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PG&E stock plunged 32% after it disclosed a possible link to California’s fire

287 points by breitling 8y ago

sjroot 8y ago
The article states that there is roughly $15 billion in damages from this fire. PG&E’s assets and wildfire insurance are worth ~$5B. That said, if it were proven that PG&E were directly liable for this fire, how would that play out?
- sjg007 8y ago
  They should be a state owned utility and tech improvements should be made to reduce the fire risk.
  - sovietmudkipz 8y ago
    In general, does the state operate more or less efficiently than the market? More specifically... What is the most efficient state run operation? What is the least efficient state run operation? What is the most efficient market driven operation? What is the least efficient market driven operation? My sense is that in general a market driven operation will be run more efficiently and practically than a state run operation. There may be particular instances of efficient state run operations that exist in the United States but there are always particular instances of efficient market driven operations too. Taken as a whole, we should skew towards market driven solutions.
    - Mbioguy 8y ago
      Utilities are natural monopolies. Not exactly the best fit for a market solution, especially when, as in this case, they are negative externalities borne by the public that the company is trying to avoid paying for.
      - VLM 8y ago
        The company will pay for nothing. Its a powerco not a mint. Their only significant revenue stream is electric bills (pole rental for telco fiber optics, pole rental for cable TV cables, all small amounts of money) What we have here is a decision between one group of accountants getting electricity users to pay, vs a different group of accountants getting taxpayers to pay. The fraction of the population that are net positive taxpayers is much smaller than the fraction of the population that uses electricity, so in a democracy it would be surprising NOT to see the people deciding the few people who are net positive taxpayers will get the bill. The large chunk of the population that pay electric bills while being net negative taxpayers are not going to volunteer to pay more.
      - koboll 8y ago
        A counterpoint might be that binding private enterprise by strict liability rules might coerce it to be extra cautious not to cut corners that lead to fires -- as opposed to a state owned company which might have less to fear from lax practices. Although, it's debatable how avoidable starting fires is in the bone-dry tinderbox of 21st-century California, even if you stick closely to best practices.
        sjg007 8y ago
        What you describe is exactly what PG&E is today. Those strict liability rules did not prevent them from cutting corners. They estimate damages at 15B and their insurance and assets are worth $5B. So do the math.... taxpayers will have to pay for rebuilding and if PG&E survives will they pass costs on to rate payers (aka the same people whose houses burnt down) or will they tax PG&E more or ?. Maybe PG&E will become insurance company owned since they will owe the insurers tons of money since they can't pay out for liability.
    - 0xcde4c3db 8y ago
      I don't think that framing of the issue is very useful on its own. Public and private entities both participate in the market, and the question of which entities are most efficient depends on which definition of efficiency one deems most relevant (i.e. which inputs and outputs one chooses to measure, and by which methods). Also, people often attribute exclusively to government a class of dysfunctions or inefficiencies that have virtually nothing to do with an organization's ownership structure, but have a great deal to do with management structures typical of large organizations (e.g. wasteful spending due to "use it or lose it" budgets). With respect to these problems, I would be very surprised if substituting public vs. private does anything other than change minor details of how they manifest.
      - gowld 8y ago
        "market" does not mean "private". "market" means "competitive, instead of monopoly". They are orthogonal. You can have competing governments, and you can have private monopolies.
    - sjg007 8y ago
      You mean the monopoly utility in Northern California called PG&E?
- _pmf_ 8y ago
  > That said, if it were proven that PG&E were directly liable for this fire, how would that play out? As it always plays out: regular people will only sue via class action lawsuit, meaning there will be a settlement that is a fraction of the damage. The lawsuit with the state as plaintiff will drag on until either a settlement or the statute of limitation is reached.
  - sjroot 8y ago
    That’s the answer I expected but didn’t want to see.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > As it always plays out: regular people will only sue via class action lawsuit, meaning there will be a settlement that is a fraction of the damage. Businesses and individuals (and public agencies like cities, counties, and special districts) with losses, especially of structures, will in many cases be insured; direct action lawsuits, or the threat thereof, to force a substantially full settlement, to recover from liable parties are a big part of what insurance companies do, and the nature of insurance companies is that each will have much larger losses than any individual, and much more motivation to aggressively pursue them; there may still be settlements that are less than would be recovered in a final judgement (to the extent that time value of money and risk and reduced litigation costs make that a winning proposition), but nowhere near as small a fraction as is typical in a class action. > The lawsuit with the state as plaintiff will drag on until either a settlement or the statute of limitation is reached. That's not how statutes of limitations work. They run from the event giving rise to the cause of action to the moment the action is filed; once the case is filed within the statute of limitations, how long it runs is immaterial.
    - gowld 8y ago
      That's only true in some cases. In the recent Tesla occupational-safety case, the statute of limitations ran from time of the incident until time of resolution, so stalling did cancel the government intervention.
- mrleiter 8y ago
  Chapter 7 (liquidation) or Chapter 11 (restructuring) of Title 11 U.S.C. are possible options.
  - koboll 8y ago
    This exactly is what's likely to happen. Note also: PG&E is already being sued for allegedly causing last fall's devastating fires in northern California. That plus damages for this year's fires is very likely to force them into bankruptcy. Hence a plunging stock price as everyone rushes to get out while they still can.
- tyu1000 8y ago
  Articles on Bloomberg about this already on who pays if they are found liable for huge amounts of damages, ratepayers, shareholders, taxpayers or bondholders. Likely to be a combination of all four in some amount, if the worse comes to happen.
  - thanosnose 8y ago
    Most likely the shareholders will be wiped out ( equity collapse ) and bondholders are going to cut their losses and simply walk away. It will be rate payers ( customers ) and taxpayers ( both state and federal ) who will be footing the bill. But that's the worst case scenario which I don't think is likely.
- sailfast 8y ago
  Even if they go into bankruptcy (Chapter 11, say) they are legally allowed to recoup the costs of this as part of being a regulated utility, so I would expect higher utility rates to customers as a start for the next few years in order to either pay for the liability insurance or (less likely) to bring their infrastructure to a court-arguable higher standard so as to avoid accusations of liability in the future. That said, as a private citizen I don't see how a person starting a fire accidentally (not sure how you prove malice if a transformer fails?) could be held liable for all the property damage further downstream. That's what private insurance is for.
