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This electrical transmission tower has a problem

• _jal 6y ago
  PG&E is a public menace.
  • dwighttk 6y ago
    California’s relationship with PG&E is perfectly designed to get these results, No?
  • umvi 6y ago
    I would wager a lot of power companies run their equipment to failure. Anecdata, but Pepco in Maryland burned me once. When we first moved into our house motor loads (vacuum, disposal, etc.) caused all the lights in the house to dim. We called an electrician and he said the problem was the transformer in the green box outside our house and to call Pepco to fix it. We did and Pepco dragged their feet forever. Weeks later they said they inspected it and it was fine. Fast forward 2 years when our house has a massive power surge which fries 2 computers (just the PSUs) and bursts some bulbs. We call an electrician and he says the transformer outside failed and to call Pepco. We did and Pepco had someone out in, no joke, in 20 minutes to fix it. As a nice side effect, motor loads no longer cause the lights to dim. We filed a claim with Pepco for damages, citing the previous incident 2 years ago as evidence they knew the transformer was failing but they denied the claim with no explanation.
    • mjevans 6y ago
      Unfortunately, you'll probably have to talk to a lawyer and maybe go to court to get damages...
    • DanBC 6y ago
      > We filed a claim with Pepco for damages, citing the previous incident 2 years ago as evidence they knew the transformer was failing but they denied the claim with no explanation. I don't know how it works in the US but in the UK you'd put in a claim with your insurance company, and tell them that you'd told Pepco about the problem sometime ago and Pepco hadn't fixed it. Your insurance company has lots of lawyers and knows how to extract money from power companies.
  • ironmagma 6y ago
    Despite all the effort that went into investigating the cause of this fire, remember that someone started an even bigger fire this year by doing a gender reveal party. So it really is irrelevant how careful everyone is; something will set everything ablaze eventually.
  • tick_tock_tick 6y ago
    PG&E being a "private company" is a useful fiction so the state of California doesn't get blamed.
• WantonQuantum 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance "Normalization of deviance is a term used by the American sociologist Diane Vaughan to describe the process in which deviance from the right as in the correct or proper behavior becomes normalized in a corporate culture. Vaughan defines this as a process where a clearly unsafe practice comes to be considered normal if it does not immediately cause a catastrophe: "a long incubation period [before a final disaster] with early warning signs that were either misinterpreted, ignored or missed completely". The original example cited by Vaughn was the events leading to the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, but the concept has also been applied to clinical practice in medicine and aviation safety."
  • liability 6y ago
    Is this sort of process similar to what occurred in Europe during the decline of the Roman Empire when aqueducts and similar public infrastructure fell into disrepair? Did the people who witnessed that occurring notice the intergenerational trend, or did they think everything was business as normal? Is there any hope for reversing this decline in infrastructure if everybody close to the matter considers it normal?
    • inamberclad 6y ago
      I'm not sure the term has ever been extended to multi-generational problems, though it very well could be. The traditional, aerospace human factors explanation occurs over timescales from weeks to years. It normally starts with something incorrect (the deviation) that doesn't cause an immediate problem. Examples would be O-ring burnthrough on Space Transportation System Solid Rocket Booster segments, or maybe a pilot who is always a few knots too fast over the threshold on his approaches. Both are problems - everyone knows it - but since it hasn't cause a problem yet its allowed to slide until it just becomes common practice. The key point here is that the system (machine, human, organization) has acquired a deviation that means it no longer operates like it was designed and is not fixed because everyone becomes accustomed to the deviation. This degraded state is now the new normal. One day the weather is too cold, and another assumption about how the system operates is violated. The O-rings don't seat properly when the boosters are fired. The runway has ice on it. Hot gasses escape through the booster joint and impinge on the LH2 tank, and the aircraft finds its braking authority is insufficient, and a runway overrun occurs.
• Agustus 6y ago
  This is a good use of twitter to apply engineering and figure out issues. The problem is that PG&E’s incentives are significantly misaligned to not be successful: 1. Crazy renewable edicts that do not have base power assumptions (see blackouts over summer). 2. Maintenance programs that are not overseen by a third part. This story. Please read just to see the sheering off of the c hook and the fact it might have been 100 years old!
  • tfigment 6y ago
    Even more so that they did something to fix the hole but apparently not the hook.
• ctdonath 6y ago
  Case study in importance of maintenance. 1 broken century-old hook => $16,650,000,000 damages.
  • jbay808 6y ago
    Only a $4 million fine, though right? How much do you think a maintenance program would cost?
    • quadrangle 6y ago
      Good point (about the dysfunction of how maintenance costs get considered), but maintenance of that one hook is nothing. And lack of maintenance of the whole system risks more such fires. I'm assuming it's $4 million fine plus requiring the missing maintenance program to be implemented.
    • imtringued 6y ago
      From an economics perspective I can't deny that PG&E did the right thing. Maybe they should have gotten a bigger fine?
  • umvi 6y ago
    Like the thread points out though, maintenance is just one piece of the puzzle. There were multiple points of failure here, not just the hook. That's like blaming the welders for the Lebanon explosion when in reality it was a combination of like 4 different fails over the course of many years.
    • Dylan16807 6y ago
      I have no idea what you're talking about. Unless you count "power lines active during dry conditions" which is unavoidable, the only meaningful failure here is repeated lack of maintenance. The design was fine, and it was installed fine; it lasted a hundred years! Lack of maintenance will kill anything eventually, all by itself.
      • 6y ago
• rman666 6y ago
  The electrons are spinning counterclockwise. They should be spinning clockwise. Or the picture is upside down.
• verroq 6y ago
  https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1306359385656946688.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1306359385656946688.html
  • sp332 6y ago
    Twitter has started doing a weird thing where if you visit the beginning of a thread directly, it will cut off the replies after just 6 tweets. To read further, you have to click "Show this thread" which directs to the same tweet but with a different URL format: https://twitter.com/i/status/1306359385656946688 https://twitter.com/i/status/1306359385656946688 This shows the full thread and then rewrites the URL in the address bar back to the original URL.
    • rektide 6y ago
      Grody behavior
• umvi 6y ago
  Excellent Twitter thread, I'm glad I went down that rabbit hole. I wish it was in blog format though, it's kind of jarring working through little blurbs.
