An 87-year-old woman whose home in San Juan Capistrano sustained smoke and ash damage in the Norte fire filed a lawsuit Monday alleging the blaze was negligently caused by faulty San Diego Gas & Electric equipment.
The suit, filed in Orange County Superior Court by attorney Richard Bridgford on behalf of Dawn Yates, blamed a failed distribution line near the ignition point of the blaze at Portico Del Norte and Eminencia Del Norte in San Clemente. It seeks unspecified damages.
“SDG&E had a duty to properly construct and maintain its electrical infrastructure and manage the surrounding vegetation. … Plaintiffs allege that SDG&E violated these duties by knowingly operating aging and improperly maintained infrastructure,” the suit alleged.
The power company responded Monday, Oct. 19, that it has not yet been served with the suit and that the cause of the fire as well as the power line outage remain under investigation.
“We are cooperating with the Orange County Fire Authority,” said an unsigned statement from SDG&E. “Smoke and ash from fires can cause electric outages and there is currently no basis to conclude that there is a connection between our facilities and the ignition.”
The company on Monday also filed a required “electrical safety incident report” with the California Public Utilities Commission outlining the distribution line failure and referencing a weekend article in the Orange County Register on a “potential connection” between the outage and the Norte fire.
Yates, who lives on Via De Agua and uses a wheelchair, was among thousands of people evacuated in San Juan Capistrano and San Clemente in the fire that damaged or destroyed at least seven homes and burned 570 acres. The fire was 75% contained Monday and the evacuations have been lifted.
According to SDG&E’s online outage map, a 12-kilovolt distribution line on circuit 197 experienced an outage at 11:31 a.m. Friday. That’s two minutes before the Norte fire was first reported to emergency responders. A segment of the transmission line crosses what the lawsuit says is the ignition site on the hillside directly northwest of Eminencia Del Norte.
Map created by law firm Bridgford, Gleason & Artinian in Newport Beach shows the point of origin of the Norte fire in San Clemente and the nearby San Diego Gas & Electric power poles.(Courtesy of Bridgford, Gleason & Artinian law firm)
The suit alleges that either an arc from the power line or falling molten metal ignited the brush below.
The lawsuit also claimed the power company, which serves San Diego County and south Orange County, was negligent in failing to maintain circuit 197 and not abating vegetation around its equipment.
“SDG&E knew that its equipment in the general area of origin of the Norte Fire needed hardening upgrades and failed to perform them,” the suit said.
The Norte fire began in an area that was classified by fire authorities as a “red zone” or a “very high fire hazard severity zone” because of the brush and the heavy winds, the suit said.
“This classification put SDG&E on notice to use heightened safety measures and increased precautions when operating its electrical equipment in the red zone,” said the suit. “Had SDG&E acted responsibly, the Norte Fire could have been prevented.”
The lawsuit also said SDG&E has known for more than a decade that its overhead distribution system in fire-prone areas carries ignition risks from multiple sources. In 2012 and 2013, SDG&E ran pole-loading calculations on approximately 4,400 poles selected from its High Risk Fire Areas and found that approximately 15% would not meet current loading standards, the suit said. That is, the poles might not be able to sustain the equipment loaded on it as well as heavy winds and other physical forces before snapping.
Besides the overloaded poles, the utility identified aged splices, connectors and legacy copper conductors as ignition risks in the Fire Threat Zone, the suit said.
South Orange County’s wildlands were placed at the back of the line for hardening the equipment, the suit alleged.
“SDG&E knew that its equipment in the general area of origin of the Norte Fire needed hardening upgrades and failed to perform them,” the suit claimed.