  - sgc 8y ago
    Negligence.
- rasz 8y ago
  Dont worry, no one will go to jail if thats what you were thinking of.
newman8r 8y ago
Southern California Edison stock was down ~10% too
jypepin 8y ago
The video of the article mentions that PG&G might also be responsible of the napa fires in 2016. This is crazy. Are there any liabilities for their executives in the case of such damage done because of negligibility? If PG&E did not make efforts to maintain their equipment better after napa, and this is the cause of Malibu, that becomes almost 3rd degree murder, right?
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  It's a utility company. The regulatory capture and political influence is too great for them to ever be held liable to such an extent.
- sgc 8y ago
  Regardless of the law, they are certainly morally responsible for loss of life every year, and have been for decades.
brownbat 8y ago
99PI's coverage of forest fire policy and design was really provocative: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-to-burn/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-to-burn/ 1. Our entire approach to fighting forest fires may just be making them worse. 2. Smart and simple design decisions can save houses. A house can be thirty feet from an entire forest on fire and never burn down. We learned this through hardcore experiments in Canada where they built homes to test and lit forests on fire nearby. One of the immediate takeaways was to change roofing materials to resist embers, but there are other options for materials and landscaping that could make homes basically impervious. The problem is probabilities. Fires are common, constant. They are exceedingly rare in any one location though. So fire resistant design is no one's urgent problem, fires are always something that seems like it will happen to somebody else.
- athenot 8y ago
  That's the same problem in the South East with tornadoes. They happen nearly every week (in summer) and can destroy neighborhoods. Yet we build lightweight framed houses and rely on insurance because the overall odds are low.
  - danielvf 8y ago
    I agree with your general point. Though we are talking many, many orders of magnitude less damage from tornadoes in the Southeast when compared with California forrest fires. My state gets an average of 20 per year, and almost all of these hit uninhabited areas. If a tornado destroys four houses, it makes state news.
    - js2 8y ago
      A better comparison is hurricane prone locations. After Hurricane Andrew in 1994, Florida conpletely revised its building codes to require homes to withstand a major hurricane. It’s possible to build a home on the beach to even withstand a catastrophic hurricane, but at possibly double the construction cost. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/14/us/hurricane-michael-florida-mexico-beach-house.amp.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/14/us/hurricane-michael-flor... I recall after there were bad fires in the Everglades many years ago there had been some work to build a foam that could be sprayed on a home to protect it in advance of an approaching fire. I think the person who came up with the idea was inspired by the amount of liquid diapers can hold. I wonder what came of that. Edit: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2006/jul/19/gel-inspired-by-diapers-may-be-firefighting-tool/ http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2006/jul/19/gel-inspired-by...
thrower123 8y ago
I didn't see what equipment actually might have started the fire? That would be more interesting. Ultimately you've got awful forestry management practices that are really to blame for this annual mess.
- newman8r 8y ago
  It's often a faulty transformer
  - sgc 8y ago
    It's far more often lines sparking/arcing during high winds when striking nearby vegetation which was not properly trimmed.
- platz 8y ago
  > firms allege in the suit that "PG&E was negligent in failing to maintain its infrastructure and properly inspect and manage its power transmission lines."
- ApolloFortyNine 8y ago
  >Ultimately you've got awful forestry management practices that are really to blame for this annual mess. Agreed, you have to assume forest fires will happen in California eventually (since they have for thousands of years). It's unreasonable to expect there never to be some kind of spark, whether it's an act of god or caused by one of the 40 million humans living in California.
crunchlibrarian 8y ago
I don't know much about the EE side of the world, but surely there is a way to design grid/transformer equipment such that the circuit can be interrupted immediately when a pole falls over or whatever. Is this possible? Is it just a matter of spending the money to upgrade the infrastructure?
- Mvandenbergh 8y ago
  Fundamentally something has to fault before you detect that fault and interrupt it. Newer protection relays and circuit breaker equipment can make that interruption faster but the amount of energy required to ignite a tinder-dry forest is so small that I'm not sure it would be possible to detect, trigger, and interrupt the energy escape in time.
  - crunchlibrarian 8y ago
    So bury all the cables/equipment underground? I'm sure costs are substantially higher to do so, but we could add other infrastructure along these underground lines as well if there was a shred of political will to accomplish this.
    - VLM 8y ago
      From a safety engineering standpoint it would be much cheaper and safer not to live in a tinderbox than to try to make a tinderbox fireproof. It seems a bad investment to try to live there.
      - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
        In a fight between logic and "surf and ski in the same day, brah" logic is not what wins.
        sgc 8y ago
        That is a useless comment. People should not live in hurricane areas, in tornado alleys, etc. But they do. So the infrastructure needs to be designed for it. What people's pastimes are is totally irrelevant and obviously does not inform this type of decision a whit.
Mvandenbergh 8y ago
"The legislation also didn’t change how California applies “inverse condemnation,” a legal doctrine under which the state’s utilities can be held liable for any economic damages tied to their equipment, even if they follow all of the state’s safety rules. That’s left the utilities exposed to open-ended liabilities." This seems like a very inefficient way of allocating risk. California is naturally fire prone and has become more so over recent years due to drought. Anyone operating an electricity distribution network is therefore operating assets that are inherently fire and explosion prone - even if operated and maintained correctly - there is no way to move that much energy over those distances without it occasionally being released in an undesirable way - in a place where the consequences of that are severe. Simple logic dictates that you only expose companies and individuals to economic risks that are within management control, otherwise you just end up with an economic role that is necessary but impossible to fill. Even if state standards for safety were updated to reduce the chances of a transformer explosion, circuit breaker arc, or fault in forested areas you'd never get the risk down to zero nor would you remove all the other sources of ignition.
- anilshanbhag 8y ago
  Article on how California's forest policy might have exasperated the wildfires: https://www.wsj.com/articles/californias-paradise-lost-1542068600 https://www.wsj.com/articles/californias-paradise-lost-15420...
  - lotsofpulp 8y ago
    Funny typo, I think you mean exacerbated.
- erickj 8y ago
  "Simple logic dictates..." Ahhh, but you assume the legislative body governing 30M people can resort to simple logic :)
- namdnay 8y ago