  • vas123 6y ago
    I found the format to be great as I wasn’t expecting it to take the turn that it did. I agree though, excellent thread
  • isclever 6y ago
    Try this: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1306359385656946688.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1306359385656946688.html
    • nooyurrsdey 6y ago
      This is so useful, thanks
    • NavinF 6y ago
      Is there an alternative unroller without ads? Seems like a fun project to build (Yes I have uBlock Origin on my desktop, but I'm not on my desktop)
      • efreak 6y ago
        Try using Nitter. https://nitter.net/tubetimeus/status/1306359385656946688 https://nitter.net/tubetimeus/status/1306359385656946688
        • abhiminator 6y ago
          +1 for nitter. Also see invidio.us (alternative YouTube frontend) and Bibliogram (alternative Instagram frontend). [0] https://invidio.us https://invidio.us [1] https://bibliogram.art https://bibliogram.art
      • seapunk 6y ago
• segfaultbuserr 6y ago
  Highlights. > When the C hook broke and the hanger fell, the steel-reinforced aluminum conductor that carries 115,000 V bounced and shorted out against the metal side of the tower, spraying chunks of white-hot aluminum across the ground underneath the tower. The weather was extremely hot, dry, and windy, and this immediately started a fire. This was the Camp fire, the most destructive fire in California history. > [...] How long was it rubbing against the hanger bracket? The answer is that we don't know. We think it is about 97 (!) years old, but we're not sure because PG&E didn't keep records about it. After the fire, many of the pieces were taken to the FBI lab's metallurgical unit at Quantico, and they determined that the C hook was made of cast iron. Not all the C hooks on these 100-year old towers were made of cast iron--many were made of steel. but again: no records. > PG&E knew that this was a problem because at some point they bolted on L brackets and moved the C hooks onto the new brackets, probably concerned that the old bracket hole had mostly worn through. We don't know when they did this because they kept no records. And yes, PG&E is legally required to inspect these towers periodically. We don't know exactly when, because (you guessed it) no records from before the year 2000. > There's even documented evidence that PG&E knew about the problem with the C hooks and hangers and yet did nothing. > > [...] to opine the keyhole wear was occurring at a rate of .007 inches per year. Based upon the average wear rate, the PG&E lab scientist determined the useful life of those hanger plates to between 97 and 100 years. PG&E now had scientific confirmation of the body-on-body wear caused by the constant movements of the C hooks within the hanger holes and an estimate of average wear per year. Nothing was done. The report was not distributed through the company and no targeted inspections of older C hooks and hanger holes were ordered. Based upon this report, a reasonable person, knowing they had C hooks which were 90+ years old hanging in hanger holes that were 90+ years old would have taken immediate action to determine the condition of those hooks and holes. The fact PG&E did nothing is evidence of completely and absolute indifference to the inherent danger of a C hook or hanger hole breaking. > > Despite the efforts of PG&E personnel to distance the company from the "Run to Failure" model, the evidence clearly establishes quite the opposite. [...] Catastrophic failures of the Caribou-Palermo line was not if "if"question; it was a "when" question. > Sadly, this is not new behavior for PG&E. it's just like the San Bruno gas explosion. > > PG&E electrical transmission policies and records prior to the Camp Fire mirrored PG&E gas transmission policies prior to the San Bruno catastrophe. [...] The San Bruno investigation also established PG&E intentionally was using the least expensive method of inspection in the least expensive manner. The chosen inspection method also saved money because problems that are not found do not need to be repaired. The investigation also established records relating to inspections, both justifying methods of inspection and the inspection reports, was fraudulent. --- > [...] So despite PG&E's criminal negligence, there's a good chance that Paradise would have burned down anyway, even if they had good records and had kept the tower maintained. [...] It turns out there was a second, unrelated fire that started at almost the same time and almost the same place! This happened when a tree fell on a distribution line (lower voltage, shorter distance), and [...] this was not PG&E's fault. There's no way the inspectors, even if they were competent, could have known that the tree would fall. > > [...] The arborist determined the disease was internal and likely would not have been visible to PG&E tree inspectors during their vegetation management inspections. According to the arborist the disease likely only would have been discoverable by an advanced inspection. > > Before the Camp B Fire grew large enough to escape its geographical bowl, it was passed over and consumed by the Camp Fire. Based upon fire indicators and patterns within Camp B Fire and recordings from the fire watch cameras, Cal Fire investigators determines that the Camp B Fire had little, or no, effect on the Camp Fire. > Here's the second, more insidious cause: climate change. extreme weather->more vegetation->increased fuel load as well as hotter/drier weather. While solving climate change is a good long term goal (although something that the human race is notoriously bad at), we need to improve our forestry management practices. And keep better records! And hold people accountable! > If you think of PG&E (the organization) as an emergent intelligence, it was set up to optimize only one metric (profit) and utterly failed to take into account another metric (risk). I'm sure there are people who study this sort of thing who could examine PG&E and point out exactly what caused this organizational failure. Again I want to emphasize that taking PG&E and making it state-owned and state-run is not a magic bullet. I mean, c'mon, Chernobyl was state-run! It comes down to organization, accountability, and incentives. They're complex problems but they can be solved. Source: * Summary report from the Butte County DA. https://www.buttecounty.net/Portals/30/CFReport/PGE-THE-CAMP-FIRE-PUBLIC-REPORT.pdf?ver=2020-06-15-190515-977 https://www.buttecounty.net/Portals/30/CFReport/PGE-THE-CAMP...
• sp332 6y ago
  https://twitter.com/TubeTimeUS/status/1306375138707865600 https://twitter.com/TubeTimeUS/status/1306375138707865600 "on June 16 of this year, PG&E pled guilty to charges of unlawfully causing a fire and 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter. their penalty? a $4 million fine." They also settled for damages from several fires (including the Camp Fire) for $25.5 billion, of which 13.5 billion was earmarked for victims.
• jrockway 6y ago
  I guess my takeaway from this is if you're a government building some sort of asset you're going to transfer to the private sector, overengineer it. Nobody is ever going to do maintenance, so your thing essentially has to last forever. Imagine that they made the hooks so they only lasted for 10 years -- we'd have 10 times as many billion-dollar fires. But some engineer in 1918 said "you know, let's make it a little bit bigger, it's only a few cents extra" and they probably saved some lives in the process. (Yes, it failed, but you have to admit that it had a pretty good run! 97 years is not bad for a moving part!)
  • benjaminjackman 6y ago
    Paradoxically though if it failed every 1 year then pretty soon maintenance would have to be performed every few months or days or else there would be so many failures it would be really hard to ignore.
    • ShinTakuya 6y ago
      This is an interesting argument. Maybe 10 years as a lifespan would be better than 100 years since it'd force checks every year. With the 100 year lifespan, people will always assume it can be done next year instead of this year.
