s wildfire fund would face its first major test if another utility is found liable for sparking the blazes.
Even the lawmaker who spearheaded legislation to set up the wildfire fund is not sure whether his efforts to mitigate the risk to utility companies — allowing them to keep functioning in a state prone to escalating risk of wildfires — is enough.
“This is the most profound test case that the fund will potentially be up against,” said Christopher Holden, a former Democratic legislator who sponsored the bill that created the fund. “This is a new frontier,” said Holden, who lives in Pasadena and had to evacuate during the Eaton fire.
“It was a new frontier when we wrote the bill — and now, just five years later, we’re going through another frontier.”
If investigators determine that a utility company caused the Eaton or Palisades fire, it could send shock waves across the utility industry and the broader insurance market.
Mark Toney, executive director of TURN, The Utility Reform Network, said the massive scope of the L.A. County fires raised significant questions about the fund’s ability to cover insurance liability. Even if the fund is able to bail out utility companies for the fires, it’s uncertain whether it could then cover fires that may crop up in the future.
“Will the fund work right?” Toney said. “Who ends up paying?”
The causes of the fires have yet to be determined.
Investigators looking into the Eaton fire — which caused at least 17 fatalities and damaged an estimated 7,000 structures across Pasadena and Altadena — are focusing on an area around a Southern California Edison electrical transmission tower in Eaton Canyon.
Edison has denied fault in the Eaton fire. In a statement to The Times, the company said that its work to mitigate wildfires had cut the risk of catastrophic fires by 85% to 90% compared with the risk before 2018.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the municipal utility that operates in Pacific Palisades, says it did not opt into the wildfire fund because it would have been too costly for its customers. If the large municipal utility was liable for the Palisades fire, the city of L.A. could face exorbitant financial costs.
But sources with knowledge of the investigation have told The Times that the fire, which started in the Skull Rock area north of Sunset Boulevard, appears to have human origins. Officials are looking into whether a small fire possibly sparked by New Year’s Eve fireworks could somehow have rekindled Jan 7.
Michael Wara, an energy and climate scholar at Stanford University, said the state’s entire insurance landscape, not just California’s wildfire fund, might have to be recalibrated if a utility company were found to have caused a major L.A. fire.
“The big question is how available and affordable is overall insurance?” said Wara, who has served on the California Catastrophe Response Council, the fund’s oversight body. “California, I think, is going to face greater challenges than it has over even the last few years, when it hasn’t been easy for its primary insurers and other entities to access these global reinsurance markets that fund losses after a catastrophe.”
Under California law, utility companies are strictly liable for all damages to real property associated with a fire, including houses.
The wildfire fund is a new model in which the state’s three big owner-operated utility companies — Pacific Gas & Electric Co., San Diego Gas & Electric Co. and Southern California Edison — pay into a fund, which they can then tap into if their equipment is determined to have caused a blaze. When that happens, they are responsible, on their own, for the first $1 billion of losses. After that, the wildfire fund will pay.
“If the wildfire fund did not exist today, Edison might be in real trouble,” Wara said. “We would see something probably similar to what happened to PG&E after the Camp fire.”
Back then, Wara said, utilities were held to a standard of strict liability: If electrical equipment was found to have caused the fire, they were on the hook.
Now, if Edison is ultimately held responsible, Wara said, the company can go to the wildfire fund and get money.
“That’s really important in terms of making sure that the victims are made whole, at least for their property losses,” he said.
Although it is too soon to estimate the damage of the Eaton fire, Wara said thousands of structures have been lost in an area where the average home value is around $1.3 million. Costs, he said, could reach $10 billion.
If officials find that Edison caused the fire but acted responsibly, Wara said, as much as half of the fund’s $21 billion could be depleted.
“That’s half the fund in one fire — five years into the life of the fund,” said Wara, who has served as a wildfire commissioner for California and a member of the California Catastrophe Response Council, the oversight body of the California wildfire fund.
The problem is compounded by the fact that the wildfire fund has so far amassed only $14 billion, because utility companies cannot immediately expect ratepayers to pay their share of half the $21 billion.