  If I understand this system correctly, this means that utilities will need insurance of some sort, and that therefore every home and business in California will pay higher utility rates to cover that extra cost. Indeed it seems a bit of a roundabout way to manage things - I guess the major political advantage is that it is a "hidden" tax? (as opposed to just mandating a certain level of safety and then having the government cover costs of accidents if these levels were respected)
throwawaymanbot 8y ago
Cowboy capitalism strikes again!
gxigzigxigxi 8y ago
I sure hope the liability laws are not such that PG&E gets wiped out. I don’t think it makes much sense to assign most of the causal weight to a spark when it would do nothing without all that tinder. There would have been another spark, eventually. If you don’t want to sometimes worry about forest fires, don’t build your house in the woods. It isn’t that complicated.
- 21 8y ago
  If you throw a match with intention and it causes a fire, you will go to prison. If they neglected fire warnings, there should be some responsability.
  - gxigzigxigxi 8y ago
    Sure. If there was gross negligence, some liability would be reasonable. Probably not 100% of damages, but some. That’s not what we are talking about though. I think under current law they could be liable even if they took all due care.
    - olliej 8y ago
      PG&E bills literally include a line item for maintenance, beyond the basic costs. PG&E has repeatedly issued bonuses and comp packages funded by cash they received from that line item while not performing maintenance of their network. This is exactly what happened last year (line that they weren't maintaining caused that fire), and when they blew up san bruno (when a gas line that had even been stated to need maintenance exploded and killed people). If you can make a profit while doing all the required work, then fair play to you, but if you're turning a "profit" without performing all the maintenance your network requires, and then getting tax payer support whenever that goes wrong you are not running at a profit. You're a tax payer subsidized siphon, taking money from tax payers to fund bonuses and investors. If you can't run a profit without tax payer backup, you aren't profitable.
- irascible 8y ago
  PGE has been fucking consumers forever. The fact that it's a publicly traded company is disgusting. It should be siezed by the state and provide service at break even.they have a history of public boondoggles going back to the hetch hetchy free water for copper deal..
andrewvc 8y ago
The silliest thing about this is that anthropogenic forest fires have been the norm in CA for thousands of years. If they aren't started on purpose by a human they will eventually be started by a human accident (or the rare lightening strike). The ecosystem evolved with humans this way. The notion of liability here is absurd. http://www.californiachaparral.com/enativeamericans.html http://www.californiachaparral.com/enativeamericans.html https://phys.org/news/2017-01-anthropogenic-forest-impacted-earth-climate.html https://phys.org/news/2017-01-anthropogenic-forest-impacted-...
- wil421 8y ago
  The differencea is this one was probably started by power lines. Other fires were also started by campers or reckless people. None of these situations are natural.
  - andrewvc 8y ago
    Please read the linked articles in my parent comment. They are natural, because humans are natural. California's vegetation has evolved to burn and quickly regrow and easily burn again due to anthropogenic fire for thousands of years. If it were not for human involvement CA might have more fire resistant species.
  - akvadrako 8y ago
    The limiting factor contributing to the total amount of fire is the growth of trees. Naturally it'll happen due to lightning. If that's less often than human triggers, the fires will be bigger.
    - andrewvc 8y ago
      That's actually not necessarily the case. By creating more fires evolutionary pressure favored plants that were designed to burn, grow fast, and leave competitive seeds. BTW much of what burns in CA is not large trees but chapparal. The linked articles I included have more detail.
michaelt 8y ago
The utility’s filing also may have marked the start of a campaign to get bailed out by California’s lawmakers -- as it was after last year’s fires. Seems to me bailing out the same company twice for the same mistake would be the height of idiocy. I mean, that's tantamount to saying you'll bail out the company every year forever. You've basically telling the CEO "Don't spend $1 billion of your money on inspections and preventative maintenance so your equipment stops causing fires! Instead, destroy $15 billion of value and we'll pay for it all at no cost to yourself!" Of course the company would accept that if someone fool offered it to them. It's super-inefficient for that fool, but the company saves a billion dollars!
- dahdum 8y ago
  California sets all the rules for utilities, including rates. There isn’t much wiggle room for PG&E, holding them liable for this is silly. It’s just a political shell game, assigning blame to PG&E and avoid responsibility for legislative failure.
gimmeThaBeet 8y ago
Utilities are weird, I could easily be wrong/offbase but going after them legally always feels vaguely like cutting off your nose to spite your face. The threat of inverse condemnation just feels like short term thinking of how you interact with your utility. Forget return on equity and shareholder returns, if you really hold a utility liable like that, not only would PG&E probably go away, I don't know how you'd get another utility to step in. I seriously think you'd need some giant Cal co-op, or you're going to have to charge seriously high prices to make it worth the risk, or go gridless, which sounds cool but infeasible at that kind of scale if you had to do it in a couple years.
- EADGBE 8y ago
  There's plenty of places that have no other option. They have to use said utility company in order to get utilities. Example, https://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/news/2014/02/06/commission-report-puts-blame-on-mge-in.html https://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/news/2014/02/06/commi... I guarantee you that JJ's restuarant in this example is still using MGE for their gas. They have no other choice here. Even though it killed one of their employees through negligence.
- olliej 8y ago
  > Utilities are weird, I could easily be wrong/offbase but going after them legally always feels vaguely like cutting off your nose to spite your face. The threat of inverse condemnation just feels like short term thinking of how you interact with your utility. No. The short term thinking is saying "here, private corporation, fell free to turn a profit by not maintaining your assets in the knowledge that you will be bailed out when you burn down a city". The long term effect of this is that tax payers do the following: * Pay the "profitable" corporation to receive what ever utility it is providing. * Pay vastly more than it would have cost to simply maintain the utility when recovering from whatever disaster is caused by the utility not maintaining their system. In the absence of liability for failure to maintain their network, a utility has (according to modern corporate policy) a /duty/ to not maintain their network, so they can maximize the money they give to their shareholders. > if you really hold a utility liable like that, not only would PG&E probably go away, I don't know how you'd get another utility to step in. You mean like an actual public entity? As has been the case in most countries for a long long time? > or you're going to have to charge seriously high prices to make it worth the risk No. If a company needs liability insurance at a feasible price they'd need to actively work to mitigate risk - private insurance would be a good hammer for that as failing to maintain your lines and equipment would increase the costs of your insurance. The other problem with this is it assumes that the cost of "seriously high prices", is higher than the cost for tax payers when they are having to pay to deal with whatever disasters and recovery costs directly.
cal97g 8y ago
buy for free money
platz 8y ago
Remember when BP spilled all that oil.. wish I'd bought that dip