      • tornato7 6y ago
        Reminds me of Let's Encrypt issuing 90 day certs instead of 1+ year so that you're forced to find a better automated solution and not have a panic when your cert expires in 5 years
        • jrockway 6y ago
          I wonder whether or not that's the global maximum. I still occasionally run into sites that never figured out how to use Let's Encrypt, so they don't encrypt at all. I personally achieved completely automatic renewals (https://jrock.us/posts/rotating-envoy-certs/ https://jrock.us/posts/rotating-envoy-certs/) but it involved some work. (It also works so well that I don't even believe it. I have to go manually check from time to time because my monitoring never shows me any errors, and there are so many moving parts that I am continually amazed that everything works perfectly.) Other people just aren't willing to do that. They like their nginx/Apache sitting on a lonely Linux box that they ssh into once every 5 years. The cost of changing any of that software is high, and they don't have a good system for running new software, like Certbot. We definitely didn't fix that.
• peterwwillis 6y ago
  It would be great if the author had just made a blog post and tweeted it. This sort of seems like useful information, which will suck to lose when this tweet inevitably disappears and isn't updated later with new information. Tweets make excellent momentary entertainment. Let's stop using them for anything else.
  • dredmorbius 6y ago
    Threadreader helps (as others have noted): https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1306359385656946688.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1306359385656946688.html
    • seapunk 6y ago
      Also better without ads: https://threader.app/thread/1306359385656946688 https://threader.app/thread/1306359385656946688
• causality0 6y ago
  "Paying money to violate the law" is a fundamentally broken method of law enforcement. Do away with them. Justice should not be a line item in a spreadsheet. Maybe it's only twenty minutes in the county jail but every single infraction should fall personally on the individual who made the decision. Start hauling board members into court in orange jumpsuits and see how quickly these "unavoidable" fuckups stop happening.
  • zanny 6y ago
    At the same time retribution should not be the goal of justice, it should be rehabilitation. I'm totally against incarcerating anyone not posing imminent threat to life for a multitude of reasons but my most selfish is that locking people up is incredibly expensive and I'd rather not spend my tax dollar on it if its not actually protecting me from anything. US corporate charter exists to exonerate decision makers from personal liability for crimes committed by the company. That absolution of responsibility is in my opinion the primary motivator for having incorporation at all - its a shield explicitly designed to protect you from culpability. At that a fair judgment would then be something along the lines of - all acting leadership of PG&E or any other corporation using their immunity to be negligent and cause harm must disbar their ownership or face incarceration for being a threat to life. Because they are when they behave like this, at scales that the most deranged mass murderer could only hope to approach.
    • mkingston 6y ago
      The cost of this fire was $85b. If this sort of event could be avoided or mitigated by disincentivising the behaviour that caused it (by putting the occasional exec in prison for negligence) I guess it's likely prison would be quite a bit cheaper overall. You do go on to agree that there should be disincentives for antisocial behaviour, so I think mostly we agree. Only that perhaps I would consider incarceration a reasonably cost-effective disincentive for such behaviour.
  • colejohnson66 6y ago
    How do we decide who is “personally responsible”? Wells Fargo’s tellers were the ones personally responsible for the fraud, but that was due to unreasonable targets set by management.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• Arcuru 6y ago
  The document cited several times in the thread appears to be "The Camp Fire Public Report" which can be found here https://www.buttecounty.net/Portals/30/CFReport/PGE-THE-CAMP-FIRE-PUBLIC-REPORT.pdf https://www.buttecounty.net/Portals/30/CFReport/PGE-THE-CAMP...
• aahortwwy 6y ago
  > Since nobody apparently noticed the wear, it would be impossible to to prove any single person was negligent. I call this sort of thing "three wise monkeys compliance."
• throwaway189262 6y ago
  Interesting. I'm kinda sympathetic to PG&E on this though. These big lines don't have much under them, inspection is by helicopter, and the lines cannot be shut down. I would not be surprised if "fix it when it breaks" is a nationwide phenomenon for high tension lines. What makes it bad is how fire-prone California is. I'm of the opinion that humans should not be living in areas that burn regularly. And in PG&E's defense I doubt anyone was living near the lines when they were built 100 years ago. If forest fire was an acceptable outcome of line failure 100 years ago when the lines were built, is it PG&E's fault that tons of people moved into this fire prone area? In my mind the cities nearby should have paid them to make the lines safer. To me this is like the people that move near a concert hall then complain that it's loud. Or move to a floodplain and complain when it floods... It seems like it's been known that these lines were a fire risk for a very long time, and cities should have paid to make them safer before zoning so much land for residential. I assume, but cannot prove, that PG&E probably enumerated the risks when the land was sold or rezoned but their concerns were ignored. Having done a study on the wear of the hooks themselves, it seems unlikely they would not have notified communities nearby of the risk. My prediction is that they start to point fingers at the government, but people continue to sue the power company because sueing the government is hard.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • akira2501 6y ago
    > and the lines cannot be shut down. Of course they can. A failure is an unplanned shutdown, and I doubt that leads to better outcomes than a planned shutdown. Also this thread demonstrates that PG&E replaced _other_ parts of the same tower. > I'm of the opinion that humans should not be living in areas that burn regularly. I'm of the opinion that climate change makes this a moving target, and this is simply one of the obvious repercussions. > is it PG&E's fault that tons of people moved into this fire prone area? No, it's their fault that even though they made $550 million in profits in 2018, and made other improvements to these towers, they still failed to keep them in proper repair. Also, it's not always "fire-prone." California experienced a bit of drought in 2018. > and cities should have paid to make them safer Shouldn't the company making $550 million in profits pay to make them safer?
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• abraae 6y ago
  There should be more use of body cameras in these inspection situations where it's hard to get at the inspected item, and it's all too easy to say "she'll be right" (a colloquial expression in my country that roughly translates to "it will be OK"). A decent regime would involve spot checks, pick a tower at random, then review the footage and make sure we have a clear image of the C hook and the bracket it hangs from, AND they are both in good condition. A similar situation is rebar in concrete pours. Who's to know if the inspection actually took place once it's buried beneath concrete? Again, a good regime would allow going back and looking at the footage.
• sunkenvicar 6y ago
  Its a shame congress still hasn’t done an infrastructure bill. The country is overdue for trillions in upgrades.
• burlesona 6y ago
  This is interesting but not really surprising. Most folks don't realize, because we don't stop and think about it, but the US has unbelievable amounts of infrastructure in this sort of condition. When things can last 40-100 years with little to no maintenance before catastrophic failure, there is _extraordinary_ incentive to defer maintenance until catastrophic failure occurs. For every mayor / governor / utility director etc. who experiences the eventual failure, there are dozens of predecessors who benefitted from deferring preventative action. Every previous leader who punted on maintenance and saved money or increased profits and reaped immediate tangible rewards. The company stock went up. Or the town paid it's firefighters pensions, which turned out to be more expensive than planned. "We ought to do more maintenance, but waiting another year or two will be okay," says everyone. "Next year, when we're not in such a bind, we'll catch up."
