Editor's note: On Wednesday at noon, the day before jury selection was set to start, Xcel Energy announced it had reached an agreement with plaintiffs to settle all claims in the lawsuit over the Marshall Fire.
The other defendants in the case, two telecommunications companies, also agreed to the settlement. Xcel said it expects to pay about $640 million as a result of the settlements. The company emphasized that it's not admitting any fault or wrongdoing and maintained that its equipment did not cause or contribute to the fire.
Original Story:
The trial to determine responsibility for the Marshall Fire, the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history, gets underway this week. Jury selection begins on Thursday at the Boulder County Justice Center.
The fire, which spread by high winds and fed by dry conditions, destroyed more than 1,000 homes on Dec. 30, 2021. Entire neighborhoods in Superior, Louisville and unincorporated Boulder County were burned to the ground. Insurance claims topped $2 billion dollars. Many homeowners were underinsured.
The effort to determine liability for the fire is ongoing. In 2023, local investigators found that the Marshall Fire originated from two sources: buried embers on a private property and damaged powerlines near a trailhead. Now, Xcel Energy is going to court to fight a lawsuit brought by more than 4,000 homeowners, businesses and insurers.
Rebuilding continues four years later...
Brandon Garcia, who lost his home in Louisville, is one of the many homeowners suing Xcel. Through this trial, he is hoping to better understand what went wrong that day.
“Who made the decisions? How can they be held accountable? And how can we prevent this from happening in the future?” Garcia said.
The majority of homeowners have rebuilt and moved back in. Many have relocated. Others, like Garcia and his family, are still struggling with recovery: his new home remains unfinished. Pipes have leaked, mold has grown and siding is missing. He is suing his builder and landscaper.
“Louisville is a very family-oriented place,” Garcia said. “And, you know, we had a really special kind of community structure going, and all that just evaporated with the fire.”
550 homes in Louisville burned down in 2021. While 468 have returned home, according to the city’s dashboard, the years since have been filled with instability. The Garcias moved from town to town, living in rentals for six months at a time. Some of their kids' friends left the area entirely. The Garcias have been living in limbo for years.
“You know, life moves on, you see other tragedies, and you realize that they're going to keep happening in the world,” Garcia said. “It'll get better one day, and we’re just going to deal with this the best we can.”
Who is responsible?
The trial, which is scheduled to last through mid-November, aims to determine who is responsible for the Marshall Fire. Other than Xcel, two telecommunications companies are named in the suit: Teleport Communications and CenturyLink.
Plaintiffs argue that the three companies’ “improper installation, maintenance, and lack of inspections” of power equipment and communications lines caused the fire near the Marshall Mesa Trailhead.
The companies deny that their equipment was to blame and said that the destruction was instead the result of a fire that sparked earlier on private property owned by the Twelve Tribes religious group. The Twelve Tribes is not being sued.
James Avery, an attorney for hundreds of homeowners and business owners, said the experts representing his clients plan to argue that the overall calamity wouldn’t have occurred without the second ignition of power lines by the trailhead. He expects a bulk of the trial to focus on fire science and power line equipment.
His clients want to be made whole.
“To the people who lost everything, it's as if it happened yesterday,” Avery said.
However, this trial will only establish responsibility – or lack of responsibility – for the fire. Any damages awarded would come through a separate trial.
Setting a new precedent
Only a few lawsuits against utilities over wildfire damages have been fully litigated, said Eric Macomber, a wildfire legal fellow at Stanford Law School. The ones that have had big impacts.
Pacific Gas and Electric in California filed for bankruptcy in the wake of the Camp Fire. Jurors in Oregon found PacifiCorp “grossly negligent” for the 2020 Labor Day Fires. Though the case is still being litigated, it ignited a wave of state laws across the West, attempting to shield utilities from some of the responsibility of starting a fire.
Macomber said because the cases are brought under state liability laws, the Marshall Fire lawsuit could set a precedent for utilities in Colorado going forward.
“Xcel choosing to litigate this case in the first place, I think that probably indicates that they think they've got a very solid case,” Macomber said.
He believes the trial could highlight what a jury or court is willing to accept in terms of what a utility can show to convey it was doing enough to limit fire risk. But he said it might not reach that stage because Xcel is denying responsibility for starting the fire.
“If you can show that there wasn't causation, you don't even get to the question of negligence,” Macomber said.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Northern Colorado, KANW in New Mexico, Colorado Public Radio, KJZZ in Arizona and NPR, with additional support from affiliate newsrooms across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
