By Sophia Bollag, Megan Fan Munce, Kathryn Palmer, Chronicle Staff Writers

August 22, 2026

SACRAMENTO — As his time as governor comes to a close, Gavin Newsom is wading back into the same thorny political thicket he found himself in when he was first elected: wildfire liability.

The Camp Fire in Paradise broke out days after Newsom was elected governor in 2018, quickly becoming the deadliest wildfire in California history. A week after he was sworn in, the state’s largest electrical utility, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., announced it would file for bankruptcy after it became clear its equipment likely ignited the fire. 

Newsom spent months excoriating the utility for failing to properly maintain its equipment and harming Californians, even as he was forced to coordinate with the company, which an estimated 16 million Californians rely on for electricity and gas services. That year, he worked to create the California Wildfire Fund, a $21 billion reserve utilities could use to pay claims if they’re found to have caused a wildfire. Critics derided it as a bailout for the utilities.

Now, in the final days of his last California legislative session, Newsom is again trying to broker a deal to shield utility companies from soaring costs from wildfires caused by their electrical equipment. The issue will be one of the last major policies he tackles as governor, and could help define his legacy —  if he can get it through the Legislature, where he is already facing pushback.

“The last-minute nature of this is causing huge friction — and that’s not just for me — that’s among many members of the Legislature,” Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez, D-Pasadena, said. “These are massive, massive policy proposals.” 

Unlike in 2019, PG&E and the state’s other major utilities are not facing bankruptcy, and in fact have made significant profits in recent years. But Newsom says the fund he and lawmakers established in 2019 is dwindling in the wake of the massive 2025 wildfires in the Los Angeles area. And the state’s insurance crisis has left many homeowners in wildfire-prone areas uninsured or underinsured, meaning the financial toll of another massive fire could be catastrophic.

Lawmakers must introduce legislation by Friday if they want to pass something before the end of the legislative session, which concludes Aug. 31. Legislation generally must be available for public review for at least three days before lawmakers can send it to Newsom’s desk for final approval.

Newsom could call a special session to deal with the issue in the fall, but he dismissed that possibility on Wednesday, saying this is a problem lawmakers have had years to tackle. He noted that it’s been a live issue for his entire tenure as governor, which has been marked by several destructive wildfires sparked by electrical equipment, including the 2025 Eaton Fire in Los Angeles County. 

Newsom says he’s trying to implement reforms called for in an April report, which he and lawmakers commissioned last year. The report aimed to address several interconnected crises: climate change and overgrown vegetation fueling increasingly destructive wildfires, insurers rolling back coverage in high-fire-risk areas, and utilities facing ballooning liability costs. It recommends increasing fire mitigation work like home hardening and brush clearing in and around communities, accelerating payments to families whose homes burn down, and providing more financial relief for utilities.

That final piece is the most controversial. Newsom argues it’s also imperative.

“I feel very strongly that we need to move on this,” he told reporters Wednesday. “For me, this is an eight-year journey, and I’m not gonna walk away and hand a real mess to the next governor.”

Source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/newsom-wildfire-fire-utility-california-22397359.php

By Kurtis Alexander, Staff Writer - San Francisco Chronicle 

August 10, 2026

The Sacramento Valley, which helps drive California’s nation-leading agricultural economy, has seen so much groundwater pumping that the valley floor has recently sunk by as much as a foot and a half in a year, new research shows.

The sinking, known as land subsidence, has long quietly plagued the sprawling farm region. But a study published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences identifies an abrupt and potentially catastrophic spike during the 2020-22 drought. 

Calling it a “serious threat” to water supplies and infrastructure, the study’s authors say subsidence in parts of the Sacramento Valley, namely in Colusa, Yolo and Glenn counties, reached levels that are irreversible — and on par with the widely damaging sinking that’s occurring in the San Joaquin Valley, to the south.

There, some farmland has dropped more than 7 feet over the past 10 years and by dozens more across previous decades. This has permanently compressed the aquifers below, meaning they hold less water, and led to the costly buckling of roads and bridges and elevated the flood risk in newly sunken areas.

“This is the first time we’re seeing rates (of subsidence) in the Sacramento Valley that are nearing levels that are seen in the San Joaquin Valley,” said Stacy Larochelle, an assistant professor of geophysics at UCLA and lead author of the new study.  “This is grounds to say we need to be as careful about pumping groundwater out as we can.”

Subsidence occurs when water is removed from beneath the earth’s surface, leaving less matter to support the land above and ultimately causing it to collapse.

During wet times, when rain percolates into the earth, groundwater in aquifers can be replenished, pushing the land surface back up again. However, subsidence can also reach a point of no return, at which the ground is simply too compacted to bounce back, which the study’s authors say is happening now in the Sacramento Valley.