“If you are an investor in PG&E or Edison, you might look at this and think, ‘Hmm, I thought the fund was big enough. Maybe now I’m not so sure.’ The fund is there to provide confidence. If the fund isn’t big enough, there will be less confidence.”
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, will lead the investigation into what caused the fires.
Then, the California Public Utility Commission determines whether the utility company acted reasonably or unreasonably and, if so, to what degree.
If a utility was found to have failed to act prudently, Wara said, it would have to reimburse the fund. The amount it would pay, however, is capped on the size of the reimbursement relative to the size of their rate base.
Edison International Chief Executive Pedro Pizarro told Bloomberg Television that state regulations allowed the company’s holder liability to be capped at $3.9 billion.
“The reason the cap is there is if Edison is reimbursing the fund, that’s basically electricity customers reimbursing the fund,” Wara said. “Edison will go to the California Utility Commission and say, ‘We need this money to be expensed in rates.’”
The fund would also have to pay for wrongful deaths, Wara said, but that’s a different kind of claim.
“You have to show negligence, and that may be hard to prove, actually, because Edison may have acted reasonably, and yet the fire still was set by their equipment,” Wara said. “Edison would have a lot of reason to claim that it has acted reasonably, in a sense that it has spent enormous sums to try to reduce the risk, and there’s an agency that’s overseeing all of this and approving and monitoring compliance with its plans.”
Still, even if the wildfire fund bailed out Edison, there could be grave consequences for Edison and other utility companies. If a large portion of the wildfire fund’s $21 billion was depleted, that could affect market perception of the fund, negatively affect utility company credit scores, and plunge investor-owned utilities — which cover about 80% customers across the state of California — into chaos.
On Tuesday afternoon, shares for Edison International, the utility’s parent company, rose less than 1% to $57.27, marking a more than 24% drop in the week since the fires broke out. That represents a more than $7 billion decline in the company’s market cap.
“If the [utility] market collapses, then we’ve got a catastrophic situation,” Holden said. “We have to secure the market going forward.”
Last fall, state regulators criticized Southern California Edison for falling behind in inspecting transmission lines in areas at high risk of wildfires.
Utility safety officials also said in a report that the company’s visual inspections of splices in its transmission lines were sometimes failing to find dangerous problems.
“We have not seen in our telemetry any indication of an electrical anomaly,” Edison International CEO Pedro Pizarro said Monday on Bloomberg Television. “Typically, when you have a fire across infrastructure, you see voltage dropping. We have not seen that in our study.”
Pizarro said Edison had turned off distribution lines near the start of the Eaton blaze before it erupted in a canyon near Altadena, but not the transmission lines. “Transmission lines are larger and stronger,” he said, “and so they can operate safely at higher wind speeds.”
Several of California’s most destructive wildfires in the last decades have been caused by aging electrical equipment. The 2018 Camp fire was caused by 100-year-old high voltage transmission towers. The 2019 Kincade fire was caused by a line built half a century ago. It may be the case, Wara said, that California’s older utility infrastructure, even when inspected, is not up to the job.
“A lot of the transmission system in California is quite old,” Wara said. “There were pulses of construction activity that led to the system we have and the last big one was when Pat Brown was governor.. .If something failed on that tower that caused ground faults, at some point we need to ask ourselves… maybe we shouldn’t be relying on old infrastructure?”
In an era when hurricane-force winds can whip up wildfires that engulf vast areas, Toney questioned whether it made sense for a utility company to be responsible for the fate of every home. Wildfires, he said, are caused not just by faulty utility equipment, but by lightning, arson, even legal fireworks, and then fueled by poor development and insufficient cutting back of vegetation and landscaping.
“It’s a mistake just to isolate utility,” Toney said. “It’s time for a new paradigm. When it comes to the cost of rebuilding, the utilities may not be big enough.”
Business
Commentary: Trump wants to let companies make fewer disclosures, thus keeping investors in the dark
Trump’s SEC is considering eliminating the mandate for quarterly corporate financial reports, but even some big investors call it a lousy idea.
This being the “information age,” it would be understandable if investors sometimes feel inundated with too much information to wade through about the stocks in their mutual fund portfolios.
The Securities and Exchange Commission, bowing like a puppy to the urgings of President Trump, is considering exactly the wrong solution to this supposed burden. It’s proposing to allow public companies to give their investors less information, as though that’s a good thing.