- prewett 8y ago
  Which is why you're buying this one, right?
geggam 8y ago
The fact we prevent forest fires from spreading is the reason they spread so bad. Eliminate the fuel and you wont have these fires. Instead of living with nature we push nature off until it overwhelms our defenses. Eventually humans will learn ?
mistrial9 8y ago
people - the last three hundred years of industrial development has been a patchwork of travesty and tragedy. Singling out "forest management" is sounding remarkably uneducated in particular, among a crowd that is notably otherwise. Secondly, PG&E and many other regulated utilities, created holding companies to siphon out profits in the go-go 90s. the deregulation of California's electrical energy markets and subsequent ENRON debacle exposed the holding companies in the ensuing crisis discovery process. Thirdly, PG&E is super-guilty of labor avoiding, subcontracting, penny-pinching and evasive behavior for decades. This includes tree-trimming; this includes inaccurate record keeping of the gas pipeline safety records; many other ordinary, daily management decisions we dont know about, but collectively create the situation as it is. Do not cry for PG&E, or mimic PR company talking points. Thanks
romed 8y ago
People are discussing this event as if it were a “pole” servicing some house. The downed line that is suspected here is a high voltage transmission line serving a hydroelectric power station. It’s major infrastructure and there are only a handful of such lines in the state.
stevespang 8y ago
Imagine the losses to insurers as well. Will those losses get spread all across the national US base ?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
notacoward 8y ago
If PG&E was negligent, they should be held accountable. On the other hand, if this happened despite all reasonable safety precautions, it seems like scapegoating. I generally despise the concept of limited liability as it applies to every corporation in every kind of business, but this particular case seems to be exactly the kind of situation that justifies it. Unless one prefers that this kind of infrastructure be run only by the government itself (not an unreasonable belief), some kind of liability shield is necessary. Otherwise no sane business person would take that risk. Do you want the power infrastructure run by insane people?
- itronitron 8y ago
  This sort of thing happens with power lines in high winds and drought conditions, although I am not familiar with the particulars of the recent CA fire.
- randyrand 8y ago
  If it were run by the government, how would the government be held liable? We can’t ‘fine’ the government. All we have are brief elections. So the question becomes - are elections a better incentive for forest safely than financial liability is for a power company? Seems laughable to claim that.
  - notacoward 8y ago
    > If it were run by the government, how would the government be held liable? At the ballot box. You're correct that they can't be held financially liable even to the extent that corporations currently are. That's why I wasn't personally suggesting that the power grid should be nationalized. I'm just saying that "make PG&E pay for everything without limit" leaves no other option, so that's the debate people would need to have.
    - conanbatt 8y ago
      No ammount of voting makes the government liable to foot a bill. Government has no money of its own, it takes it from someone else.
homero 8y ago
How's it really their fault though? We all benefit from electricity, how are they supposed to provide it if they're always at fault.
paulpauper 8y ago
Someone probably made a killing with the put options
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
When your half mil house in the CA hills gets burnt down it's PG&E's fault for not trimming trees and they should pay you for it. When a storm erodes the beach out from under your 3-mil beachfront house it's the town's fault for not building erosion controls and they should pay you for it. When your dumpy trailer in a dumpy trailer park is tossed by a tornado you knew the risks and nobody should give you a cent. See the double standard?
- 0xffff2 8y ago
  Is anyone aside from beach-front property owners in favor of bailing them out? Even the degree to which PG&E should be liable is clearly controversial just based on the comments on this post alone.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    >Is anyone aside from beach-front property owners in favor of bailing them out? Local politicians who want a bunch of rich people on their side tend to favor those sorts of things.
LinuxBender 8y ago
There have been several dozen people arrested for arson in the last couple of months just in the bay area alone. Are we certain someone didn't tamper with pg&e's equipment?
openforce 8y ago
We should think about investing in smoke/heat sensors that can broadcast an emergency signal that can be placed in the wilderness areas close to human habitation. Just thinking through here, we need to determine the max radius of fire that can be confidently contained by the nearest fire department (taking into consideration some metrics such as time taken to reach the spot, how prone the area is for fire, wind speed averages, number/ability of the fire safety crew). Place a pole at the edge of such radius with sensors at different height , inbuilt GPS, and ability to broadcast its status to a remote control room. The number of poles in an area can be based on the above metrics. I understand that some wood fires that start naturally, actually are part of the natural cycle and is necessary. So remote areas could be spared, but still monitored to check its spread. Maybe a combination of such sensors and satellite data can help catch a fire when it is still small enough to be contained.
- jbob2000 8y ago
  No. Manage the forests better. Don’t build in fire prone areas. A forest fire burning down your house is a warning from Mother Nature, not an attack. Your system will just let debris build up even longer, leading to even bigger fires.
  - openforce 8y ago
    That might not work for already existing constructions. The system can be designed to not add to the fire, we can possibly add this to the already existing power infrastructure. This is a solvable problem.
garysahota93 8y ago
The wildfires in California are insane right now. I live in San Francisco and it's been extremely hard to breathe. All you see is folks with masks everywhere. It's just so sad to hear about all that's going down.
yashap 8y ago
If they were being negligent, they should absolutely have to pay a large percentage of the damages, maybe even 100%. Getting companies to be responsible for externalities is a no-brainer, even though it’s so often not enforced.
trhway 8y ago
i wonder whether external fire sprinklers - turn them on whenever there is a fire say in a mile or 2 radius - would decrease the chances of the house being fired up by the wind brought embers.
aplummer 8y ago
This situation is actually similar to the black Saturday bushfires in Australia - also caused by power lines. The utility eventually settled for half a billion dollars. Meaningless if you look up the loss of life. (Maybe somewhat different because every type of bushfire prevention strategy was in place / overwhelmed and I don't know what the situation is in California.)
8bitsrule 8y ago
11/15 Wired article: 'How California needs to adapt'. https://www.wired.com/story/how-california-needs-to-adapt-to-survive-future-fires/ https://www.wired.com/story/how-california-needs-to-adapt-to... "Last year, that conflagration came in the form of the Thomas Fire. But Montecito had been readying itself for decades.... They really focused on defensible space around homes, particularly the homes that were closest up against the wildland areas.... When the Thomas Fire hit, Montecito couldn’t rely on aircraft to drop water, but seven homes were lost—not 500." Of course, a fire-related mudslide soon destroyed many homes there. So a related thought: some places should not be occupied.