  • pavlov 6y ago
    > “Most folks don't realize, because we don't stop and think about it, but the US has unbelievable amounts of infrastructure in this sort of condition.“ With respect, it’s obvious to anyone coming to USA from elsewhere in the world. Observing America is a strange mix of “wow, these people were so early, they really invented most of this stuff” and “wow, they really haven’t updated it since”. (The American banking system evokes the same bewilderment. Every system seems to run on a 1958 IBM mainframe where someone feeds my transactions on punch cards.)
    • burlesona 6y ago
      That’s exactly right. I had a similar (but different) experience when I first stayed in Europe: I lived in a building that was built in the 1300’s and had changed very little since. I was astonished that anything that old could (a) still be around, (b) still be an ordinary use building. Surely the building should be a historical monument! But in fact most of the city was similarly old and there wasn’t really anything special about the building I lived in. At the time it was hard for me to imagine anything being that old, as (growing up in the US Midwest), things built in the 1920s were the oldest I’d ever seen and were considered ancient. I look back now and realize they were only one lifetime old (at the time). Culturally, Americans have this idea that their stuff is shiny, new, and “the best.” But this is actually out of date, and in fact as a country we are entering a new phase where for the first time the majority of infrastructure is old and wearing out, and the critical mass of old stuff that needs to be fixed is much larger than the amount of new stuff that needs to be built.
• dakial1 6y ago
  Couldn't drones + AI do the inspection work more effectively?
  • teraflop 6y ago
    It's far from obvious to me that an AI would be able to inspect a complex system like this for (potentially unanticipated) failures more effectively than a knowledgeable, experienced human. And aside from the proximate cause of the fire, the thread highlights a deeper and more insidious issue, namely the diffusion of management responsibility for decisions and their consequences. It seems to me that delegating inspections to an algorithm would make that problem much worse, not better.
  • coagmano 6y ago
    I doubt it would have picked up this failure. That said, I think dones + AI can reduce the cost of routine maintenance, the savings of which shoud be used for infrequent detailed inspections that would pick up a defect like this. More likely the savings will just be pocketed
  • nemonemo 6y ago
    I believe so. People can probably set up some physical models and simulate the wear against various elements, and possibly detect similar wear in the reality. Even without AI, human inspectors can remotely monitor the tower using drones and check more checkboxes than one. By employing such effort and maintaining towers more responsibly, PG&E at least could partially evade the blame and liability. IMO this could be a good startup idea if founders know the right people.
  • jzwinck 6y ago
    Yes. I saw them doing just this in South Korea in 2015. The guys doing it were pretty chill, said I could not take pictures of their drone but they told me a bit about how it worked. Computer vision was part of it, human inspection was too. They said it was much safer than a manned helicopter, and faster.
• DuskStar 6y ago
  I've got a bit of a problem with articles like this one. I'll try and illustrate it with an analogy: Imagine some asshole puts an incendiary in an orphanage, and rigs it to go off when a nearby speed trap detects someone going more than 10mph over. Eventually, someone does, and the orphanage catches fire. Further, the group responsible for constructing and maintaining the orphanage hasn't looked at the place for 50 years, and so all the orphans are trapped inside and die. Who's at fault? Obviously the the asshole, and almost certainly the maintainer. But the driver? They were the direct cause of everything, and had they not broken the law those orphans would still be alive! Right? But most people will identify the driver as being at worst minimally at fault. They may have triggered things, and it may have even been predictable that speeding could kill someone, but someone was going to come along and trigger things eventually, or the speed trap would misfire, or lightning would strike the orphanage and cause a fire directly. To me, PG&E is the driver here. Yes, they didn't do maintenance they should have. But as fires have demonstrated this year... fires are going to happen. Lightning, gender reveals, a broken muffler... Something will provide the spark. So instead we should blame the people who set up the situation such that a fire in the wrong place could kill dozens. Which, IMO, is two things. One is the set of forestry management practices that lets brush build up to the point that crown fires are inevitable - which we do by putting out all fires as soon as possible - and the second is constructing houses to be vulnerable to forest fires. Forest fire proof construction is possible! It's just not quite so cheap, or might not allow a tree right up next to a house in the most aesthetically pleasing fashion. But until we fix at least one of (and preferably both of) those things, fires like this will keep happening. No matter how much PG&E gets fined.
  • zbrozek 6y ago
    You're right that it does draw attention to other systemic problems that we need to address. Forest management in a changing climate needs to change and we're definitely socially negligent there. But let's not apologize for PG&E. Read the whole Butte DA report. It's extremely damning without needing to resort to hyperbole or sensationalism. PG&E has willfully ignored problems and chosen to "run to failure" effectively their entire system, ignoring outcomes of those failures. And on top of that, they're absolutely milking the ratepayer.
  • 6y ago
• tonymet 6y ago
  this is a multi source problem. pgp failure is one facet. lack of land maintenance is the other . if the land were maintained the fire would have happened and been less catastrophic
  • NamTaf 6y ago
    Few failures in the real world tend to be a single-source problem. Hence the swiss-cheese model [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model
    • tonymet 6y ago
      Wow this is great thanks ! How do they distribute liability to the various failure modes? I think it’s dishonest (and problematic) to put all liability on PGE
      • NamTaf 6y ago
        I don't think there's one way. This isn't a codified law, for exmaple, it's just a model of failure analysis. In my experience, we use the 5 Whys [1] as a technique to drill down to 'root causes'. However, along the way you'll identify a whole heap of compounding factors, each of which may change the degree of severity or indeed completely avert the issue. In this particular instance, in isolation you can say that the hook failed and caused a fire, but it took several additional factors to make it as bad as it was: 1) Lack of maintenance (which in itself has a whole tree of causal factors) 2) Excess buildup of flammable material 3) Particuarly dry/hot weather conditions 4) Lack of firefighting resources due to other mitigating circumstances 5) Encroachment of living premises into dangerous areas etc. etc. I don't really know how the US courts might handle allocating liability, because I'm not located there, but I don't think there's one particular way to do it. I do however think that trying to retroactively allocate liability to this specific incident is probably the wrong way to look at it. Instead I think the better apporach is to say that PG&E were delinquent in their responsibility of ensuring safe equipment, and regardless of the actual consequence they should be judged on that. For example, there are established processes to assess risk, and those risks include both a likelihood and consequence. All of that is then taken in combination to understand the total risk of something. The then have a legal obligation to ensure things are safe, and they broke that so punishment should be based on that. This would hold, whether the dereliction of duty was realised through a disaster or only identified from a near miss. Similarly, you could assess that the government was delinquent in its duties to perform backburning, etc. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys
• 43920 6y ago
  This is definitely a failure on PG&E's part, but I'm still not sure how much sense it makes to assign them blame for this fire. The environment they're operating in is somewhat ridiculous - the forest is so dry and overgrown that pretty much any flame source will start a fire large enough to burn a huge area; this specific tower failure is basically just the thing that revealed a much larger issue. With proper engineering and maintenance, PG&E could probably reduce the frequency of fires significantly, but there's always going to be a non-zero risk of fire, both from power lines and other sources, and it seems basically inevitable that one of them would have started another fire at some point. If this failure hadn't happened, and the same fire had happened a year later due to an "excusable" cause (like a tree falling on a line, or someone's house catching on fire), would that outcome have been any better? PG&E does ultimately have some responsibility, due to the fact that they were the immediate cause, but it really seems like people want to blame PG&E for the entire situation while avoiding the much harder truth: that this area will likely never be safe without significant policy changes (if ever).
