California’s biggest utility was rocked Monday after lawmakers dealt Gov. Gavin Newsom a blow over a sweeping wildfire liability overhaul.
Page B1From§Eachthe early bird edition — 31 August 2026
California utilities crash while insurers circle, Gary Indiana still waiting weeks for power to return.
As it ran on the front
OBITUARY: Reliable Power, a public expectation, age unknown, died this week across two different states, of causes that turned out to be entirely foreseeable.
In California, it is survived by a handful of utility companies whose shares fell off a cliff, and by insurers who, smelling the trouble, have started backing away from the risk rather than underwriting it. In Gary, Indiana, it is survived by a mayor who described his city, plainly, as left behind and overlooked, after weeks -- not hours, weeks -- without power.…
…(cont) Reliable Power was preceded in death by a number of quieter things: the assumption that keeping the lights on was a baseline utilities existed to guarantee, the assumption that a mayor wouldn't have to hold a press conference just to say his constituents deserved better, the assumption that an insurer's retreat from a market was a warning sign and not just a Tuesday.
It was, for a long stretch, taken for granted, the way a whippersnapper takes a working furnace for granted until the day it isn't. Nobody wrote its obituary sooner because nobody thought it needed one. This is the trouble with institutions that quietly stop functioning -- the malarkey gets dressed up as market conditions, as risk pricing, as an isolated outage, right up until two different states are living the same story in the same week and it stops looking isolated.
There was, this desk will note plainly, a fair amount of penny-ante blame-shifting on the way out -- statements about market forces, about weather, about circumstances beyond anyone's control -- and under all of it sat the same shit outcome for the people paying the bill, whether that bill showed up as a rate increase or as a week without a refrigerator.
Reliable Power is survived by the people who kept paying for it anyway.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that utility regulators open the books and read the numbers out loud, in public, before the next outage writes the next obituary.
“Wall Street watches the utility stock chart like a heart monitor while a mayor in Gary is still explaining to his constituents why the lights went out for weeks -- the line's dead and nobody's rushing to fix it.”
“Falling utility shares reflect a healthy market pricing in risk, and insurers stepping back just means underwriting discipline. Did I say healthy? people are still without power, but discipline is discipline.”
The receipts
Eddie Melton, the mayor of the majority-Black city, says infrastructure must be hardened ahead of future severe storms.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.