Edison denied causing destructive 2017 fire. Feds now believe utility suppressed evidence

When the Creek fire exploded in the Angeles National Forest in 2017, suspicions quickly fell on electric power lines as the cause.

Witnesses reported seeing a snapped line on a high-voltage transmission tower in Little Tujunga Canyon around the time the fire started, and investigators focused their attention there.

“There was fire concentrated over there and sparks coming off the pylon. ... It spread each direction,” one resident told The Times.

But it would take another seven years for federal authorities to conclude that the fire — which destroyed 70 homes — was caused by Southern California Edison.

It was only last year that a federal investigator with the U.S. Forest Service made his determination, after gaining access in 2022 to Edison’s data. The federal government filed suit saying the utility giant not only caused the fire but also withheld pertinent data that could have led to the fire’s origin being pinpointed earlier. It is seeking $40 million in damages.

“SCE breached its duty of care and was negligent in causing the Creek Fire, including its failure to construct, maintain, and operate its power lines and equipment in a safe and effective working order,” the federal complaint said.

Edison denies that its equipment caused the fire and strongly rejects the allegation that it withheld information.

“We do not believe that SCE equipment was involved in the ignition of the Creek fire. We don’t agree with the allegations regarding the Creek fire. And we are addressing this matter through the proper court process,” said Kathleen Dunleavy, a spokeswoman for Edison.

The Creek Fire burns into the night in the Shadow Hills neighborhood of Sylmar on Dec. 5, 2017.

(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)

The Creek fire, a small incident when compared to the firestorm that swept L.A. County on Jan. 7, illustrated the long and twisted road of investigations into major blazes.

Edison is under intense scrutiny now for January’s Eaton fire, which destroyed 7,000 homes and killed 17 people in the Altadena area. Witnesses reported seeing the fire start under an Edison transmission tower in Eaton Canyon; video and photos also show the conflagration’s early moments seemingly under the electrical tower. The utility has pledged to cooperate in the investigation into the cause of the fire.

To the lawyers already suing, responsibility lies with the utility. Edison, meanwhile, says it has no evidence of faults on its power grid before or at the time of the fire that would suggest its equipment was responsible.

Much rides on the investigation. There are financial implications if the utility is found to be at fault. The stock price of the utility, which has already fallen since the fire broke out, could plummet.

Given the stakes, experts say it’s important to give investigators time.

“It takes time. You can’t just run with the first probable answer,” said Stewart Gary, a public safety consultant with Citygate Associates and former fire chief of the Livermore–Pleasanton Fire Department.

Big utilities have been determined to be the cause of some of California’s worst fires. The Camp fire in Paradise — which burned 153,000 acres and killed 85 people — was determined to have been caused by a high-voltage PG&E transmission line that was about 100 years old. The utility pleaded guilty to 84 counts of manslaughter and agreed to pay a $13.5-billion settlement to victims.

But investigations sometimes find other causes. PG&E was also the focus of the massive Tubbs fire in 2017 in Santa Rosa that killed 22 people. But Cal Fire concluded it was actually a private power line, not PG&E lines, that caused the blaze.

Investigators examine the base of an electrical tower where the Eaton fire erupted.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

A ‘deliberate decision’ to ‘suppress evidence’

The focus on Edison and the Eaton fire comes as the utility is battling in court over allegations that it was less than forthcoming with its data about the Creek fire.

Power lines were also an early focus of the Creek fire, which burned more than 15,000 acres in the San Fernando Valley and destroyed more than 100 structures.

The initial investigation, done by the U.S. Forest Service, concluded after five weeks that the fire was caused by transmission lines operated by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. But the investigation was complicated by the fact that LADWP officials said the fire started six minutes before they had any faults on their power line. The investigative report was released publicly in 2020, and insurance companies and fire victims suing LADWP asked Edison for data in April 2020 related to a distribution line known as the Lopez Circuit near the fire’s origin.

After not hearing back, the plaintiffs served Edison with a subpoena that July requesting the data, according to a memorandum in the civil case filed by insurance companies and victims. In an initial document production that September, Edison did not provide the relevant data, the plaintiffs claimed in their memorandum. But in December, one day before the statute of limitations expired, Edison handed over the fault data, the plaintiffs claimed.

“That fault data clearly documents several massive, elevated amperage events on the Lopez Circuit at precisely the time the Creek Fire ignited,” the plaintiffs wrote in their suit.

An Edison attorney disputed the plaintiffs’ allegations, saying that the utility began turning over documents in September 2020 and finished providing them in December 2020. The attorney said that the statute of limitations was in July 2021 and was not the day after Edison handed over its last document production.

The plaintiffs said that Edison had the fault data as early as 2018 — just days after the fire broke out.

“[Edison] made a deliberate decision at the earliest stages of its investigation to suppress evidence and pin the blame on LADWP,” the plaintiffs wrote.

The attorney for Edison claimed the entire situation arose from an inadvertent mistake made early on by an Edison employee. During the initial investigation into the fire, in 2018, the employee turned over to investigators data that corresponded to Dec. 4, 2017 but did not provide any data for Dec. 5, 2017 — the actual day the fire started. No one, including investigators and Edison, realized at the time that the data was not for the correct date. It was not until the data was requested as part of the suit that Edison realized the error, the attorney said.

The finding regarding the fire changed in 2024.

“Powerlines or equipment owned by Southern California Edison experienced a fault or malfunction that generated sufficient heat to ignite nearby vegetation, providing the competent ignition source that ignited the Creek fire,” wrote Thomas Guzman, an investigator for the Forest Service. “No evidence of any other cause was discovered, and all other causes have been excluded.”

Edison denies the finding and vows to fight it in court.

Dunleavy also denied the allegation that Edison withheld data relevant to the ignition of the fire.

The case of the Creek fire highlights how reliant fire investigators are on utility companies, which provide much of the data investigators use to determine what might have caused fires.

In building their case against Edison, Creek fire plantiff lawyers cited a 1997 raid by Cal Fire on Edison’s offices in Rosemead. At the time, Cal Fire investigators were looking for documents that might reveal whether the utility played a role in a conflagration in Calabasas from a year earlier that it was ultimately found to have caused.

In the clandestine operation, Cal Fire planted an investigator at the utility’s offices posing as an architecture student to draw up floor plans for the upcoming raid.

The raid led to an agreement between the department and the utility over the procedures to follow during investigations into the causes of wildfires, and was a nadir in relations between Edison and investigators. Edison faces no criminal charges.

The lawyers said in court papers in the Creek fire case that Edison failed to comply with the 1997 agreement following the 2017 fire. On Dec. 10, 2017, just five days after the fire started, Cal Fire investigators requested fault data for Edison’s Lopez Circuit.

At the time, the Lopez Circuit was thought to be outside the possible point of origin for the fire, but investigators requested it anyway to complete their “thorough” investigation of the fire.

Despite the request, Edison failed to provide the data related to the Lopez Circuit that was the “key piece of evidence that would have demonstrated the elevated amperage activity that SCE was desperately attempting to conceal,” according to the plaintiffs’ attorneys.

“If the allegations are correct, it does seem as if Edison was not forthcoming regarding faults in its system,” said Michael Wara, the director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at Stanford University.