Subject: Re: Billions in damages
From the Oregon NBC news report (Kezi News):

Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire Hathaway estimates that its utilities face at least $8 billion in claims across all the wildfire lawsuits already filed in Oregon and California, although the damages could be doubled or even tripled in some of those cases and some of the lawsuits don’t list a dollar amount.
https://www.kezi.com/news/paci...

$8b plus is a lot of claims, although they won't all go against Berkshire and the final amount may be a lot less if their appeals are successful or it they come to an out of court settlement. From the same news report:

PacifiCorp, a unit of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, is appealing. The utility said in an email Tuesday it has settled hundreds of claims relating to the fires and “remains committed to settling all reasonable claims for actual damages under Oregon law.”


Bad as it is, I think the more worrying aspect of this is that the regulatory environment seems to have changed in a very unfavourable way for Berkshire. If they end up paying out a few billion for the 2020 fires, that's not such a big deal for Berkshire, but if the environment is such that they no longer want to invest a lot of new capital in the utilities, that is a bigger problem, and it is not obvious to me how Berkshire can solve it.

Perhaps there is a technical fix, cutting off power more quickly when there is any hint of a problem - why wouldn't they do that, anyway? But I don't have enough understanding of the feasibility of switching off the power quickly nor the pros and cons of doing that to answer that question.

dtb