The company told federal regulators in 2013 it planned to replace many of the towers, wires and hardware pieces on the line, called the Caribou-Palermo, regulatory filings show. It again proposed the project in 2014, 2015 and 2016—pushing it back each year. The company planned to start work June 2018 and finish late last year. It hasn’t begun.
On Nov. 8, 2018, winds picked up before sunrise near Paradise, Calif., when a wire snapped free from the Caribou-Palermo line, creating an electric arc that scorched the metal tower supporting it. A few minutes later, a PG&E worker spotted a quarter-acre fire under the line, the company has disclosed. Within hours, what became known as the Camp Fire destroyed Paradise and killed 85 people. California fire investigators haven’t yet determined the fire’s cause.
PG&E restarted the line following last November’s fire after spot repairs, it said this week. The line underwent a close inspection in December, with linemen climbing some towers for the first time in years. The inspection uncovered additional problems, the company said, and it has shut down the entire line and has no estimate for when it will resume service.
PG&E’s repeated delays of the Caribou-Palermo line’s maintenance project haven’t been previously reported, nor has the decision by the company to shut down the line.
PG&E operates a vast network of power lines, many through rural regions now at elevated wildfire risk. PG&E said that overhauling the Caribou-Palermo line has proven unexpectedly complex and that it is still planning to replace aging towers and hardware, some of which has been in use since the line began operating in 1921. It said delays in upgrading the line in recent years were due to engineering challenges, partly related to permitting in a federal forest.
The story of the Caribou-Palermo line is part of California’s wildfire reckoning. The state’s largest utility is now at the center of scrutiny after a series of deadly wildfires that have swept the company’s service territory in recent years. California fire investigators have determined the company’s equipment played a role in starting 18 blazes that killed 22 people in 2017.
This year, PG&E has accepted Chief Executive Geisha Williams’s resignation, moved to replace more than half its board, begun restructuring in anticipation of liabilities from hundreds of lawsuits and filed for bankruptcy protection.
It has vowed to do more to prevent its equipment from sparking fires and now plans to consider turning off power lines proactively during high-fire-risk periods in a wide swath of its territory.
PG&E spokeswoman Lynsey Paulo said: “PG&E has heard the calls for change and is committed to taking action by focusing our resources on reducing risk and improving safety throughout our system.”
The emerging picture of the transmission line’s problems could deepen the utility’s legal problems and threaten to add to its growing regulatory headaches. The failure to maintain the Caribou-Palermo line is part of a broader set of challenges the company faces in managing its operations. These include antiquated record-keeping systems that make it difficult to assess the safety and reliability of the aging power grid, according to regulators and regulatory filings.
PG&E has for years worked to digitize and fix errors and gaps in its records, but the work has been slow and remains incomplete. Until 2015, the company said in a state regulatory document, it used “paper wall maps and push pins” in control centers to track electricity-distribution system operations, which provide service over a 70,000-square-mile area to 16 million people.
The company said it is committed to keeping accurate records in accordance with state regulations and, since the Camp Fire, has doubled down on the effort by accelerating its pace of inspections. “Our focus is to leave no rock unturned, to ensure that we are continuing to reduce risk on our system every single day,” said Sumeet Singh, vice president of the company’s community wildfire-safety program.
PG&E plans to have completed enhanced inspections of transmission and distribution equipment in high-risk areas by May. As a result of those inspections, the company shut down more than a dozen transmission lines for immediate repair. The Caribou-Palermo is the only one that remains out of commission. It said it plans to use drones and increase the frequency of in-person investigations in the future.
The California Public Utilities Commission said it has opened a wide-ranging investigation into the Camp Fire’s cause, including PG&E’s past maintenance and spending. An agency spokeswoman declined to comment on the Caribou-Palermo line.
PG&E has previously reported the 115,000-volt Caribou-Palermo line malfunctioned on Nov. 8, some 13 minutes before the PG&E employee noticed a fire underneath it as he drove along a rural two-lane highway.
PG&E in 2013 told federal regulators it had planned maintenance work on the line because it sagged too close to the ground and vegetation. It planned to complete the work by February 2016. Instead, it delayed the $30.3 million project several times.
The company again scheduled work on the Caribou-Palermo line to begin last June, according to records it filed with the federal government. It delayed again. The line wends over hard-to-access ridges and across steep draws along the north fork of the Feather River, some towers perching on rocky outcrops.
PG&E said the tower that malfunctioned before the Camp Fire wasn’t slated for maintenance as part of the project proposed in 2013. It is currently reconsidering the work’s scope in light of December’s findings, which revealed problems with the line’s structural foundations and hardware supporting wires.
