Edison Accused of Deception in Lawsuit

Los Angeles, CAA lawsuit filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court alleges that the 2019 Saddleridge wildfire in Sylmar and the more recent Hurst Fire in January 2025, in the same area, were caused by the same incorrectly grounded transmission line that Edison had neglected to repair. The wildfire lawsuit includes a deposition of an L.A. Fire Department captain accusing Edison of deception.

Edison Accused of Deception in Lawsuit The lawsuit was filed by State Farm and USAA insurance companies seeking to recoup costs they paid to their policyholders for fire-related damages. Homeowners and others affected by the wildfires have filed similar claims in the same coordinated litigation. According to the Los Angeles Times, lawyers will have evidence that five separate fires ignited at five separate SCE transmission tower bases in the same way that started the Saddleridge fire,” the lawyers wrote of the Hurst fire in a June 9 filing in Los Angeles Superior Court. They said the Hurst wildfire is “further evidence” that a transmission pylon known as Tower 2-5 “is improperly grounded.”

Edison’s Deception: The Evidence

Capt. Timothy Halloran with the LA Fire Department testified that the following actions led him to believe Edison was intentionally withholding information, according to court documents and the Los Angeles Times.

Failed to inform the LAFD about a recorded electrical fault just minutes before the Saddleridge Fire began.
Attempted to obtain key surveillance footage rather than sharing it with investigators. A Southern California Edison employee offered to purchase surveillance video from a business next to one of its towers and near the ignition point of the 2019 Saddleridge Fire. Halloran learned from a news report that Sylmar resident Jack Carpenter had recorded a large flash of light on his dashboard camera that night. Halloran traced the flash to a transmission tower built on land used by Ornelas Wood Recovery Nursery. Employees at the nursery told him that an Edison employee had offered to buy the surveillance footage from the nursery’s camera.
A nursery employee also had taken photos of the broken steel equipment he found at the foot of the tower. The employee told Halloran that an Edison crew came the day after the fire and cleaned up the shattered pieces.

According to a report by L.A. Fire investigator Robert Price:

Price arrived at the dirt road leading up to the hillside transmission line where the fire had ignited the night before to see the yellow crime scene tape lying on the ground and an Edison truck driving out, He wrote that Edison’s equipment recorded a fault that resulted in a surge of electricity about three minutes before Robert Delgado (below) reported the fire to 911 at 9 p.m. But Edison did not tell the Fire Department about the fault.
Price saw Edison crews cleaning the towers along the line three days after the fire’s start. An Edison employee told him that the utility cleans the towers once a year but had decided to clean them that day “because they were dirty from the smoke and fire.”
The cleaning did not prevent fire investigators from finding burn marks at the bottom of a second tower not far from where Delgado and his wife live, which Price said may be related to the “catastrophic failure” of equipment at the tower by the nursery.

Mark Felling, an electrical engineer and paid expert in the lawsuit, testified that:

Edison’s equipment recorded a fault that resulted in a surge of electricity about three minutes before resident Roberto Delgado reported the fire to 911 at 9 p.m, as reported by The Sentinel. But the Fire Department was not told about the fault by Edison.
He found that the size of the cement footings under the towers along the line varied by a factor of 10. He said that the size of the footings affects whether the tower is properly grounded, and that a sudden power surge could cause some towers to become “electrified and potentially very hazardous.”

Eric Ujiiye at the Public Utilities Commission also investigated the 2019 fire soon after it started. He reported that:

Edison violated five regulations, including failing to safely maintain its equipment at the tower by the nursery.
The failure of equipment at the tower by the nursery “could have led to a fire ignition” at the pylon more than two miles away.

Homeowner Roberto Delgado told the Los Angeles Times that on the night of Jan. 7 he and his wife heard two loud booms that shook their Sylmar home, followed by a bright flash of light. Seconds later, they saw flames under two electric transmission towers owned by SoCal Edison — even more shocking because they had seen a fire ignite under one of those towers just six years before. “We were traumatized,” he told the Times. “It was almost the exact same thing.” In both fires, the family was forced flee with few belongings as the flames rushed through the brush toward their home, which survived both blazes.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers said that, while building the transmission line in 1970, Edison chose to “cost-save” and not include “any purposeful grounding devices” that would enable power surges to dissipate down the tower and into the earth. Instead, the company used “only insufficient concrete footings.”

Edison Replies

Edison disputes the lawyers’ assertions, calling their claims about the 2019 fire an “exotic ignition theory” based on “an unproven narrative.” Spokeswoman Kathleen Dunleavy told the Los Angeles Times that the utility had complied with the requests of investigators looking into the two fires and that “there is no connection” between the incidents. As for the surveillance video, she said it is common for any investigator to seek to obtain video that could aid in an investigation and denied that SCE’s investigator offered to buy the video.