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It seems like an odd quirk of liability law that all of the fire damage is blamed on PG+E if the initial spark that started the fire was PG+E’s fault. Surely so

by lacker 8y ago

It seems like an odd quirk of liability law that all of the fire damage is blamed on PG+E if the initial spark that started the fire was PG+E’s fault. Surely some blame lies elsewhere as well. I think homeowners need to be paying fire insurance costs proportional to fire risk to properly incentivize fire protection (and I say this as a California homeowner in a somewhat fire prone area). In the end, PG+E is regulated so heavily that any costs they pay will basically just be passed on to consumers. The solution to the increased fire risk is not “blame PG+E”.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
schoen 8y ago
There's a long discussion in Coase's classic "The Problem of Social Cost" about the apportionment of liability between railroads and landowners adjacent to the railways when fires are started by sparks from trains. http://home.cerge-ei.cz/ortmann/UpcesCourse/Coase%20-%20The%20problem%20of%20Social%20Cost.pdf http://home.cerge-ei.cz/ortmann/UpcesCourse/Coase%20-%20The%... Basically Coase says that it's not necessarily the most economically efficient to blame the railroad that created the sparks, and that it depends on other factors (in the super-simple formulation that people sometimes attribute to Coase, this could include who could most cheaply act to mitigate the fires). I think Coase would agree with you that we can't automatically assume that blaming PG&E and making PG&E pay for all the damages will lead to the most efficient outcomes for California as a whole in the future.
Scoundreller 8y ago
> PG+E is regulated so heavily that any costs they pay will basically just be passed on to consumers. That assumes they survive. Their market cap is $12b and some cost estimates are nearing that, but their own insurance will cover a lot of the costs... for now. Endlessly increasing rates works when consumers have no alternatives. But this is in California, solar just gets more and more viable.
tathougies 8y ago
Fire insurance, like earthquake and flood insurance, does not work because of the scope of damages. Insurance works by pooling risk and taking income from low risk areas to pay for high risk ones. Due to the scope of wildfires, fire insurance is untenable. The solution to this fire is absolutely to blame pg and e and its custoners (yes this includes me). This is the logical conclusion. The only thing preventing us from doing this is a refusal to count ourselves complicit in this fire. The solution furthermore is to legislate to remove the barriers to competition that California has set up. Even though I try to do the right thing by buying my electricity from something other than pg and e, I am -- by government sanctioned monopoly -- forced to pay of and e for 'distribution'. I put this in quotes because I am not charged this fee if I buy direct from pg and e. The state allows this non competitive monopoly. When I confronted my congressman, his response to why the state allows this is that the ' pg and e lobby is strong' If the state cannot preserve a competitive market for energy, then the state needs to seize energy production. Monopoly is not capitalism and it is not the free market and it is not freedom. A state run solution is very non ideal (I say this as a libertarian), but it is the best among all others. As it is right now, people in England are able to buy shares in my utility and are more incentivized to cut costs and increase profit even to the point of causing harm that will never affect them.
- r00fus 8y ago
  What about the Federal government for cutting the funding for existing CA fire programs? Funding was cut last year and boom we have back to back years of fires.
  - tathougies 8y ago
    This is a strawman. I do not like the current administration, but attempting to blame everything on them is intellectually lazy. The fires in California are not caused due to bad budget cuts over the past few years, but rather the mistaken environmentalist policy of not allowing controlled burns for the last 100 years and extinguishing natural fires out of needless heroics to save species that are now in ever more need of saving: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/california-wildfire-why-humans-cant-control-them/575740/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/californ...