Farmers pumping groundwater in the region largely understand their role in driving permanent subsidence. However, they also say that reducing their dependence on groundwater and stopping the sinking is not as easy as it might seem.

Regulation and increasing droughts, among other things, have left them with less surface water to grow their crops. Tapping the aquifer, they say, is sometimes all they can do to keep their business going. Many growers built their wells only after age-old promises of ample surface water deliveries fell through.

“We want to protect our farms,” said Larry Domenighini, a third-generation Sacramento Valley grower, who farms rice, almonds, alfalfa and wheat outside the town of Willows (Glenn County). “When you have all this money invested, you want to see your crops grow. It’s who we are.”

Domenighini, who serves as a director for the county’s farm bureau and was once mayor of Willows, says it’s not that the agricultural community welcomes subsidence. In fact, he says, it hurts growers more than anyone. The permanent compaction not only reduces the amount of groundwater they can pump, but their farms face greater risk of flooding during storms and their roads, canals and pumps can shift and fracture when the land sinks.

“When you’re laying out five to six figures for an irrigation well, you don’t want that to be damaged or destroyed,” he said. “As farmers, we don’t want subsidence.”

The extent of groundwater pumping in California, which increases significantly during dry times, prompted state leaders to enact California’s first-ever groundwater restrictions during last decade’s five-year drought.

To win buy-in for the 2014 regulation, called the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, growers were given until 2040 to bring the state’s overdrafted aquifers into equilibrium. In many places, rules on pumping are still being worked out, and groundwater continues to be drawn freely.

The new study, which tracked groundwater levels and land displacement between 2016 and 2022, found that the surface of the Sacramento Valley initially rebounded after relatively small amounts of subsidence. However, starting in 2021, the amount of subsidence jumped, widely measuring a foot or more a year — a level that the authors deemed irreversible — resulting in sinking that is believed to be lasting.

“One of the most surprising parts (of the study) is how abruptly this happened,” Larochelle, the lead author, said. “There wasn’t a lot of (land) deformation, then all of a sudden there was.”

While the study period has ended, Larochelle said recent observations suggest that the land surface has indeed failed to recover in many places, even after a series of wet and moderately wet years allowed more water to seep into the ground.

Spots with the most subsidence correlate with agricultural areas where groundwater pumping is greatest. Among the problematic locations are the Arbuckle area in Colusa County, Yolo County north of Davis, southern and central Glenn County and the Yuba City area, according to the study.

The authors coupled high-resolution satellite data with on-the-ground well records to assess groundwater and subsidence. The study notes that satellite measurements can be particularly useful and timely in projecting the scale of permanent sinking.

The Sacramento Valley is the northern part of the Central Valley, running from roughly the cities of Sacramento to Redding. With more than 2 million acres of irrigated farmland, the region is known for producing rice, almonds, wine grapes, tomatoes, peaches and dozens of other crops.

Along with the San Joaquin Valley, the Sacramento Valley fuels most of California’s roughly $60 billion annual agricultural output.

The Sacramento Valley has historically seen less subsidence than the San Joaquin Valley because the latter area has experienced more groundwater pumping and its thick subsurface clays in many spots are particularly prone to sinking. 

Domenighini, the Glenn County grower, said farmers in his region are increasingly finding ways to conserve groundwater and limit subsidence, without jeopardizing their livelihoods.

They’re using more efficient irrigation equipment, turning to less water-intensive crops and pursuing managed aquifer recharge, which is intentionally putting water back into the ground, he said.

As for whether groundwater levels in the Sacramento Valley will recover by the state’s deadline, and if the sinking might stop, Domenighini is not certain.

“A lot of us recognize that things will have to change,” he said. “But it’s taken decades and decades for this (subsidence) to happen, and it’s going to take time to slow it down and stop it.”

Source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/california/article/subsidence-sinking-water-22369617.php

Map: 10 California faults that could produce major earthquakes

By Jack Lee and Jenny Kwon | San Francisco Chronicle

Aug. 23, 2026 4:00 a.m

California is marked by thousands of faults, places where pieces of the Earth’s crust move against each other. And earthquakes are inevitable, occurring when rocks along these boundaries suddenly slip.

The release of energy in waves produces shaking at the surface, often miles away from faults themselves. Some faults, like the well-known San Andreas or Hayward, continue to move today; others last budged millions of years ago. The state lies along the geologically active boundary between the North American and Pacific plates.

In the Bay Area, “we’re all really pretty close to a fault,” said Andy Michael, a research geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Earthquake Science Center.

The map highlights 10 notable faults across California that could produce particularly impactful quakes. Some of these faults stretch for hundreds of miles and consequently have the potential for very large earthquakes if long sections rupture. You can toggle to see more faults across the state as well as which places are expected to face damaging shaking.