  • nanodeath 6y ago
    Hm...it's unclear whether you read the stream. They had reason to believe that the C-hook would fail after 97-100 years, yet weren't even checking the C-hooks on towers that were 100 years old. That seems willfully negligent.
    • 43920 6y ago
      Right, I should clarify. PG&E absolutely should have known about, and prevented, the specific situation that caused this fire, and the fact they didn't do so is a huge problem. However, the surrounding area is such a high fire risk that a fire almost certainly would have occurred even without this failure (which the thread mentions: https://twitter.com/TubeTimeUS/status/1306377626487894017 https://twitter.com/TubeTimeUS/status/1306377626487894017), and so the specific cause of the fire seems almost irrelevant to me. Even if PG&E did spend billions more on maintenance, and fix their inspection procedures, I don't see how this area would ever be safe, and so focusing on the power company as the source of the issue seems misguided to me.
• aazaa 6y ago
  > i like this used car analogy. basically, they bought a used car and ran it without oil changes until the engine seized. This brings the Growth Ponzi Scheme to mind: > What we have found is that the underlying financing mechanisms of the suburban era — our post-World War II pattern of development — operates like a classic Ponzi scheme, with ever-increasing rates of growth necessary to sustain long-term liabilities. https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme PG&E maintains how many linear miles of power lines? How many towers like this one? Built how long ago? The reason the Growth Ponzi keeps happening is the cities fail to account for ongoing maintenance costs. When those costs come due, the easiest way out is to build more to increase revenue. Setting aside the question of intent and liability, I wonder if something similar happened to PG&E.
• dschuetz 6y ago
  So, why is that insulator actually dangling?
  • masklinn 6y ago
    I assume it’s because the cable it insulates needs to sway in the wind, otherwise you’ll get shearing on the cable itself as it sways between completely fixed points? Alternatively it might be made this way because the cable angle is variable (depends on terrain topology) so a fixed-angle insulator would require every single tower to be customised when installed. A 100y mtbf seems pretty good by comparison, you’d reasonably assume the component would be replaced long before that.
• renewiltord 6y ago
  Interesting. If you had taken a good materials engineer with you, run the analysis, and then shorted PCG using an analysis of when this would fail, you would have done very very well indeed. I wonder how predictable this is in a materials science sense. And to top it off, you could have immediately outed PCG through it anonymously shortly after the fires really spread. All perfectly legal. A more ethical way (considering the human cost) would have been to out them early and then forced maintenance on them but I don't know if that would have been as profitable. I suspect there are lots of these opportunities around. I wonder how you find them. Hmm.
• alex_young 6y ago
  Climate change vs forest management. Why is this framing so prevalent? Isn’t the real issue that you simply cannot do prescribed burns in places where we have houses (and now our houses are everywhere)? I get it. It’s hard to deal with decades of poor land use planning, but isn’t it better to at least admit it so we don’t continue to perpetuate this mistake?
• sabujp 6y ago
  localized power generation will be the future, bloom energy, fuel cell energy, ballard power, plug power, etc
• watersb 6y ago
  Normalization of deviance.
• generatorguy 6y ago
  Wind, ice, squirrels, birds, snakes and trees are going to cause power lines to fail and create sparks so while perfectly maintained power lines will fail less often failures will still occur. If the world is a tinderbox from now on there is a choice to be made between energized overhead power lines and no risk of fire.
  • _ph_ 6y ago
    That there are other risks for forest fires does not remove the burden of properly maintaining the power towers at all.
    • generatorguy 6y ago
      Those are other factors that cause sparks from power lines that are independent of maintenance. sparks are going to occur whether the towers are replaced with brand new ones every 10 years or if they leave them until there starts to be problems and then they go look to see what needs replacing.
• pistoriusp 6y ago
  I really don't understand why the USA doesn't adopt firebreaks.
• nemonemo 6y ago
  I think there might be one point that deserves more attention: the wind that is getting stronger over time. It is entirely possible that the C-hook was holding up relatively well until the wind reached certain threshold, and the wind could have gotten to go over the threshold more frequently lately. This could be another side effect of the climate change in addition to the increased vegetation mentioned in the thread. I am curious if there is any research around the electrical component failure trends (probably from some nationally owned electrical companies). I would believe there is some correlation between tower failures and the peak wind strength/strong wind frequency, but if such correlation holds up meaningfully across different electrical companies in different areas, that could mean the wind might be more at fault than PG&E. PG&E was still criminally negligent, but as the thread said with a different angle (Camp Fire B), the fire might have been inevitable.
• crubier 6y ago
  Excellent Thread, and it is very nice to see on hacker news what my whole company is about! We build software for drones to inspect power lines, and this is exactly the kind of anomaly we are looking for, using AI. Unfortunately PG&E is not a customer yet..
• jl6 6y ago
  I feel that we are getting better at recognizing that complex failures can have multiple contributing causes. In this case: superficial maintenance, negligent management, ineffective regulation, forest management, climate change, housing planning, demand for living near trees... But I feel our approach to assigning blame still relies on finding a singular villain - and we end up with politically oversimplified narratives about cause and effect.
  • justanotheranon 6y ago
    i think about this issue a lot. humans as tribal story tellers always require a meta narrative to put events into an understandable format. even if there is no story arc, no protagonist and no villian. as our world becomes more complex, with intractable dependencies between automated complex systems, our world becomes less understandable. more and more there are fewer and fewer "man in the loop" events. our infrastructure is on autopilot and we are at the mercy of its autonomous interactions. there is no one to blame for catastrophes or accidents. it's like the line from the old RAW book: "there is no governor anywhere."
• tus88 6y ago
  Engineer bloggers are the best bloggers.
