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CV NEWS FEED // A Los Angeles electricity utility didn’t use a common safety protocol to prevent power lines from sparking and causing fires during windstorms, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The news outlet reported that many California utilities commonly cut off power to several areas of their systems if windstorms arise. However, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) did not implement the procedure ahead of the devastating Los Angeles fires and has not yet developed a plan to make it standard practice for the utility.
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The LADWP is reportedly the U.S.’s largest municipal utility. Just over one-fifth of its service area lies within parts of the county that are at high risk for fires. The cause of the Los Angeles wildfires has not yet been determined.
Michael Wara, a lawyer who directs Stanford University’s Climate and Energy Policy Program and studies wildfire mitigation strategies, told the Wall Street Journal that the LADWP “is operating in a way that is very different from any of the investor-owned utilities in California or across the West at this point.”
However, the LADWP said it uses other safety measures to prevent sparking lines, including “disabling technology that automatically restores power to lines after outages or disruptions,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
In addition to potentially causing fires, according to the Wall Street Journal, failing to proactively cut off power to some areas of the electrical systems can have legal repercussions later on, as demonstrated by negligence lawsuits filed in the wake of the Oregon Labor Day Fires in 2020 and the Maui wildfire in 2023.
