On February 5, 2025, Willamette Week published a story by the Oregon Journalism Project about Pacific Power and wildfires in Oregon. The article presented a one-sided view based on a narrative pushed by plaintiffs’ attorneys who are in active litigation against Pacific Power. We write to provide a more accurate picture of Pacific Power’s industry-leading efforts to prioritize the safety of its customers, communities and employees.
Nearly two years ago, a jury in Portland decided that Pacific Power was negligent in connection with certain fires that burned on Labor Day 2020. But the article fails to grapple with the complexity of what happened at that class action trial. The questions of if, when, where, and for how long the power should be shut off are as difficult as they are consequential.
With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy for plaintiffs’ lawyers to argue that power across Oregon should have been shut off on Labor Day 2020. But in real time, the decision is never so easy. Shutting off the power can be just as dangerous as leaving it on, and it is never a realistic option to shut off power for all 600,000 customers across an entire state—which is what the plaintiffs’ attorneys suggested that Pacific Power should have done that weekend.
That would have been disastrous. The article talked about two people, Doug Grafe and Nik Blosser, who may have thought, without identifying specific locations, that the general idea of power shut offs should have been considered. But the article did not talk about the even greater number of customer service calls that Pacific Power received that same evening from panicked residents who asked for the power to be kept on because they needed electricity, including for essential medical devices and to refrigerate medication.
The article also did not talk about the dangers of shutting off power when people are trying to evacuate. Going into the Labor Day 2020 weekend, a lightning-caused fire called the Beachie Creek Fire had already been burning on federal land for multiple weeks—uncontained—and posed an active and growing threat to many Oregonians living in the North Fork Canyon and Santiam Canyon. When the windstorm hit on the evening of Labor Day 2020, that fire exploded toward people’s homes faster than any of the firefighting experts on the ground predicted.
The article is right that there is still no authoritative account of what happened in the Santiam Canyon that night. At trial, numerous witnesses who were present in the Santiam Canyon, including a local fire chief who was himself a member of the plaintiff class, testified that the Beachie Creek Fire was responsible for the vast majority of the destruction in the canyon.
While the exact timing is not clear, there is no debate that the Beachie Creek Fire eventually entered the Canyon that night. Whether they knew it at the time or not, many people depended on the power staying on so that they could get out. Electricity powers countless emergency resources. Water systems that are used to fight fires and to protect properties from catching fire. Cell towers. Computers and televisions and phones that are used to distribute evacuation notices. Traffic signals that help facilitate an orderly and rapid evacuation. Gas pumps that ensure that evacuees can refuel their vehicles. Though the article does not acknowledge these needs, Pacific Power could not ignore them on Labor Day 2020.
This is not to say that Pacific Power will never shut off power. It has done so when the conditions warrant and will do so in the future. But we cannot pretend that it is a quick and easy fix. Lives will be impacted no matter the decision. In every instance, the hardworking people who work in our operations center and oversee our system feel the weight of that decision and take that responsibility seriously.
All of that is why Pacific Power is appealing the verdict in the class action trial. It is not about trying to deny compensation to people who lost their homes, and it is not about trying to cause delay for the sake of delay. Pacific Power fully recognizes the tragic impact of the 2020 Labor Day fires on our state and has worked hard to reach fair settlements with more than 1,500 people who did not join the class action. Most of those households have been able to receive substantial payments, both from Pacific Power through settlement and from their property insurers, to rebuild their homes and lives. But that just hasn’t been enough for the plaintiffs’ lawyers in this case who have decided to turn the utility into the enemy for their own gain, which knows no limits at this point. The article fails to even note the self-interested agenda of those attorneys, who may stand to gain an outsized portion of any award in the litigation.
Filing lawsuits against utilities for billions of dollars is not a sustainable long-term solution to the growing risks posed by wildfires and climate change. These outsized damages awards do nothing to solve the problem except divert crucial resources and attention away from much-needed safety improvements—equipment upgrades, undergrounding, monitoring stations, system hardening—and into the pockets of plaintiffs’ lawyers seeking windfall attorney fees.
That is disappointing, because Pacific Power has always worked hard to stay ahead of wildfire mitigation efforts. Just last year, Stanford University’s Climate and Energy Policy Program issued a detailed report assessing the wildfire mitigation programs of western investor-owned utilities. See Stanford Climate & Energy Policy Program, Wildfire: Assessing and Quantifying Risk Exposure and Mitigation Across Western Utilities (May 2024). The report ranked Pacific Power in the top tier for wildfire mitigation due to its development of a formal wildfire prevention plan, deployment of weather stations and meteorological experts and resources to warn of potential adverse weather events, integration of protective equipment and device settings, and implementation of an operational plan for proactive power shutoffs when conditions warrant.
Oregon state regulators have also vetted and approved Pacific Power’s wildfire mitigation efforts. Each year, Pacific Power must submit its wildfire mitigation plan to the Oregon Public Utility Commission. The plan is scrutinized both by an independent evaluator and by Commission staff who compare the plan against those measures adopted by other utilities in and outside of Oregon. Each year, the Oregon Public Utility Commission has approved Pacific Power’s plan.
Wildfires are a complex problem with no single root cause, and no winners. It does not benefit anyone to ignore that reality just because it might be easier to make the utility pay in the short term. When the next big wildfire happens, there might not be a utility to blame. Two of the biggest wildfires on Labor Day 2020, the Beachie Creek Fire and the Lionshead Fire, were caused by lightning – not by any utility. The people who lived in those areas and lost their homes in those fires were excluded from this class action lawsuit, and they are not going to make headlines for recovering millions of dollars in damages, because in those cases, there is no single easy target for the lawyers to blame.
As wildfires have spread beyond the West and impacted increasingly diverse locations, such as Hawaii, Texas, and New York, several states have begun to evaluate measures to address this evolving risk. Many of these measures recognize the need for healthy utilities that can continue to provide essential electricity service and support their communities. Those solutions include limits on uncapped liability and measures to ensure that property owners have access to adequate and affordable insurance. Large damage awards against electric utilities will eventually have an upward pressure on customer rates. Pacific Power supports any efforts to help us provide safe and reliable service, at a reasonable cost to customers. Many policies are forward-looking and will take years to implement. We need public support for measures to help us evolve electric services in a world at greater risk of devastating wildfires.