anon2775 8y ago
Disclaimer: I barely survived the Camp Fire, with all the credit to our neighbors for letting us know. That's a chick-little, strawman and blame-the-victim argument. The issues are: 1. PGE likely started the fire. They should be held responsible for this specific incident, not passing the buck to ratepayers or anyone else. 2. PGE is corrupting and coopting liability when it needs to pay the penalties for its actions, not pass the buck. This is separate from 1. because it indicates a greater decay of liability and they're insulating themselves to gradually become an untouchable mafia. 3. In order to get 2., removing SIG, PAC and large private monies, and all those who benefit from them, from politics is imperative. 4. Paradise is a tiny town that doesn't do a very good job with code enforcement. My mom had to mobilize the neighbors to get an abandoned propery's owner to mow their 7 ft tall, dried weeds and remove fire other hazards like an abandoned house with a tree crashed through it, but then the institutionalized owner later allowed a random tree-trimmer to dump dozens of piles of pine sawdust and logs on that property. SMH. 5. "Regulations" aren't an uniform obelisk to scapegoat that you implied. One regulation maybe advantageous or harmful uniquely to each and every affected group, depending. So don't even start spreading the tired, libertarian, utopian refrains like "If only there were no regulations, markets solve everything," which is utter horseshit. Regulations can and do work but only if the governed demand it and refuse to allow the rich and their corporations to have their way. It's the POLR for most former/current homeowners to move to where professional town managers exist rather than deal with small-town incompetence like the bumblers in Paradise or Butte's Sheriff Kory's flimsy excuse for not activating the EAS, which likely caused the needless deaths of hundreds of disabled and elderly people.
- Twirrim 8y ago
  I'm definitely in favour of PG&E getting hit hard for this one due to what appears to be gross negligence on their part. _But_, doesn't the liability also, in part, apply to the state and/or the federal government? How far did the fire unnecessarily spread? Was the land in the area being properly maintained, with good fire breaks, routine controlled burns etc, or are they skimping like they have been all over the country?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
paul7986 8y ago
California the land of sky high housing & rent, insane deadly forest fires, homelessness like no other state, landslides, earthquakes... it just doesn't sound very appealing. What are the positives ... chasing and potentially realizing your creative (music/film) or tech dreams there? That can be done in other cities like Nashville or possibly close to here in a few years with Amazon building in Crystal City, VA (other big tech companies may follow). Well love to hear the positives of living in California!
- thisiszilff 8y ago
  Weather.
- burtonator 8y ago
  "California the land of sky high housing & rent, insane deadly forest fires, homelessness like no other state, landslides, earthquakes... it just doesn't sound very appealing." This is just sample bias. California is the size of NY all the way down to Florida. If something bad happens on the west coast it has a 60% chance of being in CA but if it happens on the east coast it could be in VA, MD, DC, FL, GA, SC, NC, WV, DE
- olivermarks 8y ago
  If California was a nation state it would rank 6th in the world https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/07/american-state-bigger-economy-than-india/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/07/american-state-bigger... The media and Hollywood create a pretty weird perception of California, the climate, geography and economy is very varied.
  - labster 8y ago
    I thought the reason Hollywood was in California is because of the wide range of climates and shooting locations. Beach, farm, desert, and alpine, all just a few hours drive away. We're a bit short on tundra, though.
    - mikestew 8y ago
Digory 8y ago
