Wildfire Lawsuits: PG&E, Maui, LA Fires, and Liability

Wildfire lawsuits against electric utilities have become some of the costliest litigation in American legal history, with cases against PG&E, PacifiCorp, Hawaiian Electric, Southern California Edison, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and Xcel Energy producing tens of billions of dollars in settlements, verdicts, and ongoing claims. The pattern is consistent: a fire is traced to utility equipment, thousands of victims sue, and the dollar figures climb into the billions. What varies is the legal regime, the solvency of the defendant, and how much of a settlement a victim actually keeps.

PG&E: The Case That Set the Template

Pacific Gas & Electric’s cascade of liability from 2015 to 2020 California fires reshaped how these cases are litigated. The 2018 Camp Fire alone killed 85 people and destroyed 18,000 structures in and around Paradise, California.¹ PG&E filed for bankruptcy in January 2019, citing $30 billion in potential wildfire liabilities.²

In December 2019, PG&E reached a $13.5 billion settlement with individual victims covering the 2015 Butte Fire, the 2017 North Bay wildfires (including the Tubbs Fire), the 2018 Camp Fire, and the 2016 Ghost Ship Fire in Oakland.³ Half was cash, half was PG&E stock. The company also paid $1 billion to public entities and $11 billion to insurers, bringing total payouts well above $25 billion. On the criminal side, PG&E pleaded guilty in 2020 to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter for the Camp Fire and paid the maximum $4 million fine.¹

The Fire Victim Trust created to administer the settlement has processed all 71,787 individual claimants and issued determination notices for every eligible claim. As of April 2026, the trust has paid out $13.71 billion, slightly more than the original settlement figure, thanks to stock sales and third-party recoveries. About 66,125 of 66,530 eligible claimants have received payments, and the pro rata payment percentage stands at 70 percent.⁴ A final distribution is expected after the trust closes its last third-party settlement with the contractor Davey Tree. Trustee Cathy Yanni has reported the final payment to claimants will likely add no more than one percentage point.⁵ A June 2026 trial date is set as a backstop.

Two separate PG&E prosecutions were resolved later. For the 2020 Zogg Fire, which killed four people and burned over 56,000 acres, Shasta County dismissed criminal charges in 2023 after PG&E agreed to a $50 million settlement — $45 million for local recovery and $5 million paid to the county.⁶ For the 2019 Kincade Fire in Sonoma County, PG&E paid $20.25 million in a 2022 civil judgment, including $7.5 million in civil penalties, and was barred from passing any of the costs to customers.⁷

PacifiCorp and the 2020 Oregon Labor Day Fires

Berkshire Hathaway-owned PacifiCorp faces its own multi-billion-dollar reckoning over four fires that swept Oregon over Labor Day weekend in 2020: the Santiam Canyon, Echo Mountain Complex, South Obenchain, and 242 fires. In the James v. PacifiCorp class action, a jury found the utility liable in 2023, and “mini-trials” to determine individual damages began in January 2024. Through early 2026, 190 plaintiffs had been awarded roughly $1.23 billion in net damages, including doubled economic damages, non-economic damages, and punitive damages.⁸

That process hit a major obstacle on April 8, 2026, when the Oregon Court of Appeals reversed the class certification and remanded. The appeals court found the trial judge’s instruction, which allowed jurors to assume evidence about particular fires applied to all class members, was “legally erroneous” and “prejudicial to PacifiCorp,” because the class lumped together properties damaged by four distinct wildfires with different causes.⁹ Plaintiffs filed a petition for Oregon Supreme Court review in May 2026, and existing verdicts remain in place while that petition is pending.¹⁰ The trial judge has stayed all damages trials until the appellate process concludes, with pretrial work and mediation set to resume in August 2026.

Outside the class action, PacifiCorp has settled nearly 4,500 individual wildfire claims for $2.2 billion.⁸ In February 2026, the company agreed to pay the federal government $575 million to resolve claims over six wildfires in Oregon and California, including the 2022 McKinney Fire, with funds going to the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to restore roughly 290,000 acres.¹¹

The January 2025 Los Angeles Fires

The Eaton and Palisades fires produced two distinct tracks of litigation against very different defendants.

