A Multnomah County jury slapped PacifiCorp with nearly $18 million in punitive damages on Wednesday after determining its conduct during the 2020 Labor Day wildfires was reprehensible and showed a reckless and outrageous indifference to the wellbeing of residents of the communities ravaged by four fires that weekend.
The punitive award was 25% of the nearly $72 million in compensatory damages that the jury awarded the same plaintiffs on Monday for property losses and pain and suffering after determining that the utility’s conduct was grossly negligent, reckless and willful. Each of the named individuals in the lawsuit was awarded between $3 million and $5.5 million in compensation.
The decision on both liability and punitive damages will apply to the entire class of some 5,000 survivors of the four fires. Those plaintiffs will need to prove their damages in a future court proceeding, but any actual damages awarded will be increased by 25 percent.
Under Oregon statute, the economic damages awarded to wildfire victims can also be doubled if the defendant’s conduct is determined to be reckless or willful, so the amount awarded to plaintiffs Monday may grow further.
In a news release issued Wednesday, the plaintiffs’ lawyers said the verdicts paved the way for billions of dollars in potential future compensation for victims. As such, they said it would be the largest civil jury verdict in Oregon history.
“This verdict is an important milestone for the thousands of Oregonians who lived through the Labor Day fires,” said Matt Preusch, a lawyer with Keller Rohrbach, co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs along with Edelson PC and Stoll Berne. “It not only provides answers to so many Oregonians who have been waiting for years, but it finally holds PacifiCorp accountable for its conduct.”
It was a crushing defeat for PacifiCorp, whose lawyers told jurors Tuesday that a sizable punitive damage award, applied to the larger class, could send it into bankruptcy. The company had issued a news release Monday saying it planned to appeal the verdict and was “confident we will prevail.”
Plaintiffs in the lawsuit alleged that their properties were destroyed by power-line caused fires, and that PacifiCorp was negligent in failing to de-energize its lines amid dire forecasts of an impending windstorm and extreme fire danger.
Some 2,500 private properties burned in the four fires at issue, which included the Santiam fires east of Salem, the Echo Mountain complex near Lincoln City, the South Obenchain fire northeast of Medford, and the Two Four Two near the upper Klamath town of Chiloquin.
During the daylong proceeding over punitive damages, plaintiffs’ attorneys hammered on their claim that the company and its executives had accepted no responsibility for their actions during the trial or after the verdict. They claimed deficient tree trimming and maintenance practices were part of a pattern and practice at PacifiCorp that had caused a host of other destructive wildfires before and after Labor Day 2020. And they told the jury that imposing punitive damages was their opportunity to send a direct message to a highly profitable company about accountability and deterrence.
PacifiCorp, Oregon’s second-largest utility, is a subsidiary of billionaire Warren Buffett’s conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway.
“This is a corporation. What matters to them is money,” Cody Berne, a lawyer in Stoll Berne’s Portland office, told jurors. “That is the power you now have, to speak to them in the language that they know, to speak to them in the language they understand. And that is money.”
The defense, meanwhile, suggested that Monday’s $72 million damage award had already delivered a resounding message, that the company had vastly upgraded its wildfire preparedness since 2020, and that even the smallest punitive damage multiplier, when applied to thousands of plaintiffs in the class, could result in utility’s bankruptcy.
Doug Dixon, a lawyer with PacifiCorp’s lead counsel, Hueston Hennigan, argued that a punitive damages award required a finding that the utility’s employees were utterly indifferent to the plight of the fires’ victims. He said that was a bar the plaintiffs couldn’t meet, as demonstrated by the wildfire mitigation, tree trimming and inspection programs the company had in place to address risks to residents in its service territory.
“You need to decide whether the women and men of Pacific Power did not care about the harm their actions caused,” Dixon told jurors, referring to the corporations Oregon subsidiary. “Your verdict in the first case sent a very clear message that Pacific Power did not do enough to protect the people in the four fire areas. But not doing enough and showing indifference, let alone outrageous or reckless indifference, are two very different things.”
The standard of proof for awarding punitive damages was higher than it was in the initial phase of the trial. It required plaintiffs to prove by clear and convincing evidence that PacifiCorp acted with reckless disregard to victims’ welfare, versus a preponderance of the evidence for awarding compensatory damages, which meant the plaintiffs only had to prove that it was more likely true that PacifiCorp’s negligence caused or was a substantial cause of harm.
Punitive damages are designed to penalize wrongdoers for particularly egregious behavior and deter them or others from similar conduct. Seventy percent of such awards go to the state. Plaintiffs receive the remaining 30% but pay attorneys’ fees out of that portion.
The court is required to review the punitive damages award to determine if its reasonable, and PacifiCorp can request it be reduced by establishing that it has taken steps to ensure the conduct in question never reoccurs.
