I'm a Californian. I've been so since 1950 - the year of my birth. All of our children and grandchildren are Californians. We love our state. And, we know that our state is in peril.
I'm also a lawyer. I'm sure that I pay more attention to the law than if I'd chosen another career. So, paying attention to the law is something that I'm supposed to do. And, given the state's current wildfires and utility power shut offs, it's worth a little reflection.
California law and state court rulings make publicly and privately-owned state utilities responsible for property damage if their equipment caused the fire. This is essentially strict liability - liability is imposed whether or not the utility acted negligently. While less than 10% of wildfires are caused by powerlines, the liabilities accruing from those wildfires are huge.
When the wildfires are catastrophic, the resulting liabilities are equally catastrophic. Our state's political and business leaders are struggling with this. The California Public Utilities Commission has rejected efforts by utilities companies to raise utility rates to compensate for litigation payouts related to fire liabilities.
PG&E Corp., the owner of our state's largest power utility, filed bankruptcy in January 2019 to address liabilities resulting from some of California's most devastating wildfires. PG&E's stock has dropped nearly 87% over the past year. The company cut power to nearly 970,000 customers last weekend. It's estimated that nearly 2.5 million people were without power.
The company is being criticized on allegations that it is focusing on minimizing its own financial liability rather than weighing the trade-offs with the human and financial impacts of power outages. If someone has an easy answer to this, speak up.
Our state requires utilities to support housing developments in areas classified as
"very high fire risk." We are told that the outages are now a likely a regular part of California's future. Politicians and utility businesses are heavily engaged in the discussion of power outages. California's people, while not left out of the discussions, have not really had their voices heard. Those voices are going to grow louder.
Having watched some revolutionary changes in my lifetime, I suspect that Californians are not going to react positively to third-world style power cutoffs. In the words of Buffalo Springfield's 1966 "For What It's Worth" ballad, a classic protest song:
"There's something happening here
But what it is ain't exactly clear ..."
The song's chorus goes on:
"I think it's time we stop
Children, what's that sound?
Everybody look - what's going down?"
California's people, or at least a significant percentage of them, are going to stop and think about what's going down. It's inevitable. What comes out of it - I don't know. But I don't think that blackouts will silence the people.
I remember being 15 years old, standing on a San Francisco sidewalk, watching a 1965 protest march against the Vietnam War. The marchers seemed like outliers. But by 1967 there was widespread disillusionment.
In the spring of 1968, I sat in my college dorm room watching LBJ announce that he would not run for reelection. I saw college campuses close, including my own, in May 1970 when National Guard troops shot into a group of Vietnam War protesters at Kent State, killing four students. Three years later Nixon announced an effective end to U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia.
Maybe I'm being dramatic - I could be. Still, we may be in for some drama. The much seen and heard Les Miserables' song, "Do You Hear the People Sing," brings the theme to mind.
"Do you hear the people sing?
Singing the song of angry men?
It is the music of the people
Who will not be slaves again?"
So, going back to where I started. Are power shut offs doing more harm than good?
I suspect that, while it may take time, we're going to hear the people sing. And, their song may strike a tune radically different from what California's politicians and utility business leaders are playing today.