Pacific Gas and Electric Co. on Monday announced that it has agreed to plead guilty to an 85-count criminal indictment to settle all state charges related to the 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 84 people and destroyed the town of Paradise in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Butte County.

The company said in public filings made in its bankruptcy case and with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it had reached an agreement with the Butte County district attorney to plead guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter and one count of unlawfully starting a fire stemming from the 2018 Camp Fire. The company agreed to pay the maximum fines of about $4 million and to fund efforts to restore access to water over the next five years for residents affected by the loss of a canal destroyed by the fire.

In a press release confirming the plea deal, the Butte County district attorney noted that the underlying indictment would remain sealed until the company is arraigned next month. The arraignment had initially been set for this coming Friday, but was delayed after confirmed COVID-19 cases in Butte County led to the closure of the Chico courthouse.

"The action we took today is an important step in taking responsibility for the past and working to create a better future for all concerned," said PG&E CEO Bill Johnson. "We want wildfire victims, our customers, our regulators and leaders to know that the lessons we learned from the Camp Fire remain a driving force for us to transform this company," he said. The company was represented by lawyers at Munger, Tolles & Olson in the investigation.

Laurie Levenson who teaches criminal law at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles says the company had little choice but to accept full responsibility, especially in light of its prior felony conviction stemming from the 2010 pipeline explosion in San Bruno, which killed eight people and injured dozens more.

"This either has to be the biggest or one of the biggest corporate manslaughter cases that we've had," said Levenson. "This will be one that goes down in the books and sadly sets the standard."

Levenson said that one had to look back to the 1940s to the case of the Cocoanut Grove, where nearly 500 people died in a nightclub fire in Massachusetts, to find anything close to a parallel, and there the owner of the club faced charges rather than the business. Even in the case of the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico, which killed 11 workers, prosecutors eventually dropped manslaughter charges against two individual executives.

Rick Claypool, a research director in the president's office of consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, called for prosecutors to continue to investigate to see if any individuals at the company should be held culpable. "Investigations by the California attorney general and district attorney should continue so that any individual executives who also may be culpable in PG&E's crimes can be prosecuted and brought to justice," Claypool said. He added that since the company is already on probation for the San Bruno explosion, the state should consider pulling the company's charter.

Peter Henning, a professor at Wayne State University Law School, noted that the company has already faced scrutiny for its fire mitigation efforts from U.S. District Judge William Alsup, who is overseeing PG&E's probation in the San Bruno case. Henning said that he would not be surprised if Alsup finds the new guilty plea as a violation of the company's terms of probation and extends the length of his oversight or imposes new conditions.

"I think there's going to be an effort to make them upgrade their power lines, and that's going to be very, very costly," Henning said. "Rarely do we see this many deaths being attributed directly to a company. That's what makes this the rare case: PG&E is basically saying 'We did it. We killed 84 people.'"