The Caribou-Palermo line has experienced a series of problems within the past decade after the expansion of nearby towns strained its capacity. Since 2016, population growth in Paradise and neighboring Chico has outpaced that of the state, boosting regional demand for electricity and exacerbating wildfire risk in an area hurt by drought.
PG&E spends enormous sums on transmission-line upkeep, costs passed to ratepayers. Some big customers have questioned whether it is spending prudently.
Randy Howard, general manager of the Northern California Power Agency, a collection of municipal utilities relying on PG&E’s lines to deliver power to customers, called the company’s annual budget for replacing transformers, towers and other equipment a “black box” with little oversight or accountability. The group challenged a 2017 PG&E federal tariff filing—its request for spending on behalf of the shared bulk-power-transmission system—arguing that it failed to justify why it needed transmission-rate increases to recoup its costs.
“They ask for the money, they get approval for it, they never have to demonstrate they actually did the work,” Mr. Howard said. “There isn’t transparency. There doesn’t seem to be an actual asset-management plan.”
PG&E’s Ms. Paulo said the company, as part of its spending requests, “has been forthcoming with information about our transmission asset management programs and the additions that have occurred year to year.”
Last year, PG&E filed to spend $1.96 billion annually on its transmission system, more than twice the $946 million request a decade earlier.
tate regulators have expressed skepticism in filings with federal regulators about PG&E’s transmission spending. Lawyers for the California Public Utilities Commission argued in a federal filing last year PG&E had no effective way of ranking which projects were most necessary to ensure safe and reliable operations. An internal PG&E audit from 2013 found that the company focused mainly on spending its allotted budget, not ensuring expenditures were prudent and effective, and that it lacked performance data and other records for many projects.
Little had changed since then, regulators said last year in federal filings. They argued PG&E continued to build certain projects to meet budget targets and let others slip—in part because it lacked construction, maintenance and inspect PG&E faces similar problems in tracking its electricity-distribution operations, an issue it acknowledged in regulatory filings after a 2010 natural-gas-pipeline explosion in San Bruno, Calif., that killed eight.
Part of its efforts to improve its record-keeping involved a sweeping inventory of its overhead and underground lines. Some records in its central database had, since the 1970s and 1980s, been missing information such as the make and age of switches, circuit breakers and voltage regulators—information the company said was critical in addressing system safety risk.
Regulators approved about $97 million for a records-system overhaul between 2014 and 2016. By the period’s end, the company in filings estimated it had spent only 15% of that on the effort because of technological challenges and used the rest for other projects.
PG&E is seeking additional funding to complete its distribution-line inventory and fix gaps in records, an undertaking it projected will continue through 2024.
“PG&E does understand that it has issues,” said Garrick Jones, a consultant who has examined the company’s record-keeping spending for the Utility Reform Network, a consumer advocacy group. “But its history of making promises and under-delivering makes one question whether they undertook the records program with all due haste.”
The long-distance transmission lines that run near Paradise, including the 56-mile Caribou-Palermo, are among America’s oldest, dating to the early 1920s when electricity was an urban luxury. They became part of a system tapping into Sierra Nevada dams and powerhouses known as the “Stairway of Power.” In the 1960s, the Caribou-Palermo line was in a relatively sparsely populated region.
In 2010, the California grid operator said the line would soon face “thermal overload”—a designation that means there’s too much power moving through it—as nearby communities expanded. It concluded: “There is more than ample time to schedule implementation by 2018.”
PG&E undertook sporadic repair work on the lines near Paradise. Near Camp Creek, the remote waterway that gave the fire its name, it’s possible to see under towers a few replaced disc-shaped insulators and metal anchors—evidence of small-scale repairs over the past few years.
Xela Young, 37, has lived her whole life in Yankee Hill, a few miles from Paradise. PG&E transmission lines cut through her community. A year or two before the Camp Fire, she said, she saw PG&E workers planning for clearing vegetation or doing maintenance.
“The same frickin’ tree got marked three times, but was never cleared,” she said. “It seemed like they did a lot of preparation, but not a lot of follow-through.”
In December 2012, a storm blew through and five towers on the Caribou-Palermo collapsed. PG&E erected temporary wooden towers and devised a $2.9 million plan to replace them.
In 2013, when it filed an annual transmission tariff with federal regulators, it unveiled a broader plan to overhaul the Caribou-Palermo line by 2017. In January 2017, wind blew trees into the line, causing a fault that shut down a powerhouse. The company cleared trees and resumed service, but it took six days to restore the powerhouse, PG&E documents show.
In July 2017, PG&E’s federal filing again included overhauling the line. More than one in four wire spans between towers were too close to vegetation, the filing said. The plan involved swapping 61 lattice towers with modern tubular-steel poles, and replacing wire and hardware connecting it to the towers. It never began the work.