The Ross wildfire has burned more than 80,000 acres across Palo Pinto and Jack counties, forcing evacuations, closing roads and disrupting schools.
Page F2From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 31 August 2026
Ross Fire burns 85,000 acres; lawmakers block plan to let insurers sue wildfire-causing utilities
As it ran on the front
The Ross Fire is logged at 85,000 acres, with destruction reported across two counties. In the same stretch of days, California lawmakers blocked Governor Newsom's push to let insurance companies sue the utility companies whose equipment is found to cause wildfires. Put those two entries in the same ledger and look at what doesn't balance.
An insurer that pays a claim on a burned house has, in the ordinary run of business, the right to go after whoever's equipment caused the loss — the same mechanism a car insurer uses against a drunk driver's policy. The blocked measure would have let insurers use that mechanism against utilities found to have started a wildfire. Lawmakers said no to that specific ask, in this specific session, while a fire the size of two counties was still being counted.…
…(cont) Nobody in Sacramento stood up and said the vote was about protecting a utility's balance sheet. That's not in the record, and this column doesn't put words in anyone's mouth. What's in the record is the vote itself and the acreage itself, filed the same week, and the plain fact that the vote removes one of the few tools an insurer has to shift a wildfire's cost off policyholders and onto the party whose lines may have started it.
Run the numbers straight. Eighty-five thousand acres burned. Two counties affected. One bill blocked that would have let the companies footing those claims go collect from the utilities found responsible. The gap between what the fire costs and who's allowed to bill for it doesn't close itself, hon — it moves, and it moves toward the next renewal notice, not toward the pole that sparked.
That's the whole filing. No adjectives needed. The acreage is the acreage, the vote is the vote, and the customer holding both bills is the same customer either way. When the account gets reconciled, the deficit isn't hidden in a hard-to-find column. It's the acreage number, sitting right next to the roll call, in plain sight, doing the arithmetic nobody in the chamber had to do out loud.
“Eighty-five thousand acres and two counties gone, and the same week Sacramento makes sure the company whose wires might've started it can't get billed for it. That's not an accident, that's a customer list. You already pay the utility bill and the fire insurance premium — now you get to cover the fire too.”
“Nobody's saying utilities like wildfires, that's absurd — this is about ratepayer stability, keeping premiums predictable for the whole system. Okay, it's specifically about keeping the utility's own premiums predictable. That's the version I meant to give you.”
The receipts
Newsom’s office pushed for the change as part of a wider effort to protect California’s wildfire liability fund and prevent utilities from potentially being driven into bankruptcy.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.