16 ms·

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 operatin

by 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.
  - bhawks 6y ago
    Climate change shouldn't be used as a get out of jail card free card for catastrophic events like this. PGE has a very long track record of neglectful behaviours. From leaking chromium into drinking water in socal, san mateo gas main explosion, and the electrical fires in northern California. There is something very wrong with how PGE approaches it's infrastructure and public safety. It would happen regardless of climate change.
    - Johnny555 6y ago
      Assigning them unlimited liability for catastrophic wildfires leads to the unintended consequence of making it risky for them to run power at all during high fire danger conditions, so they turn off power in these areas.
      - bhawks 6y ago
        They've been willfully negligent and reckless to the infrastructure they own to service their customers. In this case we're not even talking about tree trimming, we have a 100 year old tower. It's obvious it will fail soon, there should be an internal maintenance program to replace/update it. There are no such programs, PGE operates in a way that there would never be such a program. PGE should be held liable for predictable out comes of its behaviours. (see all it's other catastrophic failures across the state) A normal company would not exist after one PGE level negligent catastrophe. PGE is still around because it holds the state hostage to our energy infrastructure. This is not acceptable. The key recurring theme is negligence. That's the reason PGE faces such high liabilities for the disasters it causes. This is not an act of God. I believe it's totally possible to operate a for profit utility that's safe and reliable. PGE can't do that, now how can california untangle this mess.
        20after4 6y ago
        Where I live in rural Missouri, we have "rural electric cooperatives." They are customer-owned utilities set up in the 1930s. From my experience and that of everyone I've talked to in the region, the coops are incredibly reliable, take safety and maintenance very seriously, and provide service at very reasonable rates. It seems clear to me that for-profit business is the wrong model for an infrastructure monopoly like power delivery networks.
- tuna-piano 6y ago
  I think the point is that PG&E negligently caused sparks. But many things can negligently cause sparks, including dozens of human and natural causes. Even among power operators, sparks seem to not be too rare (for example, the tree that fell on the line). So while PG&E can be blamed for that specific fire that doesn't really address the root cause of "why can some sparks in one place cause such huge destruction and can we do anything about that?" I'm just not so sure that if you accidentally knock over one domino and a cascading whole room full of dominoes falls that you should take the blame for the cascading effects. Maybe whoever setup the dominoes behind the first one shares the blame as well...
  - free_rms 6y ago
    Many things can crash cars but if you crash one you're liable. If the wildfires in CA were a new thing this season, I wouldn't want to witch hunt this year's culprit. But it's been a huge hazard for years now -- negligent sparks can't be tolerated.
    - ajmurmann 6y ago
      I love the car comparison because I think the comparison to car manufacturers' stance pre-"Unsafe At Any Speed" seems quite fitting. In fact car manufacturers at least had drivers to blame, whereas PG&E can really only blame themselves or "acts of god"
  - nullc 6y ago
    > But many things can negligently cause sparks, including dozens of human and natural causes. My favourite: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-mendocino-complex-cause-california-fire-20190606-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-mendocino-compl... Someone tried to stop an angry yellowjacket nest by driving a concrete stake into the hole in the ground and their hammer thew off sparks and started a 459,123 acre fire-- the largest recorded in state history at the time.
    - scollet 6y ago
      Problem solved, I guess.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dvduval 6y ago
  Right, and it also outlines how records were not kept up-to-date. I would be interested to know what has happened since then. What type of records are being kept now? it seems likely that with today's technology we can use something to keep an eye on these things without sending people in as often too. Perhaps we can use cameras or drones.
  - woliveirajr 6y ago
    There is a project from my former professor (?) and electrical company: use drones + cameras with specific filters to capture variation of temperature, wear and debris in towers.
- creato 6y ago
  Yes, PGE did cause a fire through negligence. That's a problem. However, what is the appropriate penalty for this? In my opinion, it is the average cost of a fire, most of which are small and don't cause much damage. That this particular fire blew up into a big disaster was the result of many factors, only a few of which were actually in PGE's control.
