Oregon’s Court of Appeals said in its Wednesday ruling that a trial jury in a 2023 case was wrongly instructed in a way that could have carried across evidence tied to separate 2020 wildfires, a decision that now sends the class-action back for further proceedings.
The appeals court’s three-judge panel concluded the trial court erred when it instructed jurors that they could assume that evidence presented at trial regarding four different fires applied to all class members. The panel said the instruction was legally erroneous because “certain evidence at trial, particularly related to causation, did not necessarily apply to every class member,” and that the instruction was prejudicial to PacifiCorp. The court “reverse[d] and remand[ed],” according to its written ruling.
The class members described in the appellate decision include owners of more than 2,000 parcels of property that were damaged by different parts of the 2020 fire season. The panel said some parcels were separated by “well over a hundred miles,” and that the class covered multiple blazes, including the Santiam Canyon fire in northwestern Oregon, the Echo Mountain Complex fire near the coast, and the South Obenchain and 242 fires in southwestern Oregon.
The ruling matters because juries after the 2023 trial have ordered PacifiCorp to pay more than $1 billion in damages to a class that includes thousands of members, building on earlier verdicts tied to different components of the wildfire litigation. In Wednesday’s decision, the appellate court pointed to the specific jury-instruction problem and sent the case back to a lower court rather than resolving the dispute on the merits.
The 2020 Labor Day weekend wildfires were among the worst natural disasters in Oregon’s history, killing 11 people, burning more than 1,560 square miles, and destroying thousands of homes. More than 1,000 class members have cases set for trial in 2026 and 2027, the report said, and it remained unclear how the case would progress next or whether plaintiffs would seek further review in the state supreme court.
After the decision, PacifiCorp said in a statement that the court’s ruling supports what it called its longstanding belief that the litigation process was prejudicial and not appropriate for managing wildfire claims. The company also said it remains open to resolving reasonable claims and will keep defending against what it described as unsupported claims.
Plaintiffs’ lead counsel said the appellate decision was a “procedural setback” and that “nothing in this ruling suggests the jury got it wrong.” The statement continued that the court rejected PacifiCorp’s effort to win the appeal on the merits, and instead addressed a single jury instruction while outlining several paths forward, including “fixing that instruction and trying the case again.”
Separately, PacifiCorp has agreed to pay more than $2 billion to settle claims stemming from the 2020 blazes, including $575 million to the federal government for wildfire damages on federal land in Oregon and California. The company has also said it plans to sell its wind, natural gas generation and distribution assets and infrastructure in Washington state to Portland General Electric for $1.9 billion to help stabilize its finances, and it has had to post bonds tied to wildfire judgments, a factor that has put pressure on cash flow, according to the report.