A Warren Buffet Company Held Liable for Wildfires Is Spooking Utility Investors
- PacifiCorp was found grossly negligent in Oregon jury trial
- ‘It woke a lot of people up, looking at their portfolios’
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Destructive wildfires are now an almost routine part of summer in the American West, and electrical utilities have likewise become used to having their power lines and equipment blamed for igniting the blazes.
But a jury verdict last month ordering Warren Buffett’s PacifiCorp to pay 17 owners of properties destroyed by a series of 2020 Oregon fires an average of $5 million each — setting up total liability for thousands of others in the billions — took investors by surprise and raised new fears about the scale of exposure utilities may be facing, and whether they will all survive.