It's not clear to me that these outages are due to maintenance issues rather than due to an extremely conservative risk posture because it looks like PG&E will

It's not clear to me that these outages are due to maintenance issues rather than due to an extremely conservative risk posture because it looks like PG&E will be held accountable for grid-started fires even where maintenance wasn't an issue. E.g. PG&E's current filing for bankruptcy protection was triggered by the Tubb's fire, which Cal Fire's investigation concluded wasn't even caused by PG&E. If anything the social machine that appears to be broken is how we're apportioning liability. Electrical grids, even well maintained ones, sometimes throw a bit of sparks or start small fires. No amount of tree trimming is going to prevent fires if strong winds blow dry flammable brush across high tension lines. You can find zillions of videos on the internet of power lines going down and sparking small fires... but in California if a line goes down in the wrong place and in the wrong weather it causes tens of billions of dollars in damages. It's not clear to me that its economically possible operate an electrical utility under the risk that the smallest spark could result in being responsible for billions in damages.