287 points by breitling 8y ago

The article states that there is roughly $15 billion in damages from this fire. PG&E’s assets and wildfire insurance are worth ~$5B. That said, if it were proven that PG&E were directly liable for this fire, how would that play out?

sjg007 8y ago
They should be a state owned utility and tech improvements should be made to reduce the fire risk.
- sovietmudkipz 8y ago
  In general, does the state operate more or less efficiently than the market? More specifically... What is the most efficient state run operation? What is the least efficient state run operation? What is the most efficient market driven operation? What is the least efficient market driven operation? My sense is that in general a market driven operation will be run more efficiently and practically than a state run operation. There may be particular instances of efficient state run operations that exist in the United States but there are always particular instances of efficient market driven operations too. Taken as a whole, we should skew towards market driven solutions.
  - Mbioguy 8y ago
    Utilities are natural monopolies. Not exactly the best fit for a market solution, especially when, as in this case, they are negative externalities borne by the public that the company is trying to avoid paying for.
    - VLM 8y ago
      The company will pay for nothing. Its a powerco not a mint. Their only significant revenue stream is electric bills (pole rental for telco fiber optics, pole rental for cable TV cables, all small amounts of money) What we have here is a decision between one group of accountants getting electricity users to pay, vs a different group of accountants getting taxpayers to pay. The fraction of the population that are net positive taxpayers is much smaller than the fraction of the population that uses electricity, so in a democracy it would be surprising NOT to see the people deciding the few people who are net positive taxpayers will get the bill. The large chunk of the population that pay electric bills while being net negative taxpayers are not going to volunteer to pay more.
    - koboll 8y ago
      A counterpoint might be that binding private enterprise by strict liability rules might coerce it to be extra cautious not to cut corners that lead to fires -- as opposed to a state owned company which might have less to fear from lax practices. Although, it's debatable how avoidable starting fires is in the bone-dry tinderbox of 21st-century California, even if you stick closely to best practices.
      - sjg007 8y ago
        What you describe is exactly what PG&E is today. Those strict liability rules did not prevent them from cutting corners. They estimate damages at 15B and their insurance and assets are worth $5B. So do the math.... taxpayers will have to pay for rebuilding and if PG&E survives will they pass costs on to rate payers (aka the same people whose houses burnt down) or will they tax PG&E more or ?. Maybe PG&E will become insurance company owned since they will owe the insurers tons of money since they can't pay out for liability.
  - 0xcde4c3db 8y ago
    I don't think that framing of the issue is very useful on its own. Public and private entities both participate in the market, and the question of which entities are most efficient depends on which definition of efficiency one deems most relevant (i.e. which inputs and outputs one chooses to measure, and by which methods). Also, people often attribute exclusively to government a class of dysfunctions or inefficiencies that have virtually nothing to do with an organization's ownership structure, but have a great deal to do with management structures typical of large organizations (e.g. wasteful spending due to "use it or lose it" budgets). With respect to these problems, I would be very surprised if substituting public vs. private does anything other than change minor details of how they manifest.
    - gowld 8y ago
      "market" does not mean "private". "market" means "competitive, instead of monopoly". They are orthogonal. You can have competing governments, and you can have private monopolies.
  - sjg007 8y ago
    You mean the monopoly utility in Northern California called PG&E?
_pmf_ 8y ago
> That said, if it were proven that PG&E were directly liable for this fire, how would that play out? As it always plays out: regular people will only sue via class action lawsuit, meaning there will be a settlement that is a fraction of the damage. The lawsuit with the state as plaintiff will drag on until either a settlement or the statute of limitation is reached.
- sjroot 8y ago
  That’s the answer I expected but didn’t want to see.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > As it always plays out: regular people will only sue via class action lawsuit, meaning there will be a settlement that is a fraction of the damage. Businesses and individuals (and public agencies like cities, counties, and special districts) with losses, especially of structures, will in many cases be insured; direct action lawsuits, or the threat thereof, to force a substantially full settlement, to recover from liable parties are a big part of what insurance companies do, and the nature of insurance companies is that each will have much larger losses than any individual, and much more motivation to aggressively pursue them; there may still be settlements that are less than would be recovered in a final judgement (to the extent that time value of money and risk and reduced litigation costs make that a winning proposition), but nowhere near as small a fraction as is typical in a class action. > The lawsuit with the state as plaintiff will drag on until either a settlement or the statute of limitation is reached. That's not how statutes of limitations work. They run from the event giving rise to the cause of action to the moment the action is filed; once the case is filed within the statute of limitations, how long it runs is immaterial.
  - gowld 8y ago
    That's only true in some cases. In the recent Tesla occupational-safety case, the statute of limitations ran from time of the incident until time of resolution, so stalling did cancel the government intervention.
mrleiter 8y ago
Chapter 7 (liquidation) or Chapter 11 (restructuring) of Title 11 U.S.C. are possible options.
- koboll 8y ago
  This exactly is what's likely to happen. Note also: PG&E is already being sued for allegedly causing last fall's devastating fires in northern California. That plus damages for this year's fires is very likely to force them into bankruptcy. Hence a plunging stock price as everyone rushes to get out while they still can.
tyu1000 8y ago
Articles on Bloomberg about this already on who pays if they are found liable for huge amounts of damages, ratepayers, shareholders, taxpayers or bondholders. Likely to be a combination of all four in some amount, if the worse comes to happen.
- thanosnose 8y ago
  Most likely the shareholders will be wiped out ( equity collapse ) and bondholders are going to cut their losses and simply walk away. It will be rate payers ( customers ) and taxpayers ( both state and federal ) who will be footing the bill. But that's the worst case scenario which I don't think is likely.
sailfast 8y ago
Even if they go into bankruptcy (Chapter 11, say) they are legally allowed to recoup the costs of this as part of being a regulated utility, so I would expect higher utility rates to customers as a start for the next few years in order to either pay for the liability insurance or (less likely) to bring their infrastructure to a court-arguable higher standard so as to avoid accusations of liability in the future. That said, as a private citizen I don't see how a person starting a fire accidentally (not sure how you prove malice if a transformer fails?) could be held liable for all the property damage further downstream. That's what private insurance is for.
- sgc 8y ago
  Negligence.
rasz 8y ago
Dont worry, no one will go to jail if thats what you were thinking of.

newman8r 8y ago

Southern California Edison stock was down ~10% too

jypepin 8y ago

The video of the article mentions that PG&G might also be responsible of the napa fires in 2016. This is crazy. Are there any liabilities for their executives in the case of such damage done because of negligibility? If PG&E did not make efforts to maintain their equipment better after napa, and this is the cause of Malibu, that becomes almost 3rd degree murder, right?