Isn't one theory of granting a government monopoly franchise that it allows pooling of risks related to that activity? PG&E is, in some sense, the government's insurance plan. Other general liability insurance is now priced for damages that cannot be assigned or recovered. But "no fault fire insurance" would shift cost from the government-backed-utility-rate-pool to private insurers. It's hard to imagine that such a shift would be more efficient, in part because PG&E is in the best position to assess its own risk -- and buy its own insurance and reinsurance. Surely, somewhere in the utility, someone bought a SwissRe or Loyds policy against freak catastrophic loss.
- michaelt 8y ago
  It's hard to imagine that such a shift would be more efficient There was an article linked here the other day [1] that said homes can be designed to withstand wildfires through choice of materials and vegetation clearing. If the intervention you want to incentivise is replacing wooden roofs and removing fuel near the house, raising insurance bills for people who don't do that could be one way of doing it. Of course, there's also a case for incentivising not starting the fire in the first place. [1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-to-burn/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-to-burn/
williamscales 8y ago
> Surely some blame lies elsewhere as well. I saw a picture of Paradise after it burned. It was remarkable, the houses were completely gone but the trees were still standing all around. There's something wrong with how we build and maintain our structures in fire prone areas.
- edejong 8y ago
  The trees have evolved to withstand fires very well, using bark over 10cm thick, dropping the lower needles during fire. Perhaps it is possible to cover buildings in similar isolating material as well. However, people would still need to be evacuated due to the lethal smoke.
kozikow 8y ago
> "I think homeowners need to be paying fire insurance costs proportional to fire risk" Wildfires are already covered by property re/insurance. The problem is that risk is badly priced, as modeling for wildfires is currently very underdeveloped compared to hurricanes or earthquakes. There has been no wildfire event of a similar magnitude of property losses in recent history. Shameless plug: At tensorflight we are actually starting some prototyping of wildfire risk models for the insurance industry based on satellite imagery.
- LanceH 8y ago
  A house is insured. PG&E is insured. My house burns down, my insurance pays for it. Then they sue PG&E to recover that payout. As far as who is at fault: a fire needs a fuel, oxygen and a spark. It can be argued that a spark is going to happen somewhere, and mitigating it is more about not having the fuel so that it can chain and spread.
  - masonic 8y ago
    PG&E is insured. Do we know this? Many large public and quasi-public entities are self-insuring.
ergothus 8y ago
Liability law is at least consistent, even if I end up disagreeing with the result. When my (now ex-) wife was in law school, one if the sample cards they studied was an arsonist where the fire had met up with an unrelated one. The arsonist was found liable for all the subsequent damage from the combined fire rather than an approximation of his "contribution" despite the being no disagreement that some of the damage would have happened anyway. In another case construction crews finding were found liable for a nearby mink farm's lost of income when the sounds freaked out the animals and they ruined their coats, because blowing stuff up, even done legally, is considered a high liability task. At least those are my recollections of the decisions, it has been a while and I didn't study them myself.
- gamblor956 8y ago
  Interesting. In law school, I learned that the exact opposite way--the arsonist wasn't responsible for any damage, because the bigger fire would have consumed the target house anyway. (Edit: I believe the proper term is "superseding cause". Note that with all things involving case law, this is highly jurisdictionally dependent. For example, in California, intentional acts can be superseding causes but not unintentional/negligent acts or acts of god.) With the mink case, the issue wasn't that blowing stuff up is a high-liability task. The issue was that it was a nuisance. Nuisance activities can be legal, and even first-in-time (like say, cow farms predating housing developments). Very nutshell version, but basically the issue with nuisance law is that the activity's effects transcend the boundaries of one's property and so the doer can be held liable for those effects.
  - ergothus 8y ago
    I'll trust your memories over mine, particularly as you've studied this and I had dinner-table conversations.

