PG&E Has a Plan to Prevent More Deadly Wildfires

(Bloomberg) -- Five months after wildfires ripped through Northern California’s wine country, PG&E Corp. has developed a plan to lower the risk of another outbreak.

PG&E will establish new guidelines for proactively turning off power lines in areas where there’s extreme fire risk -- a practice that regulators had asked about after last year’s events. The company will also keep trees and limbs farther away from power lines to meet new standards and expand its practice of disabling some equipment during fire season, according to an emailed statement Thursday.

The announcement comes as state investigators probe whether PG&E power lines played a role in causing fires in Napa and Sonoma counties that destroyed thousands of structures and killed at least 40 people. The San Francisco-based company has lost more than a third of its market value amid investor concern that its equipment may have sparked the deadly blazes. No cause has been determined.

To contact the reporter on this story: Mark Chediak in San Francisco at mchediak@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Lynn Doan at ldoan6@bloomberg.net, Will Wade

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