On May 8, the SEC proposed rescinding its mandate that public companies report financial results on a quarterly schedule. Instead, it suggests, semiannual and annual reports should suffice.
This takes an already-unlevel playing field where Main Street investors are already disadvantaged, and makes it more unlevel.
— Dennis Kelleher, Better Markets
The SEC left its proposal open for public comment for 60 days, meaning the window closed Monday. By then, the agency had received more than 68,000 comments, according to a tracker posted online by accounting professor Tzachi Zach of Ohio State.
Almost 99.9% of the comments were negative. Several organizations of institutional investors and auditing professionals, as well as a tsunami of individual investors, expressed opposition.
A similar initiative the SEC aired in 2018, during Trump’s first term, received an overwhelmingly negative response and was eventually dropped.
The tide of opposition coming from individual investors shouldn’t be surprising. “Taking away basic quarterly information means investors are blind for six months at a time,” says Dennis Kelleher, co-founder and chief executive of the investor advocacy nonprofit Better Markets.
That’s especially true for small investors, though perhaps not so much for major institutions, insiders or deep-pocketed individuals. “If you’re a big dog, you’ll get the information anyway,” Kelleher told me. “And insiders, who are trading in their own stock all the time, will have the information. This takes an already-unlevel playing field where Main Street investors are already disadvantaged, and makes it more unlevel.”
Trump set off the latest initiative with a social media post on Sept. 15, advocating the move to a six-month reporting schedule. It read, in part, “This will save money, and allow managers to focus on properly running their companies. Did you ever hear the statement that, ‘China has a 50 to 100 year view on management of a company, whereas we run our companies on a quarterly basis???’ Not good!!!”
As was usual with Trump, his argument was a string of uninformed and irrelevant non sequiturs.
It’s doubtful that eliminating quarterly reports will save much, if any, money. Most 10-Qs are cookie cutter documents disclosing financial figures already embedded in corporate records.
The idea that managers would become empowered to “focus on properly running their companies” if only they were relieved of the burden of preparing a report every three months is just malarkey: Any CEOs who feel the impulse to drop everything and involve themselves in what is essentially an automated process can’t be very good at their jobs.
As for China’s “50 to 100 year view on management of a company,” what would that even mean, even if it were true? China doesn’t operate on a 50 to 100 year corporate horizon, but rather on a string of five-year plans. The most recent of these was adopted by the government in March, covers the period up to 2030, and is its 15th in a row.
Despite the flaws in Trump’s arguments, Trump’s SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, a former corporate lawyer and securities industry consultant, fell into line. Within a few days of Trump’s post, he showed up on CNBC to minimize the potential effect of the change. Private companies rely on semiannual reports, after all, he noted, although the idea of taking private companies as models for publicly traded corporations might not strike experienced investors as the wisest thing.
Atkins cited an enduring chestnut, for which there’s no evidence, that quarterly reporting is responsible for “short-term thinking” in corporate suites (though he admitted that his evidence was “anecdotal”). And he suggested that small investors have ample access to corporate information even without quarterly reports — why, he said, they can just tune in to CNBC!
“To propose change in what our rules are now would be a good way forward,” he said. “So I welcome the president’s putting this up for discussion.”
Something more insidious undergirds the SEC’s proposal than its immediate effect on corporate behavior. The agency rationalizes its proposal as seeking “a tradeoff between reducing regulatory burdens … and promoting efficient financial markets through timely disclosure.”
The problem here, Kelleher points out, is that “reducing regulatory burdens” isn’t part of the SEC’s mission in any way, shape or form. It’s a regulatory agency, and its mission since its founding in 1934 has been to protect investors, not to make things fluffier for stock issuers.
The history of financial disclosure in the U.S. shows a long-term trend favoring more disclosure, not less. In the 1880s, quarterly reporting by railroads and other transportation companies were common.
Early on, pressure for more frequent disclosure came not from government regulators, who barely existed before 1934, but from investors. The reporting of quarterly earnings, notes corporate finance expert Owen Lamont of Acadian Asset Management, was “a bottom-up historical phenomenon reflecting voluntary arrangements between firms and investors, not a top-down phenomenon imposed by law.”
