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California utility company PG&E Corp is exploring filing some or all of its business for bankruptcy protection as it faces billions of dollars in liabilities related to fatal wildfires in 2018 and 2017, people familiar with the matter said on Friday.
The company is considering the move as a contingency, in part because it could soon take a significant financial charge for the fourth quarter of 2018 related to liabilities from the blazes, the sources said.
A bankruptcy filing is not certain, the sources said. The company could receive financial help through legislation that would let it pass on to customers costs associated with fire liabilities, the sources said. But that is just a possibility, they said, so bankruptcy preparations are being made.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @06:35PM (3 children)
One should get in trouble for starting a fire. One shouldn't pay for the fact that it keeps burning out of control.
For example, liability could involve the first acre or the first day.
If you want more liability, landowners could be liable when fire spreads from their property to an adjacent property. Oh, they wouldn't like that, but it seems fair. If you fail to control fire on your property, it endangers others. Of course, as with the initial fire starter, liability doesn't go past the first acre or day.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Monday January 07 2019, @07:29PM
So if a truck rear-ends you in a traffic slowdown and pushes you into the Ferrari in front of you, the truck driver gets to buy you a new Honda and you get to buy the guy in front of you a new Ferrari?
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Monday January 07 2019, @08:27PM
As counter-intuitive as it might seem, cigarettes are responsible for relatively few fire starts [accuweather.com]. I was surprised by this myself when I went looking for stats on it. Most wildfires are man-made. Smoking is bad for you. It's just not actually responsible for that many wildfires. I guess maybe the kinds of people that hike miles into the woods are more likely to get careless with a campfire than smoke.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Monday January 07 2019, @11:21PM
Under a rule like that, what would motivate companies like PG&E to maintain their equipment enough to avoid setting fires in the first place? The cost of the first acre or first day would be far less than maintenance costs, so financially the smart thing to do would be to continue risking thousands of people's lives & homes, not make any effort to protect them... For that matter, how are landowners supposed to prevent walls of flames moving at 40-60 mph (or as the news put it, spreading at a rate of 1 Costco per minute) from traveling across their property, short of removing every bit of vegetation from their land so it looks like a desert?