The Wall Street Journal has an excellent article, unfortunately behind their paywall, which describes the way in which it was determined that Pacific Gas & Electric Co., aka PG&E, had criminal liability in the 2018 Camp Fire in CA which burned down the town of Paradise and killed 84 people. Sadly, the article is featured on a news service to which I can't give you a link.
It turned out that the parts of the High Voltage line running up the Feather River canyon past Pulga, where the fire started, had hung there since the 1930s with essentially no replacement. The part that broke, dropping a hot wire where it started the blaze, had worn through from swaying in the windy canyon, metal on metal, for 70 years.
After the fire they inspected the rest of that line and found many things in nearly similar states of decrepitude. Then they inspected all of their 5500 miles of lines and found 250,000 things needing repair. Apparently the theory had been, when something breaks, we'll fix it.
PG&E entered a guilty plea of involuntary manslaughter for the 84 deaths, and went through bankruptcy. As far as I can determine, no one served jail time for the negligent failure to perform preventive maintenance. In addition to the persons injured or harmed financially by the fire, people who held PG&E stock found its worth had become zero.
A mitigating factor is that PG&E has for years been pressured by the CA legislature to pursue renewable sources of power. It is likely funds that PG&E would have spent on maintenance were diverted to chasing the chimeras of solar and wind power.
----------
The home we sold in CA in 2020 was located perhaps 20 miles southwest of the ignition point. The town that burned down - Paradise - was 10 miles up the hill from our place, and the fire eventually burned to within 10 feet of our house. We lost some landscaping but - thanks to our firebreaks - neither our house nor outbuildings burned.
At the time it happened we were on a cruise ship two days sailing west of Hawaii, headed home from a trip that included visiting friends on Guam. We spent those two days thinking our house was gone, until our phones went "live" in Hawaii and we could call a neighbor who said it was safe.
