A joint enforcement strike force issued more than $200,000 in administrative fines to nine Contra Costa County, Calif. restaurants for failing to provide workers’ compensation insurance.

Investigators from the Contra Costa District Attorney’s Office, Department of Industrial Relations’ Labor Commissioner’s Office, and Employment Development Department conducted surprise inspections in June and July at Contra Costa County restaurants suspected of evading the obligation to provide workers’ comp insurance to employees.

California utility giants PG&E Corp. and Edison International are one step closer to changing a state law that has exposed them to billions of dollars in wildfire liabilities.

Late Tuesday, California Gov. Jerry Brown proposed a bill that would require a court to consider whether a utility acted “reasonably” when deciding whether it should end up on the hook for fire damages. Brown said the proposal wouldn’t affect the potential liabilities PG&E and Edison face for blazes that devastated the state in 2017. Still, it’s a win for PG&E, which has been lobbying hard to change a policy that holds utilities responsible for the costs of wildfires their equipment caused, even if they weren’t negligent.

February 10-13, 2019
45th Annual Conference

A new analysis offers a preliminary look at Utilization Review and Independent Medical Review outcomes involving pharmaceutical requests for California injured workers since the state implemented a workers’ compensation formulary in January.

The analysis from the California Workers’ Compensation Institute issued on Friday shows that the proportion of UR decisions involving prescription drug requests fell from 44.5 percent in the pre-formulary period to 40.7 percent in the first five months of 2018.

As blame for California’s wildfires rises over Sacramento like smoke from last year’s blazes, the state is being forced to confront the possibility that it’ll happen again in 2018.

California’s drought is worsening, and blazes have charred more acres in the first six months of this year than they did in the same period in 2017, a year that ultimately set records for destruction and deaths. The state is covered with dried-out brush and the skeletal branches of 129 million trees killed by a bark-beetle infestation. Hundreds of miles of electric transmission lines run through the dead forests and crisscross hills crowned with golden, dried grass.

It seems like news of disastrous wildfires never ends. Last winter, we watched as wildfires raged in Santa Barbara County, California. Once contained, the fires then led to catastrophic mudslides that killed 20 people around Montecito, California.

The recent Western wildfires that have been burning in Colorado and California are attributed to multiple factors, including a heat wave and climate change.

A Beverly Hills, Calif. doctor has been sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for his role in a massive fraud scheme.

The San Diego Union-Tribune reports Dr. Ronald Grusd was convicted in December of 39 charges, including conspiracy, honest services wire and mail fraud and health care fraud.

The National Transportation Safety Board is sending a technical specialist to observe Tesla Inc.’s examination of a Model S that caught fire in California on Friday, the agency said in a statement.

The action is not a formal probe of how the lithium-ion battery pack caught fire without being involved a crash, NTSB spokesman Peter Knudson said. NTSB’s participation in Tesla’s review “will provide the agency with an opportunity to learn more about fires in all types of battery-powered vehicles,” he said.

Research suggests the magnitude 6.0 earthquake that rocked California wine country in 2014 may have been caused by an expansion of Earth’s crust because of seasonally receding groundwater under the Napa and Sonoma valleys.

The vineyard-filled valleys flank the West Napa Fault, which produced the quake that killed one person, injured several hundred and caused more than $500 million in losses.

Four bills sponsored by the California Department of Insurance that the department believes will strengthen consumer protections for wildfire survivors have passed the Senate Insurance Committee with unanimous, bipartisan votes.

Assembly Bill 1772 would extend the amount of time a home or business owner has to rebuild an insured property from two to three years after a declared wildfire emergency and receive the full replacement costs to which they are entitled.