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"Bloomberg) -- A Berkshire Hathaway Inc. unit found liable by a jury for destruction caused by the 2020 Labor Day Fires in Oregon could face damages well beyond PacifiCorp's net worth of $10.7 billion, a lawyer for the company told a jury. ...

The final tab could add up to more than 10 times the value of the company, Alison Plessman, a lawyer for PacifiCorp, told the jury. If the owners of about 2,500 properties each win an average of $4.5 million as part of the class-action case, that would add up to $11.25 billion, she said. Punitive damages of five times that amount to each of two occupants of a home would result in a 10-fold increase."

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/berkshire-unit-liab...

The PG&E bankruptcy for similar causes demonstrates that a total wipeout is very plausible - and deserved, in that case. I don't know what PacifiCorps' history is, but PG&E has such a record of killing its own customers and destroying property that I consider the CA Public Utilities Commission to bear a lot of responsibility as well. There's no way they could not know what kind of company they were dealing with after the San Bruno gas line explosion in 2010, but they did very little to focus the company on operating safely in the intervening years.

Now we're left in a situation where PG&E just turns the power off whenever they consider weather conditions too risky. Undergrounding power lines is underway but completion is probably a decade off.

The more extreme weather conditions get, the better the case for distributed solar + storage.

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Berkshire Hathaway FAQ

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