• lmilcin 6y ago
  Let's be clear, the fires are not fault of PG&E. Once the forest has not burned for long eonough and is dry enough any spark is going to cause large scale fire. It just happens that PG&E tends to cause a lot of sparks. Simulations show (and logic says) that the frequency with which a piece of land has a fire depends on humidity, not amount of sparks. If the forest is dry enough any fire spreads unimpeded and even if you have less sparks you just get larger fires.
• blunte 6y ago
  Tangential, but Twitter is a very poor medium for delivering this kind of information. It's really a drag for the reader.
  • boobsbr 6y ago
    I agree. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1306359385656946688.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1306359385656946688.html
    • leahshule56 6y ago
      Nice, but no in-line images which are important in this case.
      • thejeswi-nk 6y ago
        I can see the inline images. Perhaps it's blocked on your browser?
        • _xoo 6y ago
          Didn't see them either. Firefox blocked the images (tracking)
  • sradman 6y ago
    I found this series of tweets a very succinct way of describing the failure. Ultimately the key evidence is contained in the images and we only need a few additional words to provide the context. A tweet storm built around a handful of key images serves as a poor-man's infographic. Maybe I just had low-expectations when I clicked through and I was pleasantly surprised that it represented a useful failure analysis.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • seapunk 6y ago
• gotadollar 6y ago
  How much are you willing to pay for electricity? Up to now it's been relatively cheap... Might be time for the hand-crank lantern and battery-operated rasberry pi. Go off-grid and vote. Run for office if you're serious.
• mensetmanusman 6y ago
  Blaming the spark is antithetical to solving this problem. There will always be sparks. Blaming the spark is like blaming the welders for the Beirut bombing.
• mensetmanusman 6y ago
  I have been reading about what this means for California, and it’s a really tricky problem of managing to create lots of little fires that make lots of people annoyed. I hope they realize they can still play a role in fighting climate change with controlled burns, especially if they time a majority of their controlled burns during peak summer. This would let the smoke act as a reflector of radiation over quite a large area.
• jacquesm 6y ago
  The root problem is that an aboveground power distribution network was used when an underground one would have been the right solution. This is not cheap to fix and so lotteries with peoples lives and property are on the order of the day. The US power infrastructure is dated and super fragile, fixing it would be super costly and would take a long time. The profit oriented nature of these companies is what stops this from being tackled, utilities should be run at cost with public safety as the first order of priority, not profits.
  • fny 6y ago
    We seem to be in the mood to burn trillions of dollars, so I'm not sure what expensive means anymore. Renovating US infrastructure seems more prescient than another trillion dollar funemployment program.
    • jacquesm 6y ago
      Besides having an actual return on that investment in terms of lower opex once it is realized.
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• Dahoon 6y ago
  I'm amazed how a nation as rich as the US allows things to fall apart as much as it does but maybe one of the reasons it is so rich is because of the lack of money used on fixing things? Last time it was dangerous bridges called out. What's next? If only state run wasn't even worse in the US it could be a better way. It baffles the mind that electricity, gas, internet, etc. is being run on a for-profit basis. Clearly these are all in the nations interest to have top-notch.
  • pp19dd 6y ago
    Next? Dams. There are about 84,000 dams in the USA, and most of them are approaching their projected end-of-life - a hundred years or so (most of them are of the earthen type, not the concrete kind.) And ... civil engineers are going into retirement and their workforce is not getting refilled, about a 20% reduction. The common theme is that this was all done a century ago in a progressive push that was unaware of any environmental consequences or long-term maintenance needs. For example, the Columbia river (NW) was so dammed up for electric generation, it impacted salmon spawning. Today, USACE spends something like $5 million a year to make salmon elevators and in many places, literally truck them upriver so that commercial fishermen can later retrieve about $450k worth of salmon a year downriver. And as it turns out, we didn't need that much electricity to begin with and the demand never materialized in time to capitalize on it (manufacturing). And unlike salmon, we can't truck electricity elsewhere. Edit: since I'm a dam dork, here's a construction type breakdown I did five years ago. Edit 2: dam_type not related to year_built, summaries just placed next to each other. count dam_type year_built count 70,278 Earth <1900 14,623 9,031 (Unknown) 1900-09 2165 1,446 RCC 1910-19 1964 1,215 Gravity 1920-29 2321 724 Concrete 1930-39 3930 455 Other 1940-49 4115 420 Rockfill 1950-59 11,517 201 Masonry 1960-69 18,717 136 Buttress 1970-79 12,910 103 Arch 1980-89 5189 58 Stone 1990-99 4393 51 Timber Crib 2000-09 2290 16 Multi-Arch Only 847 of those dams are tailings dams, used for industrial processing. More than 0, but less than 84,000. Of those, none are listed as concrete (730 Earth, 61 Unknown, 43 Other, 13 Rockfill).
• fanzhang 6y ago
  What's the right policy solution to this? Genuinely asking. The proximal problems pointed out here are: - CA power transmission infrastructure is under maintained. - CA has overgrown forests of which anything can be a catalyst for forest fires. For whether the CA infrastructure was indeed under maintained, let's look at the costs and benefits: The cost of maintaining the infrastructure more is that you'd have to inspect much more of the power infrastructure much more often. The twitter thread suggests that there were many orders of magnitude more quantity infrastructure like this, and this tower was under maintained by at least one order of magnitude. (To be honest, I'm not sure whether the tower lasting 100 years is evidence in favor of more preventative maintenance or less!) Costs are made worse by the rising cost of infrastructure in the last many decades. Think about the cost of building a new subway in Manhattan and now think about replacing all the century-old high tension towers in CA. The benefit of preventive maintenance is that you'd get fewer accidents, and perhaps less downtime caused by accidental failures. How much fewer fire accidents you'd get is uncertain -- the rest of the comments here do a good job of dissecting between the camp that says this could have permanently prevented all electrical-caused CA wildfires (maybe a few fires per decade?) and the camp that says this would have no long run impact on the number of disastrous fires because a lighting strike would have started the next fire. Now it seems to me uncertain that the costs outweigh the benefits, but suppose it does, what's the best way to make PG&E do more maintenance? Currently PG&E is profit-incentivized to not maintain infrastructure very much. The gov't could force them to establish a liability fund that they must contribute 50% of profits to until they have enough money in a trust fund to cover one bad wildfire. This policy would have direct cost effect on Californians -- after all PG&E is not a genie that you can legislate free money or performance from. PG&E would raise electricity rates by an amount equivalent to its current profit margin (not that much) and perform more fixing of infrastructure to meet the CA rule. This seems like probably a good route to take, as PG&E would then focus maintenance on liability reduction. The liability laws should be written carefully to incentivize PG&E to fix the right things. PG&E should only have a certain percentage liability per event, where the percentage correlates with "how many new wildfire did you cause / how fire-proof this region would have been if not for PG&E". There are some other fixes too for the legislatively-minded. CA could just literally force PG&E to replace towers every 50 years, conduct 2x as many inspections etc. This would probably raise PG&E's costs which would get passed to CA utility payers. The disadvantage of this solution over the last paragraph is that the specific maintenance is by law, instead of at the discretion of PG&E's technicians. But if you think PG&E's management is poor to begin with, then that's not too bad. But what if we just take more of it from executive's pay? Probably the executives will just leave and go elsewhere, in which case it becomes similar to the next solution: nationalizing PG&E. Now this could work. The engineers of HN in PG&E will have to tell me how much mismanagement is really going on inside PG&E compared to gov't owned utilities they've worked in in the past. The higher that ratio, the better the case for nationalization. The lower the ratio (e.g. if you feel the state of CA would run PG&E worse than today's management), then the less argument there is for nationalization. Overall, the extra maintenance has to be funded by someone. Your pick of whether electricity prices go up, or whether fire-endangered towns need to make 2x property taxes, or whether CA residents have higher income tax rates.