By 1931, according to financial historians, 63% of New York Stock Exchange-listed firms were publishing their quarterly earnings. The Big Board mandated that frequency for most listed companies in 1939. The SEC mandated semiannual reports in 1955 and quarterly reports, as Atkins said, in 1970.
The evidence in favor of dropping the quarterly reports is uniformly thin. Some advocates cite a 2018 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Warren Buffett that was headlined “Short-Termism Is Harming the Economy.”
Couple of points about this: First, the target of Dimon and Buffett wasn’t quarterly financial reporting, but quarterly earnings guidance — that is, the practice of some top executives who project their earnings into the future. (This guidance usually comes at the same time they issue their SEC disclosures.)
It’s guidance, they wrote, that is “a major driver” of short-termism in corporate behavior. That’s because management is giving itself a target it feels obligated to meet, even if factors outside its control interfere with the quest.
Furthermore, Dimon and Buffett wrote, “Our views on quarterly earnings forecasts should not be misconstrued as opposition to quarterly and annual reporting.” They called transparency about financial and operating results “an essential aspect of U.S. public markets … so that the public, including shareholders and other stakeholders, can reliably assess real progress.”
Individual investors may be unmoved by the SEC’s proposal because — let’s be candid — how many of them read quarterly earnings reports, anyway? But that’s unimportant, Kelleher says, because other market participants are reading them. “So that information is in the marketplace, and that’s what actually enables price discovery, so stock prices roughly reflect what’s going on at a company, most of the time.”
More to the point, the quarterly reports reflect the highest-quality, detailed information, the information the SEC requires executives to disclose on pain of facing a civil lawsuit from the agency or even criminal liability for faking data. “Main Street investors, whether they read quarterly reports or not, are the real beneficiaries,” Kelleher says.
That’s so. The bottom line is that quarterly financial reporting helps investors. It doesn’t promote short-term behavior and its costs, modest as they are, don’t outweigh its benefits.
Over the decades, scandal-ridden corporations have hidden fraudulent behavior in the interstices between mandated disclosures—think Enron, WorldCom and Tyco, among others. Why give any corporation, even an honest one, the opportunity to disclose less?
The luxury shopping center in Pacific Palisades will reopen next month after more than $100 million in renovations forced by the January 2025 wildfire that devastated the Los Angeles neighborhood.
Palisades Village will reopen Aug. 15, owner Rick Caruso announced Wednesday. The outdoor center survived the blaze that destroyed homes and other businesses but needed refurbishment to eliminate contaminants that the fire could have spread.
Crews are putting finishing touches on mall buildings after tearing them down to the studs, treating the wood and rebuilding the walls, Caruso said.
“Everybody’s working, and stores are moving their products in,” he said. “It’s a really cool feeling that people have really locked arms and are working together.”
An electrician installs lighting for a restaurant at Rick Caruso’s Palisades Village on Thursday. The shopping center is scheduled to reopen mid-August.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Pacific Palisades resident Allison Polhill, who is rebuilding the home of 30 years that her family lost in the blaze, said she is “thrilled” at the prospect of returning to the mall she used to frequent. Its comeback is a boost for the community, she said.
“Every single step that we make to reopen our commercial corridors is going to bring more people back into the Palisades,” said Polhill, who expects to move back into her home at the end of August.
A total of 6,822 structures were destroyed in the Palisades fire, including more than 5,500 residences and 100 commercial businesses, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Caruso previously attributed the mall’s survival to the hard work of private firefighters and the fire-resistant materials used in the mall’s construction.
The $200-million shopping and dining center opened in 2018 with a movie theater and a roster of upmarket tenants, including Erewhon, which may be the only grocer in the heart of the fire-ravaged neighborhood when it opens.
Caruso’s company was able to fill the mall with tenants despite the long shutdown.
Palisades Village is 99% leased, with the majority of tenants returning, said Jackie Levy, chief financial and revenue officer. Nearly one-third of the shops and restaurants are new to the property.
A firefighter carries a hose back to his rig while walking through a destroyed home from the Palisades fire in Pacific Palisades on Jan. 7, 2025.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Last year, Pacific Palisades-based fashion designer Elyse Walker said she would reopen her eponymous store in Palisades Village after losing her 25-year flagship location on Antioch Street to the inferno.
