No charges have been filed yet in the wine country fires. So far, though, district attorneys have shown little appetite for prosecuting PG&E, according to Sacramento Bee reporting. Becerra’s brief is purely advisory if any criminal charges are filed, they would likely be lodged by county district attorneys, not the state. The charges would range from murder to a misdemeanor negligence charge, according to the brief. The legal brief submitted by Becerra’s office said prosecutors would have to gauge PG&E’s “mental state” before determining which charges, if any, to bring. Investors are worried that the utility could be on the hook for billions of dollars in civil damages in addition to criminal penalties.īelow is an excerpt from the Sacramento Bee: It took several days in 2017 for word to spread that the company appeared to be liable for the Northern California fires, but the sell-off began the day after the Camp Fire started in 2018. Shortly after both events the stock price of PG&E dropped precipitously, sinking 66 percent over the 13-month period. More than 14,000 homes were destroyed in the Camp Fire. Over 40 people died in the Northern California fires, and 86 perished in the Camp Fire. For more detail, please see Cal Fire’s official county maps for both state and local responsibility areas.A dozen of the fires that started in Northern California around Octohave been blamed on PG&E’s electrical equipment, according to CAL FIRE Investigators, who also are looking into power line equipment failures that may have caused the Camp Fire on November 8, 2018.

Note: KQED has simplified these maps for online display. After that, Cal Fire will work with local governments to develop new maps for those areas, too. The agency expects to release official maps next summer for “state responsibility areas” - the parts of California areas that it’s responsible for protecting. “You don’t want to zone that house based on what’s there, but what could potentially be there,” Sapsis says.Ĭal Fire hopes to start testing its new draft maps this winter. In urban areas, fires can move quickly through dense neighborhoods where homes are tightly spaced. The new maps are meant to show “where fires could go,” not where they could start, Sapsis says.įor instance, development patterns can change how fire spreads. But the risk, or how much damage a fire can do, depends on the built environment. Those kinds of weather conditions are tricky to map, Sapsis says, because you want to take into account those very destructive types of fires, but also need to consider a longer, 50-year period.įire “hazard” is a measure of how a fire will behave, based on the physical conditions. “We’re just now getting the capacity to estimate at a realistic scale what these areas, footprints, if you will, of these dry windy events are … and what the magnitudes of these events are,” Sapsis says. Sapsis says that fire modeling technology is improving all the time, and that the new models Cal Fire is testing are taking into account dry, windy weather. Original 2019 story continues below New Maps to Assess Weather and Development (Cal Fire was expected to release new draft maps to test in winter 2019/2020 that took new risk factors into account. We do the best we can based on the tools we have,” he says.Īnd, as recent fires have tragically demonstrated, living outside a higher-risk zone doesn’t mean that you’re safe.Įxtreme winds drove much of the damage in Paradise during last the November 2018 Camp Fire and in the North Bay during the October 2017 fire siege, and current fire maps don’t take that factor into account. “Estimating a burn probability is an estimate. Sapsis says it’s important to remember that the Cal Fire-defined risk zones are showing only a probability. “How likely is the fire? And what is the nature of the fire?” “The model is basically trying to describe areas and their likelihood for a structure to ignite,” Dave Sapsis, a Cal Fire researcher who specializes in mapping and research models, told KQED in 2019.

California fire map 2017