Amanda L. Riddle

It was her first case as a practicing lawyer, after the University of San Francisco School of Law. During a rainstorm the main clogged and raw sewage flooded her clients' home. The investigation found thick tree roots growing into the pipe and blocking it. The city could not produce maintenance records because, as she later wrote, it did not maintain the lines with any regularity. The claim she brought did not depend on proving the city careless. Under article I, section 19 of the California Constitution, a public improvement that damages private property makes its owner liable whether or not anyone was at fault, and a property owner who wins recovers attorneys' fees under section 1036 of the Code of Civil Procedure. Riddle has since used that rule, and the Barham decision extending it to investor-owned utilities that operate like the state, against a gas line, a power line and a transmission tower.

Line 132

At 6:11 on the evening of September 9, 2010, a thirty-inch PG&E gas transmission line, Line 132, ruptured beneath the Crestmoor neighborhood of San Bruno. The escaping gas ignited. Eight people died, fifty-eight were injured and about thirty-eight homes were leveled. Federal investigators found that the twenty-eight-foot segment that failed had been assembled from shorter pieces welded together in 1956, with seam welds that did not fully penetrate the steel and had never been tested by methods that would have found the defect.

The lawsuits, more than seventy of them from more than twenty firms, were coordinated in San Mateo County Superior Court as JCCP 4648 before Judge Steven L. Dylina. Riddle, whose office in Millbrae is a few miles from the blast site, was appointed plaintiffs' co-liaison counsel. She moved for a ruling that PG&E was liable in inverse condemnation for the damage its pipeline had done to the neighborhood's property, and the court granted it. On December 15, 2011, PG&E announced that it accepted financial liability for the explosion. In October 2012 Judge Dylina refused to strike the punitive-damages claims before trial. PG&E settled with 286 plaintiffs on September 6, 2013 and 61 more three days later; by then it had paid $565 million to 499 people. The California Public Utilities Commission fined the company $1.6 billion in April 2015, and in August 2016 a federal jury convicted it of pipeline-safety violations and obstruction.

Five Years to the Day

On September 9, 2015, at 2:26 in the afternoon, a tree touched a PG&E power line near Jackson in Amador County. The Butte Fire burned for twenty-two days across Amador and Calaveras counties, 70,868 acres, killed two people and destroyed more than nine hundred structures. The claims were coordinated in Sacramento Superior Court, and Riddle was again appointed plaintiffs' co-liaison counsel.

On June 22, 2017, Judge Allen Sumner ruled that the Butte Fire had been caused by a public improvement as PG&E deliberately designed and constructed it, and that the company was liable to the property owners in inverse condemnation. The ruling removed negligence from the question of who would pay for the houses. What remained for each family was proof of what the fire had taken from them.

Nine Seats

The 2017 North Bay fires and the 2018 Camp Fire followed, and in January 2019 PG&E filed for bankruptcy under the weight of the claims. Riddle was part of the plaintiffs' negotiating team for the settlement that became the Fire Victim Trust: $13.5 billion in cash and PG&E stock for the people harmed by the Butte, North Bay and Camp fires. The trust was funded on July 1, 2020, with $5.4 billion in cash and 22.19 percent of PG&E's outstanding shares, and PG&E paid a further $1.35 billion in 2021 and 2022. More than 85 percent of the fire victims who voted on the plan accepted it.

Riddle sits on the trust's nine-member Oversight Committee, with Elizabeth Cabraser, Frank Pitre, Gerald Singleton and five others, appointed to represent the claimants while the trust evaluates and pays tens of thousands of claims. She had negotiated the money; the committee's job was to see that it reached people.

Three Liaison Counsel, Forty-Seven Firms

The Eaton Fire started in Eaton Canyon on the evening of January 7, 2025, in Santa Ana winds, and moved into Altadena. Nineteen people died. More than nine thousand homes and businesses were destroyed or damaged. By January 23, Riddle's firm and Gibbs Mura, working together as the Corey Gibbs Fire Lawyers, had filed suit against Southern California Edison for Altadena and Pasadena homeowners and renters, alleging that the company had failed to inspect and maintain its lines and had not shut off power as the winds rose. "The devastation is terrible," Riddle said, "and it didn't have to be this way."

On March 17, 2025, Judge Laura A. Seigle of the Los Angeles Superior Court entered Case Management Order No. 1 in Gursey v. Southern California Edison Company, the lead case for more than 130 related actions. The order appointed Riddle, Gerald Singleton and Rahul Ravipudi liaison counsel for the individual plaintiffs, with a steering committee of forty-seven firms behind them, and separate liaison counsel for the insurers' subrogation claims and for the public entities. Liaison counsel were to be the spokespersons and coordinators for their group: to advance the money to prosecute the common case, coordinate the master liability discovery against Edison, organize briefing on shared issues, and file joint reports with the court. Master complaints were due within sixty days, individual plaintiffs would adopt them by notice, and the cases were consolidated for pretrial purposes only. "It is essential," Riddle said, "that each and every survivor of the Eaton Fire have their voice represented in this litigation."

The liability record is built once, for everyone: the ignition, the tower, the wind, the company's records. The losses are proved one household at a time, with a family's own photographs, deeds, leases, receipts and medical records, gathered while the family is living somewhere else.

Twelve Seconds

On August 4, 2026, after eighteen months of investigation, the Los Angeles County Fire Department and CAL FIRE released their reports on the cause. Investigators concluded that the fire began in the dry fuel bed on the spur ridge above the Eaton Wash, below Edison's transmission towers, and that it was caused by electrical arcing on an out-of-service Edison tower. Arcing lines near the tower ejected hot metal particles into the vegetation at its base, and the fire was burning within twelve seconds. Edison said it believed it likely that its equipment was associated with the ignition; by then the company's own compensation program had offered more than $775 million to more than four thousand applicants. "Edison prioritized profits over safety," Riddle said the next day, "and we are committed to helping survivors pursue their legal rights and hold Edison accountable."

The finding settled the question of cause. It did not settle liability under the law, or what any family was owed. Judge Seigle has set the first bellwether trial, for roughly fifty representative plaintiffs, for January 25, 2027, and refused Edison's request to move it to August. Riddle's liaison work runs to that date: the common record on one track, and on the other, the separate proof of each house on each street in Altadena.