By Clark Mindock
(Reuters) -An Oregon state jury on Tuesday ordered PacifiCorp, an Oregon electric utility owned by billionaire Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, to pay at least $62 million to nine homeowners whose properties were damaged by wildfires that devastated the state in 2020.
Jurors in Portland, where PacifiCorp is based, awarded the homeowners nearly $6.3 million in total to compensate them for the property damage and other economic losses and $56 million for things like emotional distress, pain and suffering following a trial that started Jan. 9 in Multnomah County Circuit Court, which Reuters viewed via the Courtroom View Network.
The trial was the first of at least two scheduled this year to serve as test cases to determine how much PacifiCorp owes Oregon residents whose homes were ravaged by a series of fires that torched parts of the state over Labor Day weekend in 2020, causing nearly $1.9 billion in property damage and other harms, according to a state estimate.