Eaton Fire: Southern California Edison

The Eaton Fire burned 14,000 acres and killed 19 people.¹² While the official cause remains under investigation, SCE’s own CEO acknowledged that a leading theory involves a century-old, dormant transmission line in Eaton Canyon that reenergized and sparked the blaze.¹³ In June 2026, plaintiff attorneys claimed new video evidence confirms SCE equipment ignited the fire.¹⁴

SCE faces hundreds of civil lawsuits alleging negligent equipment maintenance. A formal trial is scheduled for January 2027.¹⁴ The Los Angeles County District Attorney is separately investigating whether SCE should face criminal prosecution; as of mid-2026 no charges had been filed, and SCE says it acted as a “reasonable utility operator” and is unaware of any basis for felony liability.¹³

To reduce exposure, SCE launched a voluntary Wildfire Recovery Compensation Program covering roughly 18,000 damaged properties. As of February 2026, the utility had recorded approximately $1 billion in liabilities, and equity analysts have estimated total liability could reach $13.5 billion.¹⁵ The compensation program has drawn criticism because accepting a payment requires waiving the right to sue, including for long-term health effects, and compensation for children is set well below adult amounts.¹²

Palisades Fire: LADWP

The Palisades Fire litigation targets a publicly owned utility. Lawsuits filed on behalf of about 3,300 victims allege the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power failed to keep the St. Ynez Reservoir filled, leaving fire hydrants dry during the blaze. The reservoir had reportedly been empty since February 2024.¹⁶ An amended complaint filed in July 2025 added allegations that LADWP altered an operations log to cover up a delayed power shut-off; the utility called the entry a “routine change” to improve accuracy.¹⁷

Because LADWP and the City of Los Angeles are public agencies, they can assert governmental immunity defenses, a hurdle that does not apply to investor-owned utilities. Initial motions to dismiss are expected, with rulings likely to be appealed.¹⁸ The cause of the fire itself remains under investigation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and LADWP says no investigating authority has indicated its facilities were involved in ignition.¹⁷

Maui: Hawaiian Electric and the Lahaina Fires

The August 2023 wildfires in Lahaina produced a $4.03 billion global settlement, the largest wildfire resolution outside of PG&E’s bankruptcy. Hawaiian Electric agreed to contribute $1.99 billion. The remainder comes from the Kamehameha Schools trust ($807.5 million), Hawaii taxpayers ($800 million), Maui County, telecommunications companies that shared utility poles, and entities affiliated with landowner Peter Martin.¹⁹ The settlement includes no admission of liability.²⁰

Roughly 21,750 plaintiffs filed more than 94,800 individual claims across ten categories, from property loss to economic harm from canceled Maui travel.¹⁹ Maui Circuit Judge Peter Cahill approved the distribution plan and, in June 2026, capped attorney fees at $222 million, far below the roughly $1 billion lawyers had requested. The fee structure is tiered: 3 percent for attorneys who signed clients after the settlement, 8.33 percent for those who signed before, and 10 percent for those whose cases were set for trial.²¹ Payments to survivors are expected to begin in mid-2026, distributed in four installments.

Two further financial hits reduce what Maui survivors actually keep. Property insurers are entitled to 10 percent of settlement payments for victims who had coverage, under a Hawaii Supreme Court ruling that prevented insurers from suing Hawaiian Electric directly. And survivors face potential federal income tax of up to 37 percent on their proceeds unless Congress reinstates an expired tax exemption for wildfire settlement funds.¹⁹

Hawaiian Electric itself faces questions about its viability. Parent company HEI has warned in SEC filings that the settlement creates conditions that could cast “substantial doubt” about its ability to continue as a going concern, and that a failure to execute financing plans could trigger debt acceleration and potential bankruptcy.²² The company held only $165 million in liability insurance at the time of the fire.²³

Texas: The Smokehouse Creek Fire

Wildfire litigation is not limited to the West Coast. The 2024 Smokehouse Creek Fire in the Texas Panhandle burned over one million acres, the largest wildfire in Texas history, killing at least three people and an estimated 15,000 head of cattle. A Texas A&M Forest Service investigation concluded the fire was ignited by an Xcel Energy power line downed by 70-mph winds.²⁴

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Xcel Energy’s subsidiary, Southwestern Public Service Company, in December 2025, alleging the company negligently failed to replace aging utility poles — some nearly a century old, well past their 40-year lifespan — and ignored warnings about infrastructure repairs. The state is seeking over $1 billion in economic damages and civil penalties.²⁵ Xcel has agreed to pay $361 million to settle 212 individual claims. The company contests that it was negligent, with an executive testifying that the pole failure occurred under extreme wind conditions.²⁴

Why California Verdicts Get So Large

A significant reason wildfire lawsuits produce such enormous liability in California is the state’s doctrine of inverse condemnation. Under this rule, investor-owned utilities face strict liability for property damage caused by their equipment. Victims do not have to prove the utility was careless. If the utility’s infrastructure started the fire, the utility pays, even if it followed every safety regulation on the books.²⁶ That is a sharp break from ordinary negligence, which requires proving the defendant did something wrong.

When a utility is found to have acted prudently, it can seek to recover its wildfire costs from ratepayers. When it is found negligent, shareholders bear the losses. In April 2026, the California Earthquake Authority published a report recommending the elimination of inverse condemnation for electric and gas utilities entirely.