• cullinap 6y ago
  Not sure if someone covered this already, but figured I would give my two cents since I worked in the industry. Usually the hardest part of electrical work is taking a circuit off-line long enough to fix an issue like this. The toughest projects were upgrading lines where customers are fed radially (one circuit). In more densely populated areas customers are fed by two or more lines, allowing the utility to schedule an outage and do repairs or upgrades. Utilities are judged on metrics that track outage time (I believe its called SAIDI), and they will do everything they can to use those lines until the end. Anytime a utility decides to upgrade their system they have to think about a couple things. First they need money and that requires them to secure funding from their regulatory body, which will determine if they can raise the cost of electricity for the customers. Next they have to put proposals for work out for contractors. Normally utilities are not staffed to handle major projects so they might hire a 3rd party firm to manage the work. The utility must schedule outages, which requires planners to balance the needs for maintenance with the need for long-term upgrades. If they are going to replace lines, they might as well upgrade to a higher voltage, which may require the replacement of equipment in substations, which can take years depending on the size of the sub. Time of year must be taken into consideration because electrical usage in the summer is higher, and taking one circuit out add load to other circuits and could cause failures. You might work through all these scenarios and find yourself at the mercy of nature due to endangered animals. Birds will nest on powerlines, and prevent any maintenance to go on for months. Even if you want to do hot-work via helicopter, you are prevented from encroaching the bird by a buffer to prevent disturbing the bird. I don't know how big PG&E's system is, or how much they are willing to spend/are spending now on maintenance but this is an industry-wide problem that some utilities are handling better than others. Maybe wireless electrical transmission will solve this?
  • sitkack 6y ago
    > First they need money and that requires them to secure funding from their regulatory body, which will determine if they can raise the cost of electricity for the customers. ... long pause ...
    • cullinap 6y ago
• andrewl 6y ago
  There's a comment in the thread suggesting something I'd never thought of before, but which sounds like a great idea, although I'm not too good with economic thinking: "Generation and transmission need to be separated. Generation can be a perfectly competitive market and is naturally suited to private business. Transmission is inherently a monopoly and should be publicly owned. Combining the two in one for-profit company is asking for trouble."
  • herrkanin 6y ago
    This is how it works in Sweden. I pay two separate bills each month, one for the amount of electricity I've used, and another for using the electrical infrastructure. We have a ton of options to choose from regarding who generates our electricity and seems to keep the competition healthy.
  • bagacrap 6y ago
    ok great, but would you trust a government entity with a limited budget not to make the same decisions?
  • unbearded 6y ago
    I believe that Brazil gives a good case study on the subject. The whole sector used to be state-owned and electricity used to be more expensive and outages a very regular thing. Currently, some parts of the country have private generation and transmission with targets sets for the number of planned shutdowns, outages and inspection set by the regulatory agency. The private companies are light-years ahead on any metric that you can think of. The parts of the sector that are still public-owned are legendary on their wastefulness and lack of accountability.
  • burlesona 6y ago
    It can go the other way as well. Originally power companies like PG&E were also streetcar companies. They found that power generation was profitable, but main line transmission wasn’t. But if you’re going to do the work of building a main line into a city... why not run a streetcar underneath it and sell fares? That combination turned out to be profitable, and to be a great win for the cities. This was made illegal during the rise of the automobile, all those companies were forced to split up. This greatly weakened the transit companies and helped undo them (as desired by the oil and auto cabal).
• prennert 6y ago
  This case of breaking metal on an open hook reminds me very much of a warning on a climbing carabiner: make sure it is clipped fully and the gate is shut, otherwise the nose might break off. I am sure someone checked the math etc, but an open hook with decreasing diameter towards the tip seems an odd design choice for a metal-on-metal arrangement that is being pulled hard by winds. That is not to say that any system keeps on going forever without proper maintenance... And this makes think if this could be designed so that inspection is easy and a replacement could be scheduled before the breaking point is reached. Maybe something like the marks in car tire treads that show how much wear is acceptable before needing to replace the tire without needing any equipment.
  • avianlyric 6y ago
    The breakage was caused by the metal-on-metal contact wearing its way through the hook over a period of almost a century. Like a dripping gutter slowly wearing a groove into a block of stone below it. Being a closed loop would now have changed the outcome here, at best it might have bought more time. But as this fault probably developed over a time period of almost a century, I doubt that more time would have changed the outcome. > And this makes think if this could be designed so that inspection is easy and a replacement could be scheduled before the breaking point is reached. Based on the photos, it looks like the groove cut into the hook was almost half the width of the hook at the point of failure. Either the hook simply wasn’t inspected, or the inspector simply didn’t care that solid lump of steel had a half inch slot cut into it. I would hope that something like that would be a clear enough indicator that the hook needed replacing.
• Dumblydorr 6y ago
  If California had more microgrids, batteries, and demand response, they could more effectively power down their lines for fire safety and maintenance. The decision makers have been quick to add a ton of solar, but they need to add these other components for added resilience in what is an extremely fire prone region.
  • pixl97 6y ago
    At the same time, what is the failure rate of batteries leading to fire? Logic follows the incidences of battery induced fire should be highest when under load, such as when primary power is off due to wind storms. So now instead of PG&E being the cause, it's now Bob and his Powerwall that set half of CA on fire. Power is just one piece of a multitude of failures that have lead us to this situation. Lots of houses where they are going to burn is one of the biggest issues, and due to how politics works, no one is going to address that.
