PacifiCorp wins appeal
Berkshire Hathaway’s PacifiCorp won an appeals‑court challenge in an Oregon wildfire class‑action, a legal outcome that could influence how liability is assigned for large fire losses in the Pacific Northwest (x.com). The ruling arrives as regional drought and wildfire risk increase, which may shift conversations between utilities, jurisdictions, and fire agencies about prevention and responsibility (x.com).
PacifiCorp just won a ruling that could upend more than $1 billion in Oregon wildfire damages, even though no appeals judge said the company was cleared of starting the 2020 fires. The Oregon Court of Appeals said the case was handled the wrong way as a class action and sent it back to the trial court. (usnews.com) The fight goes back to Labor Day weekend in September 2020, when extreme east winds tore across Oregon and turned small ignitions into fast-moving fire fronts. Oregon’s wildfire season that year burned more than 1 million acres, affected 20 counties, and destroyed or damaged more than 5,000 structures. (oregon.gov) PacifiCorp is the Berkshire Hathaway-owned utility behind Pacific Power, which serves large parts of Oregon. Plaintiffs said the company left power lines energized despite forecasts of hurricane-force winds, and that downed live wires helped ignite four major fires. (opb.org) Those four fires were the Santiam Canyon Fire in Marion County, the Echo Mountain Complex Fire near Lincoln City, the South Obenchain Fire near Eagle Point, and the 242 Fire near Chiloquin. In the original case, 16 named Oregonians sued, and the court let thousands of other property owners ride in the same legal vehicle. (opb.org) That legal vehicle is a class action, which is basically one big bus instead of thousands of separate cars. It can save time and money when people were harmed in roughly the same way by the same conduct. (usnews.com) In June 2023, a jury found PacifiCorp liable in the first phase of that class case, and later trials produced more than $1.1 billion in awards. Berkshire Hathaway has said the company’s total wildfire exposure in Oregon could reach tens of billions of dollars. (usnews.com) The appeals court did not say wildfire survivors lose automatically. It said the trial judge gave jurors a faulty instruction by telling them they could assume the evidence applied to all class members, even though the case covered different fires, different places, and different ignition evidence. (usnews.com) That matters because a fire case turns on cause the way a car-crash case turns on which driver hit which lane. Judge Anna Joyce wrote that much of the evidence was tied to particular wildfires and even to specific ignition points inside the Santiam Canyon Fire, so jurors could not treat every claimant as if the facts were interchangeable. (usnews.com) Now the case goes back to Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Steffan Alexander, who can decide whether one class still makes sense or whether claims need to be broken apart. Oregon Public Broadcasting reported that more than 160 damages trials scheduled through 2027 could be paused by this ruling. (usnews.com) (opb.org) The result is a narrower win than it first sounds. PacifiCorp got relief from the way the case was packaged, not a finding that its power lines played no role in the Labor Day 2020 fires, so the next fight is likely to be over how many separate cases Oregon courts are willing to hear and how much proof each group of survivors must bring on its own. (usnews.com) (opb.org)