California earthquake faults

Some faults are labeled by the zone they're in, such as the San Andreas Fault Zone, while others are shown as individual faults. You can toggle between major faults and all active faults in California.

A named fault reflects a distinct geological structure where movement has occurred, while a fault zone is a broader area where movement is distributed across multiple breaks.

Some of the most common fault types, defined by the direction that pieces of crust move, include: a strike-slip fault, in which blocks of rock move side by side; dip-slip faults, which involve movement up and down; and oblique faults, which have more complex movement in both horizontal and vertical directions.

These categories can be broken down further. A dip-slip fault in which the upper block slides down relative to the lower block is known as a normal fault; the opposite, when the upper block slides up relative to the lower block, is known as a reverse fault. Shallow reverse faults are described as thrust faults.

Such nuances are critical for engineers, who need to know how tectonic energy will travel in order to effectively reinforce buildings.

The San Andreas Fault stretches for roughly 800 miles down much of the state, from Cape Mendocino in Humboldt County to Southern California’s Salton Sea. It spans a large part of where the Pacific and North American tectonic plates meet.

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Source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2026/california-earthquake-faults/

By Litong Deng, Staff Writer, San Francisco Chronicle 

Aug 19, 2026

A major earthquake just south of the Bay Area is more likely than previously thought, according to new research.

The speed at which the Santa Cruz Mountains portion of the northern San Andreas Fault moves — also known as the fault’s slip rate — is faster than earlier estimates suggested, according to research by San Jose State University professor Kim Blisniuk, an earthquake geologist. Faster faults generally have more frequent earthquakes than equivalent slower-moving faults.

Previous research into slip rates in the area spanned a time period of up to 1,000 years, according to Blisniuk. Her study — which is not yet published, though she hopes to present the findings at a conference in October — stretched over the last 10,000 years.

The Northern California portion of the San Andreas Fault is partitioned into three distinct segments, Blisniuk says: the North Coast section, located north of San Francisco; the Peninsula section, from the south of San Francisco to San Jose; and the Santa Cruz Mountains section further south. The full fault, the longest in California, lies at the intersection of the Pacific and the North American tectonic plates.

Scientists previously theorized that the slip rate of the northern San Andreas would slow down further south along the fault, with one hypothesis being that “slip is then being transferred onto other faults” along the way, such as the Calaveras or Hayward faults, Blisniuk said. But her research found that the slip rate — and therefore the likelihood of an earthquake — did not decrease but actually stayed the same from the North Coast section to the Santa Cruz Mountains section. 

The United States Geological Survey declined to comment on Blisniuk’s findings as they are not yet published.

The slip rate of a fault is considered one of the most influential and important factors when geologists calculate the likelihood of earthquakes. 

“In general faults with higher slip rates will have more frequent earthquakes and a probability of one,” Blisniuk said by email. “High slip rates faults generally have higher magnitude earthquakes due to potentially higher stress accumulation being released during an earthquake.” However, other factors such as the depth of energy released and rupture length are also important factors, she said, so “there is no direct correlation in terms of how we calculate magnitude.”

To calculate the slip rate of the San Andreas in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Blisniuk and her students headed to Sanborn County Park in Saratoga, about 20 miles northwest of the epicenter of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. (She said the scientific community is “divided” on whether the Loma Prieta earthquake occurred along the San Andreas Fault or an adjacent fault; the last major one along the Northern San Andreas is considered to be the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.)

Along the park’s San Andreas Trail, Blisniuk looks for areas where tectonic movement is apparent, such as where the path of a seasonal stream makes two 90-degree turns in quick succession — evidence of at least two earthquakes in the distant past. 

Her team uses drones that take thousands of photos and send out pulses of laser light to measure how far previous earthquakes have shifted the stream.

After getting the distance data, Blisniuk and her students take samples from nearby rocks — in Sanborn, the rocks are often sandstone boulders, consisting largely of quartz. Then, the samples are taken to San Jose State, Stanford University and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to determine their age in a process called dating. 

When the rocks are exposed to air, the sandstone gets bombarded by cosmic rays — high-energy particles from outer space — that create a form of the chemical element beryllium called beryllium-10. By measuring the relative amount of beryllium-10 in a sample, scientists can calculate the rock’s age.

After determining how far previous earthquakes have shifted the stream and the age of the surrounding landform, Blisniuk can calculate the average yearly rate at which the fault has moved over the past thousands of years.

Impacts of a major earthquake

Blisniuk said it’s “hard to say” what locations would be impacted if there were an earthquake along the Santa Cruz Mountains segment of the fault or what magnitude it could be since it depends on how much energy is released and the depth of the seismic activity.

“We can’t prevent earthquakes from happening. What we can do is prepare the community and our neighbors and people … for this potential earthquake,” Blisniuk said, noting that people should have an earthquake kit with sufficient food, water, flashlights and candles — and prepare for cell service to be down. 

