Incident Investigations for Electric and Communication Facilities

Electric utilities must report electric incidents (accidents involving electric facilities), which meet any of the criteria below:

• A fatality or injury involving electric facilities.
• Damage to property of the utility or others in excess of $50,000.
• Significant media coverage.
• A major outage to at least 10% of the utilities entire service territory is experienced at a single point in time.

In general, the electric utility must report these types of incidents to the CPUC within two (2) hours of their occurrence. ESRB investigates these incidents to enforce the CPUC’s rules and regulations and to determine how we can limit the occurrences of such incidents in the future.   ESRB produces an investigative report for each incident reported and investigated.

To request a copy of a report, please contact our Legal Division with a specific and focused request so that the records can be identified, located and retrieved our staff:

CPUC Legal Division Public Records Office

505 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco, CA 94102

Fax: (415) 703-2262

Phone: 415-703-1366

public.records@cpuc.ca.gov

For more details about the reporting requirements, please see the excerpt from Appendix B to D.06-04-055 and CPUC Resolution E-4184.

ESRB Investigations

Larkin Substation Outage - On April 21, 2017, an equipment failure at Larkin Substation resulted in a fire and outage to the northern part of San Francisco, California. Larkin Substation is owned by Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E). The CPUC is currently investigating the root cause of the incident. [Download the Outage Investigation Report by PG&E's consultant Exponent] 

Historical Incident Statistics

Note: The data below was collected from our database through December 2017.

Total Number of Reported Incidents

The table below shows the total number of reported incidents by each utility per year.

Total Number of Fatalities per Utility

The table below shows the number of fatalities that resulted from reported incidents for each utility.

Total Number of Injuries per Utility

The table below shows the total number of injuries that resulted from reported incidents for each utility.

Total Number of Utility Incidents by Cause

The table below shows the total  number of reported incidents sorted by cause for each utility.