The survivors of the fire want an investigation of the money used by Edison to prevent wildfires

Survivors of the Eaton wildfire called on state lawmakers Wednesday to pass a bill that would require an audit of the spending by Southern California Edison and the state's two other large for-profit electric utilities on wildfire prevention.

The survivors identified the an investigation by The Times which found that Edison did not spend the hundreds of millions of dollars it told regulators before the fire was needed to keep its transmission system safe. Edison had begun charging customers for the cost.

“Californians have funded wildfire prevention,” Joy Chen, executive director of the All Fire Survivor's Network, told members of the Assembly Utilities and Energy Commission on Wednesday. “And we who survived paid the price when that job was not done.”

Although the government's investigation into the fire has not been released, Edison said believes that the century-old transmission line, which has not carried power since 1971, may have been revived for a while on the night of Jan. 7, 2025, to light the fire. The fire killed 19 people and destroyed thousands of homes and other buildings in Altadena.

Chen's group of wildfire survivors and Consumer Watchdog sponsored the bill, known as Assembly Bill 1744. It would require the wildfire safety costs of Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric to be audited by an independent accounting firm.

The state's Public Utilities Commission will have to consider the audit results before agreeing to raise customer rates to cover wildfire costs.

“If Edison had known he was going to answer for those costs, the wildfire might not have started,” Jamie Court of Consumer Watchdog told the committee, referring to the Eaton fire.

All three utilities said at the hearing they oppose the bill.

A lobbyist for San Diego Gas & Electric said he believed the audit was unnecessary because the commission was already reviewing spending.

“We think it creates an iterative process,” he said.

At the committee hearing, Edison's attorney did not say why the company opposed the bill.

The company has said that safety is its top priority and does not believe maintenance of the power lines was compromised before the Eaton fire.

Also voicing support for the bill at the hearing were survivors of other deadly wildfires in the state, including the 2018 campfire, which killed 85 people and destroyed much of the town of Paradise. Investigators determined the fire was started when equipment failed at a decades-old PG&E transmission line.

The bill's author, Assemblywoman Tasha Boerner, an Encinitas Democrat, pointed out how an independent study of wildfire costs for three companies from 2019 to 2020 found that $2.5 billion could not be accounted for.

That was the last independent audit of the bushfire costs of the three companies.

Despite these findings, the commission did not require the companies to refund any of the charges to electricity customers. Instead, the commission agreed that the companies could spend billions of dollars more, Boerner said.

“This is totally unacceptable,” he said.

Asked for a response to that audit, a lobbyist from San Diego Gas & Electric told the committee he was unaware of the findings.

California's electricity rates are the second highest in the state after Hawaii.

By 2024, wildfire costs reached 17% to 27% of the costs the three companies charge consumers, according to an official study of the Boerner bill. A typical customer pays $250 to $490 a year for that use.