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
It's a utility company. The regulatory capture and political influence is too great for them to ever be held liable to such an extent.
sgc 8y ago
Regardless of the law, they are certainly morally responsible for loss of life every year, and have been for decades.

brownbat 8y ago

99PI's coverage of forest fire policy and design was really provocative: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-to-burn/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-to-burn/ 1. Our entire approach to fighting forest fires may just be making them worse. 2. Smart and simple design decisions can save houses. A house can be thirty feet from an entire forest on fire and never burn down. We learned this through hardcore experiments in Canada where they built homes to test and lit forests on fire nearby. One of the immediate takeaways was to change roofing materials to resist embers, but there are other options for materials and landscaping that could make homes basically impervious. The problem is probabilities. Fires are common, constant. They are exceedingly rare in any one location though. So fire resistant design is no one's urgent problem, fires are always something that seems like it will happen to somebody else.

athenot 8y ago
That's the same problem in the South East with tornadoes. They happen nearly every week (in summer) and can destroy neighborhoods. Yet we build lightweight framed houses and rely on insurance because the overall odds are low.
- danielvf 8y ago
  I agree with your general point. Though we are talking many, many orders of magnitude less damage from tornadoes in the Southeast when compared with California forrest fires. My state gets an average of 20 per year, and almost all of these hit uninhabited areas. If a tornado destroys four houses, it makes state news.
  - js2 8y ago
    A better comparison is hurricane prone locations. After Hurricane Andrew in 1994, Florida conpletely revised its building codes to require homes to withstand a major hurricane. It’s possible to build a home on the beach to even withstand a catastrophic hurricane, but at possibly double the construction cost. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/14/us/hurricane-michael-florida-mexico-beach-house.amp.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/14/us/hurricane-michael-flor... I recall after there were bad fires in the Everglades many years ago there had been some work to build a foam that could be sprayed on a home to protect it in advance of an approaching fire. I think the person who came up with the idea was inspired by the amount of liquid diapers can hold. I wonder what came of that. Edit: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2006/jul/19/gel-inspired-by-diapers-may-be-firefighting-tool/ http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2006/jul/19/gel-inspired-by...

thrower123 8y ago

I didn't see what equipment actually might have started the fire? That would be more interesting. Ultimately you've got awful forestry management practices that are really to blame for this annual mess.

newman8r 8y ago
It's often a faulty transformer
- sgc 8y ago
  It's far more often lines sparking/arcing during high winds when striking nearby vegetation which was not properly trimmed.
platz 8y ago
> firms allege in the suit that "PG&E was negligent in failing to maintain its infrastructure and properly inspect and manage its power transmission lines."
ApolloFortyNine 8y ago
>Ultimately you've got awful forestry management practices that are really to blame for this annual mess. Agreed, you have to assume forest fires will happen in California eventually (since they have for thousands of years). It's unreasonable to expect there never to be some kind of spark, whether it's an act of god or caused by one of the 40 million humans living in California.

crunchlibrarian 8y ago

I don't know much about the EE side of the world, but surely there is a way to design grid/transformer equipment such that the circuit can be interrupted immediately when a pole falls over or whatever. Is this possible? Is it just a matter of spending the money to upgrade the infrastructure?

Mvandenbergh 8y ago
Fundamentally something has to fault before you detect that fault and interrupt it. Newer protection relays and circuit breaker equipment can make that interruption faster but the amount of energy required to ignite a tinder-dry forest is so small that I'm not sure it would be possible to detect, trigger, and interrupt the energy escape in time.
- crunchlibrarian 8y ago
  So bury all the cables/equipment underground? I'm sure costs are substantially higher to do so, but we could add other infrastructure along these underground lines as well if there was a shred of political will to accomplish this.
  - VLM 8y ago
    From a safety engineering standpoint it would be much cheaper and safer not to live in a tinderbox than to try to make a tinderbox fireproof. It seems a bad investment to try to live there.
    - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
      In a fight between logic and "surf and ski in the same day, brah" logic is not what wins.
      - sgc 8y ago
        That is a useless comment. People should not live in hurricane areas, in tornado alleys, etc. But they do. So the infrastructure needs to be designed for it. What people's pastimes are is totally irrelevant and obviously does not inform this type of decision a whit.

Mvandenbergh 8y ago

"The legislation also didn’t change how California applies “inverse condemnation,” a legal doctrine under which the state’s utilities can be held liable for any economic damages tied to their equipment, even if they follow all of the state’s safety rules. That’s left the utilities exposed to open-ended liabilities." This seems like a very inefficient way of allocating risk. California is naturally fire prone and has become more so over recent years due to drought. Anyone operating an electricity distribution network is therefore operating assets that are inherently fire and explosion prone - even if operated and maintained correctly - there is no way to move that much energy over those distances without it occasionally being released in an undesirable way - in a place where the consequences of that are severe. Simple logic dictates that you only expose companies and individuals to economic risks that are within management control, otherwise you just end up with an economic role that is necessary but impossible to fill. Even if state standards for safety were updated to reduce the chances of a transformer explosion, circuit breaker arc, or fault in forested areas you'd never get the risk down to zero nor would you remove all the other sources of ignition.

anilshanbhag 8y ago
Article on how California's forest policy might have exasperated the wildfires: https://www.wsj.com/articles/californias-paradise-lost-1542068600 https://www.wsj.com/articles/californias-paradise-lost-15420...
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
  Funny typo, I think you mean exacerbated.
erickj 8y ago
"Simple logic dictates..." Ahhh, but you assume the legislative body governing 30M people can resort to simple logic :)
namdnay 8y ago
If I understand this system correctly, this means that utilities will need insurance of some sort, and that therefore every home and business in California will pay higher utility rates to cover that extra cost. Indeed it seems a bit of a roundabout way to manage things - I guess the major political advantage is that it is a "hidden" tax? (as opposed to just mandating a certain level of safety and then having the government cover costs of accidents if these levels were respected)

throwawaymanbot 8y ago

Cowboy capitalism strikes again!

gxigzigxigxi 8y ago

I sure hope the liability laws are not such that PG&E gets wiped out. I don’t think it makes much sense to assign most of the causal weight to a spark when it would do nothing without all that tinder. There would have been another spark, eventually. If you don’t want to sometimes worry about forest fires, don’t build your house in the woods. It isn’t that complicated.