• gdubs 6y ago
  I own roughly 40 acres of Douglas Fir forest in Northwest Oregon, and let me tell you — there’s no black and white answer to this. This is a long post, so buckle up. Start with invasive shrubs like blackberries. They spread wildly and require a ton of work to maintain. (And before people say “use goats”, know they are not a magic bullet.) Limbing trees, where you remove branches under 10’, can help prevent “ladder fires”, but it’s time consuming or costly if you need to hire someone to do it. Forests need to be thinned, invasive species kept at bay, and fuel in general needs to be removed or burned. And this stuff is alive so it’s a perennial thing to deal with. Even with grants, profit from timber, etc, it’s a lot of work, time, and money. In retrospect it’s easy to point fingers at the National Forest Service and criticize their policy of putting fires out. Imagine for a second the opposition they’d face had they just let fires burn for the past half century. Even if it’s the “right” thing to do, it would be a very hard sell. People generally want to see action, and have a hard time seeing inaction as “doing something.” Similarly with controlled burns. I’d love to burn our land every year the way that Native Americans used to — but it’s not without risk. There’s simply too much fuel. Up in Oregon things have historically been very wet. Comically so. The result is a lot of lush vegetation. Which dries out in a drought and becomes fuel. As these unprecedented burns happen more and more frequently, they push forests into new phases of succession, where a new cycle of shrub-drought-fire becomes the norm. These firestorms are a different breed from the mild creeping forest fires that are part of a natural forest ecosystem. All of that said, forest management is incredibly important. We need a new approach, and I’d argue we need more grants for the landowners who can’t afford to do the work necessary to prepare their land for this new climate. We also need to take a serious look at all of the development in the wildland-urban-interface and figure out how we’re going to address it. And yes, to the chagrin of many here, we need to address Climate Change. But, all of that said, none of that IMHO absolves PG&E from gross negligence in failing to properly maintain equipment in areas of known heightened risk.
  • jdsully 6y ago
    These forests managed themselves for thousands of years without us - including periods of invasive species (through geological rather than human means of transmission). I find it funny us humans seem to want to take responsibility for everything. That said I wouldn't want my house burned down from a forest fire either.
• poleguy 6y ago
  Am I the only one? Why no other donations today? https://gf.me/u/yvd2fb https://gf.me/u/yvd2fb
• anonAndOn 6y ago
  It's amazing to me that PG&E is allowed to use "We don't have any records" as an excuse for negligence. That's part of the same defense they tried to pull in Hinkley, CA where they were dumping hexavalent chromium into the ground and tried to destroy any records of it happening.[0] [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_groundwater_contamination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_groundwater_contaminat...
• guerby 6y ago
  Page 38 of this document you have a nice graph of the ages of the conductors of France high voltage lines: https://assets.rte-france.com/prod/public/2020-07/Sch%C3%A9ma%20d%C3%A9cennal%20de%20d%C3%A9veloppement%20de%20r%C3%A9seau%202019%20-%20Synth%C3%A8se.pdf https://assets.rte-france.com/prod/public/2020-07/Sch%C3%A9m... "RTE France" is the entity in charge of those lines. Plenty of lenghty docs for 10+ years plans: https://www.rte-france.com/analyses-tendances-et-prospectives/le-schema-decennal-de-developpement-du-reseau https://www.rte-france.com/analyses-tendances-et-prospective...
  • 205guy 6y ago
    Thank you for posting this. At this level of organizations, it is enlightening to see how different countries handle similar situations. Surprisingly, they also have lines that are 80-100 years old. I hadn't been following this story before, but upon first reading, I was shocked that infrastructure from 100 years ago was still in-place, original, and in operation. Now that seems normal. My guess was that equipment would be replaced every 40-50 years, or at least renewed. The graph implies that the French policy is to replace after 45-70 years of service, but to allow older ones in limited cases. And they are saying the ones that are 70 years old need to be replaced in 5-10 years, so they allow up to 80 years. I suppose that if the infrastructure is tested and maintained, and still cheap enough to maintain safely, there is no reason to replace it. As this story shows, you have to know your equipment and it's state of maintenance, and of course actively manage it safely and efficiently.
• DoctorOetker 6y ago
  First the broken hook is shown that started the fire, but then it is "conceded" that the fire would have happened anyway because of the fallen tree... Am I the only one who thinks this is highly unlikely? While every uncontrolled fire is one too much, the fires aren't that frequent that 2 independent fire causes would occur this close in both time and space. If the rate of firestart per year per square mile expressed as a probability would be P then the probability of 2 independent firestarts in the same area and same timeframe would be P^2, so if fires are relatively rare this should be an extremely rare event. Either the tree fell first causing a fire, after which the hook lost tensile strength because of heat; or the hook failed first starting a fire somehow collapsing a tree. Either way PG&E should be held responsible both for not cutting trees away a distance of the height of the trees away from the lines, and for failing to replace the worn hooks.
• daveswilson 6y ago
  Placing blame is far less interesting, IMO, than considering this story in the context of our much-needed next-generation power grid. One thing such a grid, and our management approach to it, has to do is not fail catastrophically, showering everything around it with sparks and cutting power to who knows how many customers. I assert that this is not a good thing regardless of whether a huge fire is started and people die as a result. If you look at PG&E's outage map, it has a way of putting a smiley face on failure. You'll find it at https://m.pge.com/#outages https://m.pge.com/#outages, but of course you will have to look below the fold. When you do that you will see the "CUSTOMERS AFFECTED" key. If less than 50 customers are affected by a power outage, PG&E calls that "green". There are always many green dots on their map in the Bay Area, whenever I've looked. That's another symptom of simply running things until they fail, and another indicator of the current state of our electrical infrastructure, and certainly an artifact of the culture at PG&E and the politics that allow it to exist. As we reinvest in and modernize our grid, we need financial incentives for operators around reliability, and standards for both construction and monitoring that support their efforts to improve that. That could begin at the federal level, if we had a functioning federal government, in much the way the largely-successful things we did prior to 2016 have done (the NASA commercial crew program, what-used-to-be-the-CDC, NIST, etc.). If we could put the right incentives in place and then take one more step - prioritize modernization of the grid in fire-prone areas - then we can look forward to a point in time when we're not shutting off people's power because the wind blows. Sure, fires start for other reasons and we're living through them now. That's no excuse for keeping our profit motivations in the wrong place. Fewer fires is helpful and reliable power is helpful. Let's start paying businesses for reliability (and efficiency, and renewability while we're at it). We're getting what we have because we're paying pretty much exclusively for the number of kilowatt hours delivered to where. A lot of things have changed since somebody came up with that. Seems we should blow that bit up, insert ways to measure additional things, and pay for performance.
• sjg007 6y ago
  These transmission lines should be buried. It won't be cheap but it's the only way apart from individual solar or solar communities.
• WoodrowGallegos 6y ago
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