Oregon Court Remands $1B Wildfire Suit to PacifiCorp Favor

An Oregon appeals court ruled Wednesday in favor of utility company PacifiCorp, remanding a class-action lawsuit back to a lower court and potentially endangering more than $1 billion in damages awarded to victims of the state's 2020 Labor Day wildfires.

The Oregon Court of Appeals found that a jury instruction in the 2023 trial was erroneous and prejudicial to PacifiCorp. In that trial, a Multnomah County jury held the utility liable for negligently failing to shut off power lines despite warnings from fire officials amid extreme weather conditions. The jurors awarded punitive and compensatory damages to a class of property owners whose lands were damaged in four separate blazes: the Santiam Canyon fire in northwestern Oregon, the Echo Mountain Complex near the coast, and the South Obenchain and 242 fires in southwestern Oregon. The class encompasses owners of over 2,000 parcels, some separated by more than 100 miles.

The appellate panel, in a three-judge decision, criticized the trial court's instruction allowing jurors to assume that evidence about the wildfires' causes applied uniformly to all class members. "We conclude that that instruction was legally erroneous, because...