SACRAMENTO, Calif — Camp Fire survivors, relatives of the 85 who died, and First Amendment advocates say a massive written record documenting Pacific Gas and Electric Company's (PG&E) crimes has been kept hidden too long.
“How do we know the truth that those details don't come out? We don’t,” said Karen Corson, who escaped from the Feather River Hospital in Paradise where she worked.
Corson, who worked as director of the hospital’s lab, evacuated a patient in her personal car during the morning of the Camp Fire, driving through burning trees to safety.
Her home, along with 14,000 others, burned down. Like most survivors, she moved away.
The 7,000-page record of a Butte County grand jury’s yearlong investigation remains a secret today, even though PG&E pleaded guilty to all 85 charges in that grand jury’s indictment.
“This is the people testifying… and the evidence that flowed from that testimony,” Butte County Attorney Mike Ramsey said. "What exactly was that evidence that so scared [PG&E] they felt that they needed to plead [guilty] to 84 deaths?"
VICTIM FAMILIES SENSE A 'COVER-UP'
California’s 3rd District Court of Appeal sealed the grand jury transcripts in June 2020, the same month PG&E pleaded guilty to the Camp Fire crimes.
“That's wrong, obviously,” Corson said. “Where's transparency in all that?”
The court was asked to seal the transcripts in a PG&E-funded lawsuit on behalf of 22 of the 200 PG&E employees named in the case, who cited safety concerns.
The names of the 22 employees were obtained by ABC10 from digital copies of the lawsuit which did not properly blackout the employees' names.
"It's a cover-up," said Phil Binstock, whose father Julian burned to death in his home during the Camp Fire. "They want to protect their futures. They don't want anybody to dig through and find out that these people were responsible."
ABC10, joined by the Wall Street Journal, argued to the court that the public has a right to know all of the details of the company's crimes, including the identities of the people who testified.
The justices are weighing whether to release the transcript, redact workers’ names and job titles, or keep the records secret forever.
It’s all been kept secret in the meantime, with no ruling from the court since the case was fully briefed in October 2020.
After ABC10 recently asked the court’s clerk when a decision might come, the court said this month that it intends to make a decision soon.
SECRECY OF THE CASE 'A FAILURE OF GOVERNMENT'
“For a catastrophe of this magnitude, to have these records sealed for this long is intolerable,” said attorney Glen Smith with the First Amendment Coalition.
His nonpartisan group’s guide to California grand jury records spells out that ordinarily, these records would become available ten days after the grand jury is done with the case.
PG&E pleaded guilty to the Camp Fire felonies back in June 2020.
The company has come under criminal investigation for starting large fires every year since Paradise burned to the ground.
Smith says the life-and-death nature of PG&E’s tendency to start fires ought to have prompted this information to come out long ago.
“It’s a failure of government at several different levels,” Smith said, arguing that not only should the court have already acted by now, but lawmakers and regulators should have held public hearings to probe the facts of the criminal case to make the facts public.
The new calls for transparency for PG&E’s criminal behavior come as ABC10’s FIRE - POWER - MONEY investigation revealed this week that prosecutors in the Camp Fire case are concerned that PG&E is still behaving in criminal ways.
“They're not learning from their history and that's why they keep repeating it,” lead Camp Fire prosecutor Marc Noel said. “We had hoped that the job we did in the Camp Fire would cause that to change. And apparently, it hasn't.”
“What they're learning is how better to bury their crimes,” Noel added.
Karen Corson had a simple message for the justices who'll decide when and if the records of PG&E's Camp Fire crimes will ever come out.
"Release those documents," said Corson. "Release those documents so the truth can come out and the appropriate actions can be taken to help to hold them accountable."
GO DEEPER: This story is part of ABC10's FIRE - POWER - MONEY reporting project. New episodes air August 10, 11, and 12. If you have a tip that could reveal more about California's crisis with utilities and wildfires, please contact investigative reporter Brandon Rittiman at brittiman@abc10.com.
WATCH THE FULL SERIES: Fire-Power-Money