The California Wildfire Fund

To prevent another PG&E-style bankruptcy, California created the Wildfire Fund through AB 1054 in 2019. Participating utilities (PG&E, SCE, and SDG&E) can draw from the fund to pay eligible wildfire claims, provided the fire occurred after July 2019 and the utility obtains safety certification.²⁷ The fund is financed by ratepayer surcharges and utility contributions, and safety certification creates a legal presumption that a utility’s conduct was reasonable.²⁸

The fund was expanded in 2025 through SB 254, which added an $18 billion Continuation Account — $9 billion from ratepayer charges extended through 2045 and $9 billion from utility shareholders.²⁹ As of early 2026, the fund’s claim-paying capacity exceeded $21 billion, with a net position of approximately $13.1 billion. The Eaton Fire has already been designated a “covered wildfire,” and SCE will become eligible for reimbursement once it surpasses $1 billion in paid claims.³⁰

Whether the fund will prove large enough is an open question. The Public Advocates Office warned in September 2025 that it is “at risk of depletion” due to cumulative liabilities from fires since 2019, and urged legislative action to prevent utilities from being driven into bankruptcy again.³¹

What These Cases Mean for Victims

Several patterns run through the litigation. Nearly all of these cases involve allegations that a utility failed to maintain aging infrastructure, whether a century-old transmission line, a tree too close to power lines, or poles past their expected lifespan. In California, the legal question is often not whether the utility was negligent but whether its equipment was involved, which lowers the bar for proving liability compared with most tort cases.

The path to compensation, though, has been long and imperfect. PG&E’s Fire Victim Trust took years to process claims and ultimately paid 70 cents on the dollar. Maui survivors face attorney fees, insurer liens, and potential tax bills that can consume a substantial portion of their proceeds. Voluntary programs like the one SCE established for Eaton Fire victims offer faster payment but require waiving the right to sue, including for health effects that may not appear for years. And where the defendant is a public agency like LADWP, governmental immunity creates additional obstacles that do not apply to investor-owned utilities. In every case, the timeline from fire to final payment spans years.

1
PBS NewsHour. PG&E To Plead Guilty to Lethal Crimes in 2018 Wildfires
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NPR. PG&E Announces $13.5 Billion Settlement of Claims Linked to California Wildfires
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PG&E Corp. PG&E Reaches Agreement to Resolve Individual Claims
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Fire Victim Trust. Fire Victim Trust
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Fire Victim Trust. Letter From the Trustee
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Courthouse News Service. PG&E Settles Zogg Fire Case for $50 Million
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Sonoma County District Attorney. PG&E Resolves Prosecution of Kincade Fire
8
PacifiCorp. Information Wildfire Litigation
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Justia. James v. PacifiCorp, A183140
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Keller Rohrback. PacifiCorp Fire Litigation
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U.S. Department of Justice. PacifiCorp Agrees to Pay $575M to Settle Claims
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CalMatters. Southern California Edison Eaton Fire Compensation
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Los Angeles Times. LA County Prosecutors Probing Whether Edison Should Be Criminally Prosecuted for Eaton Fire
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Daily News. Attorneys Claim New Video Ends Any Doubt That SCE Started Eaton Fire
15
Utility Dive. Southern California Edison Wildfire Costs
16
Carrier Management. Palisades Fire Lawsuit
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ABC7. New Allegations in Palisades Fire Lawsuit Accuse LADWP of Altering Records
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Eisner Amper. Eaton and Palisades Fire Litigation
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Honolulu Civil Beat. Maui Fire Lawsuit Payouts Are Near, Few Survivors Will Break Even
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Hawaiian Electric. Hawaiian Electric Joins Global Settlement Agreement
21
Carrier Management. Maui Fire Lawsuit Attorney Fees Capped
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Hawaiian Electric Industries. Hawaiian Electric Industries Annual Report
23
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Wildfire Risk Review of Utility Industry Trends
24
NPR. Texas Sues Minnesota-Based Electric Company for Causing 2024 Smokehouse Creek Fire
25
Texas Attorney General. Attorney General Paxton Sues Electric Company Causing Devastating Smokehouse Creek Fire
26
California Public Utilities Commission, Public Advocates Office. Wildfire Safety Inverse Condemnation Policy Paper
27
California Wildfire Fund. California Wildfire Fund
28
Nossaman LLP. Landmark Legislation Creates New Wildfire Fund
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Nossaman LLP. California’s Ambitious New Bill Overhauls the State’s Approach to Wildfires
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California Wildfire Fund. California Catastrophe Response Council Meeting Materials
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California Public Utilities Commission, Public Advocates Office. California Should Not Let the Wildfire Fund Run Dry