by lacker 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

schoen 8y ago

There's a long discussion in Coase's classic "The Problem of Social Cost" about the apportionment of liability between railroads and landowners adjacent to the railways when fires are started by sparks from trains. http://home.cerge-ei.cz/ortmann/UpcesCourse/Coase%20-%20The%20problem%20of%20Social%20Cost.pdf http://home.cerge-ei.cz/ortmann/UpcesCourse/Coase%20-%20The%... Basically Coase says that it's not necessarily the most economically efficient to blame the railroad that created the sparks, and that it depends on other factors (in the super-simple formulation that people sometimes attribute to Coase, this could include who could most cheaply act to mitigate the fires). I think Coase would agree with you that we can't automatically assume that blaming PG&E and making PG&E pay for all the damages will lead to the most efficient outcomes for California as a whole in the future.

Scoundreller 8y ago

> PG+E is regulated so heavily that any costs they pay will basically just be passed on to consumers. That assumes they survive. Their market cap is $12b and some cost estimates are nearing that, but their own insurance will cover a lot of the costs... for now. Endlessly increasing rates works when consumers have no alternatives. But this is in California, solar just gets more and more viable.

tathougies 8y ago

Fire insurance, like earthquake and flood insurance, does not work because of the scope of damages. Insurance works by pooling risk and taking income from low risk areas to pay for high risk ones. Due to the scope of wildfires, fire insurance is untenable. The solution to this fire is absolutely to blame pg and e and its custoners (yes this includes me). This is the logical conclusion. The only thing preventing us from doing this is a refusal to count ourselves complicit in this fire. The solution furthermore is to legislate to remove the barriers to competition that California has set up. Even though I try to do the right thing by buying my electricity from something other than pg and e, I am -- by government sanctioned monopoly -- forced to pay of and e for 'distribution'. I put this in quotes because I am not charged this fee if I buy direct from pg and e. The state allows this non competitive monopoly. When I confronted my congressman, his response to why the state allows this is that the ' pg and e lobby is strong' If the state cannot preserve a competitive market for energy, then the state needs to seize energy production. Monopoly is not capitalism and it is not the free market and it is not freedom. A state run solution is very non ideal (I say this as a libertarian), but it is the best among all others. As it is right now, people in England are able to buy shares in my utility and are more incentivized to cut costs and increase profit even to the point of causing harm that will never affect them.

r00fus 8y ago
What about the Federal government for cutting the funding for existing CA fire programs? Funding was cut last year and boom we have back to back years of fires.
- tathougies 8y ago
  This is a strawman. I do not like the current administration, but attempting to blame everything on them is intellectually lazy. The fires in California are not caused due to bad budget cuts over the past few years, but rather the mistaken environmentalist policy of not allowing controlled burns for the last 100 years and extinguishing natural fires out of needless heroics to save species that are now in ever more need of saving: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/california-wildfire-why-humans-cant-control-them/575740/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/californ...

anon2775 8y ago

Disclaimer: I barely survived the Camp Fire, with all the credit to our neighbors for letting us know. That's a chick-little, strawman and blame-the-victim argument. The issues are: 1. PGE likely started the fire. They should be held responsible for this specific incident, not passing the buck to ratepayers or anyone else. 2. PGE is corrupting and coopting liability when it needs to pay the penalties for its actions, not pass the buck. This is separate from 1. because it indicates a greater decay of liability and they're insulating themselves to gradually become an untouchable mafia. 3. In order to get 2., removing SIG, PAC and large private monies, and all those who benefit from them, from politics is imperative. 4. Paradise is a tiny town that doesn't do a very good job with code enforcement. My mom had to mobilize the neighbors to get an abandoned propery's owner to mow their 7 ft tall, dried weeds and remove fire other hazards like an abandoned house with a tree crashed through it, but then the institutionalized owner later allowed a random tree-trimmer to dump dozens of piles of pine sawdust and logs on that property. SMH. 5. "Regulations" aren't an uniform obelisk to scapegoat that you implied. One regulation maybe advantageous or harmful uniquely to each and every affected group, depending. So don't even start spreading the tired, libertarian, utopian refrains like "If only there were no regulations, markets solve everything," which is utter horseshit. Regulations can and do work but only if the governed demand it and refuse to allow the rich and their corporations to have their way. It's the POLR for most former/current homeowners to move to where professional town managers exist rather than deal with small-town incompetence like the bumblers in Paradise or Butte's Sheriff Kory's flimsy excuse for not activating the EAS, which likely caused the needless deaths of hundreds of disabled and elderly people.

Twirrim 8y ago
I'm definitely in favour of PG&E getting hit hard for this one due to what appears to be gross negligence on their part. _But_, doesn't the liability also, in part, apply to the state and/or the federal government? How far did the fire unnecessarily spread? Was the land in the area being properly maintained, with good fire breaks, routine controlled burns etc, or are they skimping like they have been all over the country?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

paul7986 8y ago

California the land of sky high housing & rent, insane deadly forest fires, homelessness like no other state, landslides, earthquakes... it just doesn't sound very appealing. What are the positives ... chasing and potentially realizing your creative (music/film) or tech dreams there? That can be done in other cities like Nashville or possibly close to here in a few years with Amazon building in Crystal City, VA (other big tech companies may follow). Well love to hear the positives of living in California!

thisiszilff 8y ago
Weather.
burtonator 8y ago
"California the land of sky high housing & rent, insane deadly forest fires, homelessness like no other state, landslides, earthquakes... it just doesn't sound very appealing." This is just sample bias. California is the size of NY all the way down to Florida. If something bad happens on the west coast it has a 60% chance of being in CA but if it happens on the east coast it could be in VA, MD, DC, FL, GA, SC, NC, WV, DE
olivermarks 8y ago
If California was a nation state it would rank 6th in the world https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/07/american-state-bigger-economy-than-india/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/07/american-state-bigger... The media and Hollywood create a pretty weird perception of California, the climate, geography and economy is very varied.
- labster 8y ago
  I thought the reason Hollywood was in California is because of the wide range of climates and shooting locations. Beach, farm, desert, and alpine, all just a few hours drive away. We're a bit short on tundra, though.
  - mikestew 8y ago

