Wildfire survivors and advocates learned during a virtual protest held over Zoom on Tuesday that Pacific Gas & Electric Company’s safety certificate has been renewed this year — a move they say will give the public utility a “license to burn” by letting it tap into a multi-billion dollar state wildfire fund to pay to the victims of the fires.said Monday that PG&E will be granted the certificate, which will remain in effect for 12 months, according to a news release.
“We’ve known that this is a possibility, that they’re going to keep checking the boxes and keep PG&E in power,” Woiwode continued. “It remains in the governor’s table on his desk, whether to continue to uphold PG&E’s reign of terror over our communities or do something different.” Margarita Garcia, farmworker and leader of North Bay Jobs With Justice, said during the Zoom protest that her house was burned down in the 2017 Tubbs Fire, which swept through Santa Rosa and killed 22 people, and is organizing with workers to demand smoke protections and fire safety in wine county vineyards. State fire investigators said in 2019 that the Tubbs Fire was caused by a “private electrical system” centered around a woodpecker-weakened pole and not PG&E as was widely speculated.
“We’ve had five climate-related disasters happened here in the last several years,” Benson said. “We take this on with PTSD running rampant here. …A lot of us volunteers are really exhausted but we fight on.” The utility also caused a fatal natural gas explosion that killed eight people and destroyed a San Bruno neighborhood in 2010. PG&E was convicted in 2016 of six criminal charges connected to the San Bruno pipeline explosion and fined $3 million.