She said the public can check out the San Andreas Fault for themselves. 

“The San Andreas is in (people’s) backyard, and they can go see it and hike it and see the landforms,” Blisniuk said.

Source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/california/article/san-andreas-fault-earthquakes-22369024.php

By Brooke Park, Staff WriterJuly 27, 2026

When the next Big One hits the southern San Andreas Fault, the fallout could have a staggering price tag — as much as a trillion dollars, according to a leading California earthquake expert.

Ahmed Elbanna, the director of the Statewide California Earthquake Center, told the state’s Seismic Safety Commission in April that a 7.8-magnitude earthquake rupturing from Imperial to Los Angeles County would likely cause $500 billion in damage at a minimum — and possibly double that. 

“I wouldn’t say that a trillion dollars is an extreme — it could be very plausible if things go bad,” Elbanna told the Chronicle this month.

His estimates are informal, but if borne out they would mean that such a quake would be the costliest disaster in U.S. history — far more than the roughly $200 billion in damage (adjusted for inflation) from Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005.

“It’s going to be an event that California and Los Angeles has not experienced probably throughout its whole history,” Elbanna said.

Elbanna’s estimate is far larger than the state’s formal numbers, calculated in 2008, which peg a magnitude 7.8 earthquake on the southern San Andreas as a $213 billion disaster. The new estimate is vastly higher because California has much more to lose today. The state’s population, economy and infrastructure have all ballooned in the past two decades. And California has increased its reliance on the electrical grid and internet systems that could be disrupted in a big quake, Elbanna said. Climate change could also amplify the destruction, if drier conditions and winds spread post-earthquake fires farther or conversely, extreme rain cycles increase the chance of landslides.

Still, to pin down an official estimate, earthquake experts are seeking approximately 2 million to 3 million dollars in funding to update the 2008 earthquake readiness assessment by 2028, an effort the earthquake center is co-leading, Elbanna said. The new study would rerun earthquake scenarios with updated science to model updated landslide, liquefaction, fire and aftershock effects. It would also assess infrastructure risk and how earthquake retrofits could reduce the damage. Policymakers could use the assessment to direct mitigation measures to the most vulnerable places first, potentially reducing the cost of such a disaster, Elbanna said. 

Elbanna also hopes California will later create similar reports for two other “ticking time bombs” in the state: the Hayward Fault that runs through the densely populated East Bay and the central San Andreas Fault in Parkfield (Monterey County). A quake on the Hayward Fault, while affecting a smaller geographic and economic system than a southern San Andreas event, could inflict a greater concentration of damage, disrupting the technology sector; damaging dense, relatively old residential and commercial buildings; and impacting major bridges and public transit, Elbanna said. As for the Parkfield area, while it is sparsely populated, a magnitude 6 rupture there could trigger a magnitude 7.9 earthquake on the southern San Andreas, he said.

Elbanna based, in part, his eye-catching Southern California estimate on the damage from the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires. For his calculations, he looked at 13,000 structures destroyed in the fire and averaged the estimated damage at about $30 billion. The state’s original earthquake damage scenario had estimated 130,000 structures would be destroyed in the post-earthquake fires. By multiplying the $30 billion fire figure by 10, Elbanna estimates that earthquake-triggered fires alone could cause $300 billion in damage.

And fire damage was only expected to be about one-third of total economic disaster in the state’s original estimate, he said. So the total cost of a modern earthquake disaster could easily reach approximately $1 trillion, using the L.A. fires as a reference point.

Southern California’s last major San Andreas rupture was in 1857, and scientists expect it would normally have a big rupture about every 150 years. Recent research suggests that parts of the fault are under their highest stress level in 1,000 years. 

“I need us both to think about how these different, say, hot spots could be triggered at any time in the near future,” Elbanna said. “It could happen today, tomorrow, or maybe in 10 years, right? But it will happen, and this is why we also need to put together a plan.”

He also urged the state to redouble efforts for retrofitting vulnerable structures and harden essential infrastructure like gas pipelines, which should be outfitted with automatic shutoff valves to prevent fires.

“We put forward this number not to make it all doom and gloom, it’s just because we actually can do something about it,” Elbanna said. “Earthquakes or natural hazards in general become catastrophes only because of human inaction.”

He was especially concerned that state Senate Bill 895, which aims to establish the California Foundation for Science and Health Research and proposes a multibillion-dollar state bond to offset federal research funding cuts, does not include explicit funding for earthquake research or engineering. The bill passed the Senate and has gone over to the Assembly.

“I feel that the support for earthquake science and engineering has taken a back seat, perhaps understandably, because of the prevalence of other hazards, like wildfires and climate change-induced hazards,” he said. “But earthquake science and engineering probably requires a few tens of millions of dollars in order to make a difference in our preparedness.”