Consider the following: "PG&E didn’t anticipate how quickly the drought would overtake heavily wooded areas north of San Francisco and outside Sacramento, said

Consider the following: "PG&E didn’t anticipate how quickly the drought would overtake heavily wooded areas north of San Francisco and outside Sacramento, said Stephen Tankersley, who oversaw PG&E’s vegetation-management program between 1999 and 2015. “It’s hard to believe that anybody would have predicted that it would have been like this,” said Mr. Tankersley, now a utilities consultant. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” Conditions on the ground worsened dramatically and quickly, said PG&E spokeswoman Lynsey Paulo. She said the utility has reacted with speed and urgency. “We are very aware of the risk and we are doing everything we can to keep our customers and the communities we serve safe,” she said. “PG&E considers wildfire risk as a top-tier enterprise risk. It is evident in our actions.” The utility removed 451,000 more trees from 2016 through 2018 than it had originally forecast, she said, in an “amped up” effort to deal with massive tree mortality." ... "The task was complicated because some dangerous trees were on private land, forcing PG&E to negotiate with landowners, said Bob Fratini, a retired PG&E vegetation-management manager. Residents sometimes pressured crews, he said, to trim just enough to satisfy minimum requirements. “Utilities should be given the right to remove any tree that could cause an outage or a fire,” he said. California regulators recently gave utilities more latitude in this area, saying they could shut off power to homes or businesses that prevent tree crews from working. PG&E’s Ms. Paulo said that isn’t necessary very often. Sometimes, PG&E’s tree-clearing created new problems. After PG&E workers removed two trees in January 2015 southeast of Sacramento, a gray pine was exposed to wind and began leaning, according to a state investigation. On a 102-degree day in September, the pine hit a 12,000-volt line and electricity ignited it, dropping embers onto dry grass and sparking the Butte Fire, which burned 70,868 acres and 921 buildings. Two people died." These two blocks of text to me make it sound more like what you'd traditionally call an 'act of god', and not malfeasance (unlike San Bruno). While its unfortunate people died, and that there were great losses, you when you have people living in land that historically (over tens of thousands of years) had regular burn cycles, then humans came along and kept putting the fires out, I have less sympathy for those who take a loss - they should have known it was a risk of living there. Also, I work with power utilities, having to turn the power off in a windy situation is an unwinnable situation, you either get complaints to the PUC, or you get higher fire risk - both are expensive to an extent to deal with - and without a historical record of fires in that area, its not really rational to just turn the power off, to tens of thousands of customers, and its harder to justify to your customers on its face - just as they are being excoriated now a failure to exert enough caution, if they had exerted the caution and nothing had happened, they would have been excoriated for exerting too much caution, again - its an unwinnable situation.