California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric—and What It Means for America's Power Grid

NATIONAL BESTSELLER2022 Winner of the Golden Poppy Award for Nonfiction (California Independent Booksellers Alliance)A revelatory, urgent narrative with national implications, exploring the decline of California’ s largest utility company that led to countless wildfires— including the one that destroyed the town of Paradise– and the human cost of infrastructure failurePacific Gas and Electric was a legacy company built by innovators and visionaries, establishing California as a desirable home and economic powerhouse.

In California Burning, Wall Street Journal reporter and Pulitzer finalist Katherine Blunt examines how that legacy fell apart— unraveling a long history of deadly failures in which Pacific Gas and Electric endangered millions of Northern Californians, through criminal neglect of its infrastructure.