21 8y ago
If you throw a match with intention and it causes a fire, you will go to prison. If they neglected fire warnings, there should be some responsability.
- gxigzigxigxi 8y ago
  Sure. If there was gross negligence, some liability would be reasonable. Probably not 100% of damages, but some. That’s not what we are talking about though. I think under current law they could be liable even if they took all due care.
  - olliej 8y ago
    PG&E bills literally include a line item for maintenance, beyond the basic costs. PG&E has repeatedly issued bonuses and comp packages funded by cash they received from that line item while not performing maintenance of their network. This is exactly what happened last year (line that they weren't maintaining caused that fire), and when they blew up san bruno (when a gas line that had even been stated to need maintenance exploded and killed people). If you can make a profit while doing all the required work, then fair play to you, but if you're turning a "profit" without performing all the maintenance your network requires, and then getting tax payer support whenever that goes wrong you are not running at a profit. You're a tax payer subsidized siphon, taking money from tax payers to fund bonuses and investors. If you can't run a profit without tax payer backup, you aren't profitable.
irascible 8y ago
PGE has been fucking consumers forever. The fact that it's a publicly traded company is disgusting. It should be siezed by the state and provide service at break even.they have a history of public boondoggles going back to the hetch hetchy free water for copper deal..

andrewvc 8y ago

The silliest thing about this is that anthropogenic forest fires have been the norm in CA for thousands of years. If they aren't started on purpose by a human they will eventually be started by a human accident (or the rare lightening strike). The ecosystem evolved with humans this way. The notion of liability here is absurd. http://www.californiachaparral.com/enativeamericans.html http://www.californiachaparral.com/enativeamericans.html https://phys.org/news/2017-01-anthropogenic-forest-impacted-earth-climate.html https://phys.org/news/2017-01-anthropogenic-forest-impacted-...

wil421 8y ago
The differencea is this one was probably started by power lines. Other fires were also started by campers or reckless people. None of these situations are natural.
- andrewvc 8y ago
  Please read the linked articles in my parent comment. They are natural, because humans are natural. California's vegetation has evolved to burn and quickly regrow and easily burn again due to anthropogenic fire for thousands of years. If it were not for human involvement CA might have more fire resistant species.
- akvadrako 8y ago
  The limiting factor contributing to the total amount of fire is the growth of trees. Naturally it'll happen due to lightning. If that's less often than human triggers, the fires will be bigger.
  - andrewvc 8y ago
    That's actually not necessarily the case. By creating more fires evolutionary pressure favored plants that were designed to burn, grow fast, and leave competitive seeds. BTW much of what burns in CA is not large trees but chapparal. The linked articles I included have more detail.

michaelt 8y ago

The utility’s filing also may have marked the start of a campaign to get bailed out by California’s lawmakers -- as it was after last year’s fires. Seems to me bailing out the same company twice for the same mistake would be the height of idiocy. I mean, that's tantamount to saying you'll bail out the company every year forever. You've basically telling the CEO "Don't spend $1 billion of your money on inspections and preventative maintenance so your equipment stops causing fires! Instead, destroy $15 billion of value and we'll pay for it all at no cost to yourself!" Of course the company would accept that if someone fool offered it to them. It's super-inefficient for that fool, but the company saves a billion dollars!

dahdum 8y ago
California sets all the rules for utilities, including rates. There isn’t much wiggle room for PG&E, holding them liable for this is silly. It’s just a political shell game, assigning blame to PG&E and avoid responsibility for legislative failure.

gimmeThaBeet 8y ago

Utilities are weird, I could easily be wrong/offbase but going after them legally always feels vaguely like cutting off your nose to spite your face. The threat of inverse condemnation just feels like short term thinking of how you interact with your utility. Forget return on equity and shareholder returns, if you really hold a utility liable like that, not only would PG&E probably go away, I don't know how you'd get another utility to step in. I seriously think you'd need some giant Cal co-op, or you're going to have to charge seriously high prices to make it worth the risk, or go gridless, which sounds cool but infeasible at that kind of scale if you had to do it in a couple years.

EADGBE 8y ago
There's plenty of places that have no other option. They have to use said utility company in order to get utilities. Example, https://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/news/2014/02/06/commission-report-puts-blame-on-mge-in.html https://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/news/2014/02/06/commi... I guarantee you that JJ's restuarant in this example is still using MGE for their gas. They have no other choice here. Even though it killed one of their employees through negligence.
olliej 8y ago
> Utilities are weird, I could easily be wrong/offbase but going after them legally always feels vaguely like cutting off your nose to spite your face. The threat of inverse condemnation just feels like short term thinking of how you interact with your utility. No. The short term thinking is saying "here, private corporation, fell free to turn a profit by not maintaining your assets in the knowledge that you will be bailed out when you burn down a city". The long term effect of this is that tax payers do the following: * Pay the "profitable" corporation to receive what ever utility it is providing. * Pay vastly more than it would have cost to simply maintain the utility when recovering from whatever disaster is caused by the utility not maintaining their system. In the absence of liability for failure to maintain their network, a utility has (according to modern corporate policy) a /duty/ to not maintain their network, so they can maximize the money they give to their shareholders. > if you really hold a utility liable like that, not only would PG&E probably go away, I don't know how you'd get another utility to step in. You mean like an actual public entity? As has been the case in most countries for a long long time? > or you're going to have to charge seriously high prices to make it worth the risk No. If a company needs liability insurance at a feasible price they'd need to actively work to mitigate risk - private insurance would be a good hammer for that as failing to maintain your lines and equipment would increase the costs of your insurance. The other problem with this is it assumes that the cost of "seriously high prices", is higher than the cost for tax payers when they are having to pay to deal with whatever disasters and recovery costs directly.

cal97g 8y ago

buy for free money

platz 8y ago

Remember when BP spilled all that oil.. wish I'd bought that dip

prewett 8y ago
Which is why you're buying this one, right?

