By Emma Tucker, CNN
(CNN) — The expectant couple, along with several children and loved ones, walked with anticipation into the grass at the edge of the El Dorado Ranch Park in Yucaipa, California – where wild grasses turn golden in the fall, making a scenic backdrop – to reveal their baby’s gender.
Another person lit a pyrotechnic device that generates an explosion of smoke in the color of blue for a boy or pink for a girl, as seen in surveillance video. But what was meant to be a celebratory moment went terribly wrong just moments later when a fire was ignited, and the family frantically grabbed water bottles to put out the growing flames.
That fire continued for over two months until November 2020, scorching nearly 23,000 acres and killing one beloved firefighter who was battling the blaze. The couple pleaded guilty to criminal charges in connection with causing the fire and the death of firefighter Charles Morton, prosecutors said in 2024.
The couple aren’t the only ones facing consequences. The saga concluded last week when three companies involved in designing, importing and marketing the smoke bomb agreed to settle a federal lawsuit filed by the government in 2023. They agreed to pay more than $4 million for US Forest Service costs for fighting the fire and the damage it caused to federal land.
The case is unusual compared to the slew of lawsuits over the past decade against utility companies for negligence that caused destructive and deadly wildfires, according to legal and environmental experts CNN spoke with. It’s much less common for manufacturers to face such lawsuits because their role is more indirect and requires consumers, like the couple, to use the product in conditions that would lead to a wildfire, the experts said.
“Unlike utility companies, who can sometimes be sued for being negligent – or in a state like California, strictly liable – when they cause a wildfire, a business that sells a good can always argue that it doesn’t have a duty to prevent third parties from using their product unreasonably, particularly after they are sold,” said Adam Zimmerman, a professor at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law.
It’s standard practice for utility companies to be sued for their role in starting wildfires, the experts said. Pacific Gas & Electric was forced to pay billions of dollars in damages after its faulty electric transmission line was the determined cause of the 2018 Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in California history. More recently, the devastating Eaton Fire in Altadena last year led to a host of lawsuits against Southern California Edison by fire victims, insurance companies and governments.
Why the three companies are being held liable
A key aspect of the settlement was cut-and-dry. The two smoke bombs used in the gender reveal party should have never been sold from out of state into California, where they are illegal, federal prosecutors said.
Wholesale Fireworks Corp., the smoke bomb designer and importer, and its subsidiary, American Fireworks Warehouse LLC, agreed to pay $4 million to settle claims for their role in designing, importing, distributing, marketing and advertising the smoke bomb. Another company, Pink or Blue Gender Team Inc., agreed to pay $50,000 for distributing, marketing and advertising the device, according to prosecutors.
The companies “allegedly failed to safely design and label the smoke bombs and failed to properly warn customers about the fire risk of the smoke bombs, despite being aware of their dangers,” prosecutors said.
The El Dorado Fire “had a tremendous impact on the community of San Bernardino,” said San Bernardino County District Attorney Jason Anderson when the couple was charged in July 2021. He added at least six agencies “were involved in containing, extinguishing and investigating” the deadly blaze.
In February 2024, Refugio Manuel Jimenez Jr. pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter for the death of the firefighter, as well as recklessly causing a fire to an inhabited structure, and was sentenced to two years felony probation, a year in county jail and community service, prosecutors said. His wife, Angelina Renee Jimenez, pleaded guilty to three misdemeanors of recklessly causing fire to property of another and was sentenced to one year of summary probation and community service, prosecutors said.
The couple was ordered to pay over $1.7 million in restitution to the victims, prosecutors said.
CNN reached out to the attorneys for the couple but did not hear back.
The couple’s mishap wasn’t the first time a gender reveal party caused a destructive wildfire, but it stands out because manufacturers involved in previous incidents were not held liable.
Another one in Arizona sparked a wildfire that burned nearly 47,000 acres in 2017 and caused more than $8 million in damage. The expectant father, who shot a makeshift target that exploded into a blue cloud, igniting the surrounding brush, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor violation of US Forest Service regulations and was ordered to pay restitution for the damages. No manufacturers were sued in that case.
In the El Dorado gender reveal case, as well as most of the wildfire settlements in California and other parts of the country, victims and government entities have mainly used tort law to file civil lawsuits and seek restitution from those responsible for causing the blaze, according to Michael Wara, a lawyer and senior research scholar focused on climate and energy policy at Stanford University.
In California specifically, a doctrine called inverse condemnation can be used to hold utility companies liable when their services for public use cause a fire, regardless of whether or not they did so negligently, Wara said.
Negligence is the most common claim pursued under tort law, but others can allege wrongdoing or recklessness, Wara said. Many of the early tort law cases involved railroads and trains when they were powered by coal and wood, causing sparks that would often start damaging fires, he added.
“Out of those instances developed a body of law that is basic negligence law. You have to take reasonable care to prevent your actions from causing harm to others and related to that is a body of law around product defects,” Wara said.
“If you sell something to someone, it can’t have the effect of causing harm in some way that’s non-obvious to the person buying them,” he added.
Why this case stands out
Most of the cases seeking to hold companies accountable for their role in starting wildfires over the past decade have been against electric utilities, Wara said, such as PacifiCorp and PG&E.
It’s more common to hold electric utility companies accountable for fires because they provide an essential service that is highly regulated, and their power lines and overhead wires are “inherently sources of ignition,” said Wara.
Roughly half of the structure loss in California from wildfires in the last decade has been associated with electric power system ignitions, Wara said, citing a Stanford research report in which he was the lead author.
With fireworks companies, the picture is entirely different, he said, because it’s obvious their products can start a fire, and the responsibility is on the user to take precautions. “I’m not aware of anything like this before,” Wara said of the El Dorado wildfire case.
Given this case involved smoke bombs that prosecutors allege did not come with proper warning of their risk, that ambiguity opened the three companies up to liability, Wara said.
It’s rare to see a case against a manufacturer because a company selling a product “can always argue it doesn’t have a duty to prevent third parties from using their product unreasonably, particularly after they are sold,” said Zimmerman.
But this case is unique because the government relied on a “failure to warn” claim, he added.
Manufacturers in many states owe “a responsibility to warn people about the known or knowable hazards associated with its products, even after those products are sold,” Zimmerman said.
It’s typical for consumers to bring these types of lawsuits, but third parties can also do so when the company “knew or should have known that they also would be hurt if they failed to warn consumers about the dangers of the goods they sell,” he said.
More unusual, however, are instances where the government sues a company based on that claim, Zimmerman said. They are difficult to win because the company could argue, for example, that the hosts of a gender reveal party caused the wildfire by choosing a hazardous environment as their setting, Zimmerman said.
“But the defendants here likely chose to settle rather than roll the dice with a well-resourced plaintiff, like the federal government, relying on a creative, but still plausible legal theory,” he said.
The case is unlikely to make a major dent in California’s fire safety mitigation efforts because while many different types of fireworks are illegal in the state, people will still use them – even in areas with a high risk of fires, Wara said. At best, the case might compel fireworks companies to improve the labeling on devices like smoke bombs, he added.
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