Digory 8y ago

Isn't one theory of granting a government monopoly franchise that it allows pooling of risks related to that activity? PG&E is, in some sense, the government's insurance plan. Other general liability insurance is now priced for damages that cannot be assigned or recovered. But "no fault fire insurance" would shift cost from the government-backed-utility-rate-pool to private insurers. It's hard to imagine that such a shift would be more efficient, in part because PG&E is in the best position to assess its own risk -- and buy its own insurance and reinsurance. Surely, somewhere in the utility, someone bought a SwissRe or Loyds policy against freak catastrophic loss.

michaelt 8y ago
It's hard to imagine that such a shift would be more efficient There was an article linked here the other day [1] that said homes can be designed to withstand wildfires through choice of materials and vegetation clearing. If the intervention you want to incentivise is replacing wooden roofs and removing fuel near the house, raising insurance bills for people who don't do that could be one way of doing it. Of course, there's also a case for incentivising not starting the fire in the first place. [1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-to-burn/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-to-burn/

williamscales 8y ago

> Surely some blame lies elsewhere as well. I saw a picture of Paradise after it burned. It was remarkable, the houses were completely gone but the trees were still standing all around. There's something wrong with how we build and maintain our structures in fire prone areas.

edejong 8y ago
The trees have evolved to withstand fires very well, using bark over 10cm thick, dropping the lower needles during fire. Perhaps it is possible to cover buildings in similar isolating material as well. However, people would still need to be evacuated due to the lethal smoke.

kozikow 8y ago

> "I think homeowners need to be paying fire insurance costs proportional to fire risk" Wildfires are already covered by property re/insurance. The problem is that risk is badly priced, as modeling for wildfires is currently very underdeveloped compared to hurricanes or earthquakes. There has been no wildfire event of a similar magnitude of property losses in recent history. Shameless plug: At tensorflight we are actually starting some prototyping of wildfire risk models for the insurance industry based on satellite imagery.

LanceH 8y ago
A house is insured. PG&E is insured. My house burns down, my insurance pays for it. Then they sue PG&E to recover that payout. As far as who is at fault: a fire needs a fuel, oxygen and a spark. It can be argued that a spark is going to happen somewhere, and mitigating it is more about not having the fuel so that it can chain and spread.
- masonic 8y ago
  PG&E is insured. Do we know this? Many large public and quasi-public entities are self-insuring.

ergothus 8y ago

Liability law is at least consistent, even if I end up disagreeing with the result. When my (now ex-) wife was in law school, one if the sample cards they studied was an arsonist where the fire had met up with an unrelated one. The arsonist was found liable for all the subsequent damage from the combined fire rather than an approximation of his "contribution" despite the being no disagreement that some of the damage would have happened anyway. In another case construction crews finding were found liable for a nearby mink farm's lost of income when the sounds freaked out the animals and they ruined their coats, because blowing stuff up, even done legally, is considered a high liability task. At least those are my recollections of the decisions, it has been a while and I didn't study them myself.

gamblor956 8y ago
Interesting. In law school, I learned that the exact opposite way--the arsonist wasn't responsible for any damage, because the bigger fire would have consumed the target house anyway. (Edit: I believe the proper term is "superseding cause". Note that with all things involving case law, this is highly jurisdictionally dependent. For example, in California, intentional acts can be superseding causes but not unintentional/negligent acts or acts of god.) With the mink case, the issue wasn't that blowing stuff up is a high-liability task. The issue was that it was a nuisance. Nuisance activities can be legal, and even first-in-time (like say, cow farms predating housing developments). Very nutshell version, but basically the issue with nuisance law is that the activity's effects transcend the boundaries of one's property and so the doer can be held liable for those effects.
- ergothus 8y ago
  I'll trust your memories over mine, particularly as you've studied this and I had dinner-table conversations.