In Simple Avo Paradise Ranch, LLC v. So. Cal Edison Co., No. B320948 (May 23, 2024), the California Court of Appeal (Second District) held that a complaint adequately alleged a claim for inverse condemnation by asserting a privately-owned public utility’s actions substantially caused a wildfire.
The court rejected the utility’s argument that alleging that the utility knew its infrastructure was old and improperly maintained and it failed to remediate these known risks was not enough to show substantial causation, and that this negligence shows only that its actions were a concurrent (and therefore not substantial) cause of the wildfire.
The court’s analysis turned on the California Supreme Court’s Oroville decision in which the court refined the “substantial causation” requirement where a secondary concurrent cause may be enough to absolve the government from inverse liability.
A large part of the opinion is about whether a stipulated judgment is appealable (yes