QuestionerPlease discuss your strategy on how to protect our company from future liabilities due to wildfires blamed on our electric utility companies out west.
WarrenWell, that's a very good question. And we've made some mistakes in the past when we bought Pacific Corp in 2000, what, five? Yes. Or Scott and David Sokol and myself, three guys who, capital's at heart. And we're dealing with our own money, but we made a mistake by not carving it up into the seven states that we were buying. And it came with an aggregation where it wasn't state by state. And we kept the same structure. And that was a big mistake. Part of the country is going to need electricity. And there are going to be places where public electric or privately held electric utilities would be very foolish to operate and how it gets resolved in a democracy, we will find out. But those are the facts as they stand now, I would say.
Greg AbelYeah. The reality, the risk around the wildfires, i.e. that do the wildfires occur? They're not going away. And we know that. and the risk probably goes up each year. So, but what we can do to reduce the risk of it impacting our system and our underlying assets and the, unfortunately, the liabilities that come with such events, we can change that and manage that. We then take it even further, and this is something Warren and I've discussed many times, is that the utilities started to recognize when we have these unusual weather events, and Warren touched on what's been happening in Nebraska with stormed. but they're equally occurring or significant events occurring out west. But when we have those, we've gotten very, very good at saying, okay, we have to manage the system differently. We'll potentially de-energize because there's likely to be an event. But the one thing we hadn't tackled, and this is very relevant to the one significant event we had back in 2020 in Pacific Corps, is we didn't de-energize the system as the fire was approaching. Because our employees and the whole management team have been all their lives trained to keep the lights on. And the last thing they want to do is turn those lights off and have a system de-energized. And after those events, and as we really looked at how we're going to move forward in managing the assets and reducing that risk, we have clearly recognized as a team that we have to de-energize those assets. assets.