geggam 8y ago

The fact we prevent forest fires from spreading is the reason they spread so bad. Eliminate the fuel and you wont have these fires. Instead of living with nature we push nature off until it overwhelms our defenses. Eventually humans will learn ?

mistrial9 8y ago

people - the last three hundred years of industrial development has been a patchwork of travesty and tragedy. Singling out "forest management" is sounding remarkably uneducated in particular, among a crowd that is notably otherwise. Secondly, PG&E and many other regulated utilities, created holding companies to siphon out profits in the go-go 90s. the deregulation of California's electrical energy markets and subsequent ENRON debacle exposed the holding companies in the ensuing crisis discovery process. Thirdly, PG&E is super-guilty of labor avoiding, subcontracting, penny-pinching and evasive behavior for decades. This includes tree-trimming; this includes inaccurate record keeping of the gas pipeline safety records; many other ordinary, daily management decisions we dont know about, but collectively create the situation as it is. Do not cry for PG&E, or mimic PR company talking points. Thanks

romed 8y ago

People are discussing this event as if it were a “pole” servicing some house. The downed line that is suspected here is a high voltage transmission line serving a hydroelectric power station. It’s major infrastructure and there are only a handful of such lines in the state.

stevespang 8y ago

Imagine the losses to insurers as well. Will those losses get spread all across the national US base ?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

notacoward 8y ago

If PG&E was negligent, they should be held accountable. On the other hand, if this happened despite all reasonable safety precautions, it seems like scapegoating. I generally despise the concept of limited liability as it applies to every corporation in every kind of business, but this particular case seems to be exactly the kind of situation that justifies it. Unless one prefers that this kind of infrastructure be run only by the government itself (not an unreasonable belief), some kind of liability shield is necessary. Otherwise no sane business person would take that risk. Do you want the power infrastructure run by insane people?

itronitron 8y ago
This sort of thing happens with power lines in high winds and drought conditions, although I am not familiar with the particulars of the recent CA fire.
randyrand 8y ago
If it were run by the government, how would the government be held liable? We can’t ‘fine’ the government. All we have are brief elections. So the question becomes - are elections a better incentive for forest safely than financial liability is for a power company? Seems laughable to claim that.
- notacoward 8y ago
  > If it were run by the government, how would the government be held liable? At the ballot box. You're correct that they can't be held financially liable even to the extent that corporations currently are. That's why I wasn't personally suggesting that the power grid should be nationalized. I'm just saying that "make PG&E pay for everything without limit" leaves no other option, so that's the debate people would need to have.
  - conanbatt 8y ago
    No ammount of voting makes the government liable to foot a bill. Government has no money of its own, it takes it from someone else.

homero 8y ago

How's it really their fault though? We all benefit from electricity, how are they supposed to provide it if they're always at fault.

paulpauper 8y ago

Someone probably made a killing with the put options

dsfyu404ed 8y ago

When your half mil house in the CA hills gets burnt down it's PG&E's fault for not trimming trees and they should pay you for it. When a storm erodes the beach out from under your 3-mil beachfront house it's the town's fault for not building erosion controls and they should pay you for it. When your dumpy trailer in a dumpy trailer park is tossed by a tornado you knew the risks and nobody should give you a cent. See the double standard?

0xffff2 8y ago
Is anyone aside from beach-front property owners in favor of bailing them out? Even the degree to which PG&E should be liable is clearly controversial just based on the comments on this post alone.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  >Is anyone aside from beach-front property owners in favor of bailing them out? Local politicians who want a bunch of rich people on their side tend to favor those sorts of things.

LinuxBender 8y ago

There have been several dozen people arrested for arson in the last couple of months just in the bay area alone. Are we certain someone didn't tamper with pg&e's equipment?

openforce 8y ago

We should think about investing in smoke/heat sensors that can broadcast an emergency signal that can be placed in the wilderness areas close to human habitation. Just thinking through here, we need to determine the max radius of fire that can be confidently contained by the nearest fire department (taking into consideration some metrics such as time taken to reach the spot, how prone the area is for fire, wind speed averages, number/ability of the fire safety crew). Place a pole at the edge of such radius with sensors at different height , inbuilt GPS, and ability to broadcast its status to a remote control room. The number of poles in an area can be based on the above metrics. I understand that some wood fires that start naturally, actually are part of the natural cycle and is necessary. So remote areas could be spared, but still monitored to check its spread. Maybe a combination of such sensors and satellite data can help catch a fire when it is still small enough to be contained.

jbob2000 8y ago
No. Manage the forests better. Don’t build in fire prone areas. A forest fire burning down your house is a warning from Mother Nature, not an attack. Your system will just let debris build up even longer, leading to even bigger fires.
- openforce 8y ago
  That might not work for already existing constructions. The system can be designed to not add to the fire, we can possibly add this to the already existing power infrastructure. This is a solvable problem.

garysahota93 8y ago

The wildfires in California are insane right now. I live in San Francisco and it's been extremely hard to breathe. All you see is folks with masks everywhere. It's just so sad to hear about all that's going down.

yashap 8y ago

If they were being negligent, they should absolutely have to pay a large percentage of the damages, maybe even 100%. Getting companies to be responsible for externalities is a no-brainer, even though it’s so often not enforced.

trhway 8y ago

i wonder whether external fire sprinklers - turn them on whenever there is a fire say in a mile or 2 radius - would decrease the chances of the house being fired up by the wind brought embers.

aplummer 8y ago

This situation is actually similar to the black Saturday bushfires in Australia - also caused by power lines. The utility eventually settled for half a billion dollars. Meaningless if you look up the loss of life. (Maybe somewhat different because every type of bushfire prevention strategy was in place / overwhelmed and I don't know what the situation is in California.)

8bitsrule 8y ago

11/15 Wired article: 'How California needs to adapt'. https://www.wired.com/story/how-california-needs-to-adapt-to-survive-future-fires/ https://www.wired.com/story/how-california-needs-to-adapt-to... "Last year, that conflagration came in the form of the Thomas Fire. But Montecito had been readying itself for decades.... They really focused on defensible space around homes, particularly the homes that were closest up against the wildland areas.... When the Thomas Fire hit, Montecito couldn’t rely on aircraft to drop water, but seven homes were lost—not 500." Of course, a fire-related mudslide soon destroyed many homes there. So a related thought: some places should not be occupied.