Bufetico
There’s a photo of Sam Drevo walking past the burned foundation of his mother’s home in Gates, Oregon, after the Labor Day fires.
Oregon had more than 2,000 fires that weekend in 2020. They killed 11 people and destroyed more than 3,000 buildings. Gates sits in the Santiam Canyon, and PacifiCorp, an electric utility, had power lines running through it.
Drevo’s name is on the class action, one lawsuit for a whole group, that survivors filed against PacifiCorp that September. In 2023 a jury found that PacifiCorp had failed to cut the power despite warnings from fire officials, and that it had been grossly negligent toward the whole group. PacifiCorp says it didn’t start the fire that burned the canyon, and points to a state forestry report. That report also found its lines sparked seven small fires in the canyon, each one put out.
In February another jury awarded 16 survivors of the canyon fire $305 million, the largest award in the case. Six weeks later the Oregon Court of Appeals threw out the 2023 verdict over one instruction the judge gave the jury. Every award stood on that verdict, and now every payout is on hold. In May the survivors asked the state Supreme Court to step in. Their petition says more than 50 of them have died still waiting.
What comes with one share
PacifiCorp belongs to Berkshire Hathaway, through Berkshire’s energy business. So if you own one Class B share of Berkshire, a slice of that lawsuit comes with it, along with a slice of the railroad, the insurers and everything else Berkshire owns.
A share is a claim on a business. Everything the company owns, owes and earns gets cut into slices, and one of them is yours. The most you can lose is your slice. Berkshire has two classes of shares, and in money one A share is the same slice as 1,500 B shares. Counting both classes in its quarterly report, one B share was one 2,147,538,984th of Berkshire on June 30.
A slice that thin comes with almost no say. In votes, a B share counts for one 10,000th of an A share, and Berkshire’s owners don’t vote on whether PacifiCorp settles or fights. Since January 1, the annual report says, the big decisions about where Berkshire’s money goes have belonged to Greg Abel, its new CEO. The AP noted in February that he ran Berkshire’s energy business, PacifiCorp’s parent, for years.
Abel talked about the appeals court’s ruling in May, at his first annual meeting as CEO. Reuters reported that he called it a relief for PacifiCorp and said “we’re back to first base” on the legal side.
What your slice holds is whatever’s left over. Book value is what the accounts say is left for the owners after every debt is paid, and on June 30 it came to $348.26 per B share by my division. Whatever PacifiCorp ends up owing Drevo and the others comes off before anything is left for Berkshire, its owner.
So I looked for the fires inside that number. Berkshire’s quarterly report puts $572 million on the books for fire claims that PacifiCorp hasn’t paid, and that’s PacifiCorp’s own estimate of what it’ll probably have to pay. Juries had awarded 201 plaintiffs about $1.25 billion, more than twice that, and none of it has been paid while the appeals go on. The report also says it’s reasonably possible the losses end up significantly higher. PacifiCorp can’t put a range on how much, so that part isn’t in book value at all.
Berkshire hasn’t paid a cash dividend since 1967, so what its companies earn stays inside the slice, and what they lose comes out of it. PacifiCorp counted most of its fire losses in 2023. The cash goes out years later, one settlement at a time, and for the survivors whose awards are on hold it hasn’t gone out at all.
The appeals court also named PacifiCorp the winning side and awarded it costs. The survivors’ petition says PacifiCorp is now seeking about $6 million of those costs from a handful of them.
Where this breaks
For Berkshire’s owners, the fires are small. The quarterly report says Berkshire doesn’t guarantee any debt issued by its energy business or the companies under it, so the most its owners can lose to the fires is what PacifiCorp is worth to them, one company out of everything Berkshire owns. For PacifiCorp they’re heavy. It had to post court bonds, a kind of guarantee, for every verdict, so it could wait out the appeals before paying. Berkshire’s annual report said in March that this might leave it unable to get the funding it needs. A judge paused the rest of the trials in May and let PacifiCorp skip the bonds on the later judgments, and the quarterly report keeps only a milder warning.
Book value is an accounting number, the owners’ line on the balance sheet, and the price of a share gets set somewhere else, by whoever’s trading. Price times every share is market cap. Who’s right about the fires is up to the courts, and the Oregon Supreme Court hears the case on November 3.
Where Sam Drevo’s claim sits
On June 30, Berkshire’s insurance and other businesses held $359.2 billion in cash and Treasury bills, which are short loans to the US government. PacifiCorp isn’t one of those businesses, and the AP reported in February that Berkshire expects PacifiCorp to handle what it owes on its own.
So PacifiCorp has been finding the money itself. That same month it lined up a buyer for its business in Washington state, to shore up its finances, the AP said. Posting those court bonds had squeezed its cash. In the first half of 2026 it borrowed from investors, and its cash flow statement shows no money from its parent. The parent hasn’t taken a dividend out of PacifiCorp since 2023 either, and says it won’t for the next several years, so PacifiCorp can build up cash in case more settlements come.
Drevo’s case is against PacifiCorp alone.