Other neighborhood shops destroyed in the fire that are reopening at the mall include K Bakery and Loomey’s Toys, which caters to children up to age 12 and used to be across the street from Palisades Elementary Charter School.
“It’s been a journey and I’m excited because I wasn’t sure that there was going to be a place to come back to,” said toy store owner Amanda Rastegar. “Hopefully we can bring some of that magic back.”
Rastegar’s home in the Palisades survived but was damaged by the fire. The family returned about eight weeks ago. Her last memory of the fire was a burning supermarket.
“I just couldn’t wrap my brain around what was happening,” she said. “By the time I left, Gelson’s was on fire.”
Among the returning tenants is Angelini Ristorante & Bar. Well-known Los Angeles chef Gino Angelini said he will be in the kitchen next month for a return of the Italian restaurant.
“We won’t do a big celebrity open,” he said. “We want to have a very soft opening and see our customers come back.”
Construction takes place at Rick Caruso’s Palisades Village on Thursday. The shopping center is scheduled to reopen mid-August.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
An elaborate celebration would not feel “correct for me,” Angelini said, because the devastation has been “very sad” for so many.
Other new tenants include local chef Nancy Silverton, who has agreed to move in with a new Italian steakhouse called Spacca Tutto. Women’s activewear retailer LESET will open its first West Coast location.
Caruso said he is optimistic that customers will return to the center, even though many Pacific Palisades residents are still dispersed. One tracking system estimated that about 30% of the Village’s customer base was impacted by the fire, he said.
“That means 70% did not get impacted, so there’s a lot of customers still left out there,” Caruso said. Historically, the center drew customers from as far away as Beverly Hills and Calabasas, as well as Malibu, Brentwood and Santa Monica.
He also hopes many will be inspired to visit the revived mall.
“I believe in the goodness of people and I believe that people are going to want to support the Palisades,” he said. “They’re going to want to be there and support the businesses that have had the courage and the heart to reopen.”
Walmart is rapidly expanding its network of electric vehicle chargers designed for customers to use while they shop.
The network could help fill gaps in EV infrastructure in states with greater need for chargers. Walmart, which has more than 5,000 locations in the U.S. and hundreds in California, says more than 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of one of its stores.
The chargers also offer an incentive for customers to choose Walmart — Walmart Plus members will receive a 10% discount off an average price of $0.46 per kilowatt-hour of energy at the company’s chargers.
Walmart chargers are already available at more than 75 locations in 17 states, with Texas boasting the most charging stations, followed by Florida and Arizona.
Matthew Nelson, Walmart’s director of energy policy, said last week on LinkedIn that the network will soon reach 29 states, including California.
“We are delivering on the promise of affordable, reliable and convenient charging,” Nelson said in his post.
According to Walmart’s website, six charging stations are coming to California soon, though the company did not offer a specific timeline.
The chargers will be installed at stores in Antelope, Brea, Fresno, Stockton, Suisun City and Vallejo.
Most charging sites in California will include eight to 16 fast-charging stalls, said Walmart spokesperson Kelsey Bohl.
The company first announced plans in April 2023 to install its own EV chargers at Walmart and Sam’s Club stores, with a goal of installing thousands of chargers by 2030. Partnering with ABB E-Mobility and Alpitronic, it added 25 new charging sites this past May and six more in June.
“Walmart is building a leading retail-integrated EV fast-charging network, focused on delivering an affordable, reliable and convenient charging experience where customers already shop,” Bohl said in an emailed statement. “Customers can charge while they shop, access stations through the Walmart app they already use, and benefit from affordable pricing.”
The charging stations already available include 612 individual charging stalls using 400-kilowatt chargers. Each stall has a dual charging cord with both Combined Charging System and North American Charging Standard connectors. The standard connectors, designed by Tesla, are smaller and lighter than the combined systems.
The primary way to pay for the chargers is through the Walmart app, but the company is also experimenting with built-in credit card readers to allow those without the app to use the stations.
Customers can check charger availability on the Walmart app. The company said the chargers will be available 24 hours a day.
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