  - shajznnckfke 6y ago
    That’s an argument you could make in any kind of liability lawsuit. It falls flat because the lawsuit isn’t worth filing in the average case, so nobody ends up being held to account for anything. Example: a roller coaster has broken seat belts. Usually nothing bad will happen because physics keeps the rider in their seat. In one case, a rider falls to their death because they were leaning a particular way on a particular turn. Should the theme park not be punished because nobody was hurt in the average case? Or everyone who rode the roller coaster and wasn’t injured needs to sue for their piece of the pie (because the average damage is one death divided by the total number of riders)?
  - phendrenad2 6y ago
    They should be fined the cost of the fire multiplied by the increased risk of fire that they caused. So (cost of camp fire) * ((chance of fire happening due to unmaintained c-hook) / ((chance of fire happening from unmaintained c-hook)+(chance of fire happening from all other sources)
  - content_sesh 6y ago
    Whatever the appropriate monetary penalty is, it feels like jail time for executives and management within PG&E, who are ultimately responsible for the apparent culture of negligence within PG&E, is appropriate as well. In terms of _average_ cost vs. actual costs, according to my non-lawyer reading of the Wikipedia article on the eggshell skull rule, it doesn't matter that these particular conditions made the fire significantly more costly than average. They have to answer for the damages from the fire they caused, not to the "average" or even "foreseeable" damages from such a fire.
- andbberger 6y ago
  And if you read all the way to end you'll learn that the Camp fire would have been started anyways. No need to assign culpability strictly to either PG&E or calfire for systematic wildfire mismanagement. We can blame them both! Also climate change.
- csours 6y ago
  We're all thinking about C-hooks because that's what failed here. What if the foundation had failed? Or any one of a million other things. I'm not saying that PG&E are clear by any means, just that it's really easy to point fingers after an incident. Be very wary of hindsight bias. So very much of America's infrastructure is aging and used past planned capacity. How can you tell ahead of time which infrastructure will bite you the worst? Water control structures (dams, levees, locks) are a great place to look because of their potential for widespread, costly disasters. If this C-hook had failed during a rainstorm, there would have been localized power loss for some time, and extra work for a repair crew. Now, as it happens, California is naturally prone to wildfires; add to that climate change, poor vegetation control, people wanting to live next to trees[0] - it really is only a matter of time before people are killed. Just look at all the fires burning now. How many of them were caused by faulty C-hooks? Take the example from Fight Club: > "Narrator: A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one." The Narrator has provided us with a very vivid example: a fiery crash caused by a specific part. But what about all the other components? What about the other cars on the road? What about the guy that falls asleep while driving an affected vehicle and has a single car accident? There's a lot of noise in the real world. 0. For instance, I also live next to trees and love it (but not in California).
  - hellotomyrars 6y ago
    The issue isn't specifically what failed. The issue is that the failure in this case was both predictable and ignored. PG&E willfully failed to inspect/maintain the equipment. Accidents happen and you can't control for everything. But this is a very clear and obvious failure. The failure isn't specific to what failed in this case (The c-hook) but the failure of PG&E to do any due diligence.
  - vladvasiliu 6y ago
    > We're all thinking about C-hooks because that's what failed here. What if the foundation had failed? Or any one of a million other things. I'm not saying that PG&E are clear by any means, just that it's really easy to point fingers after an incident. Be very wary of hindsight bias. I'm not sure that's the point. C-hooks are an example of a preventable accident. The problem isn't the c-hook itself but the policy / culture at PG&E and probably outside the company (as you point below) that allowed this to happen. > So very much of America's infrastructure is aging and used past planned capacity. How can you tell ahead of time which infrastructure will bite you the worst? Exactly. I see the twitter thread as an example of this broader issue. Of course, the solution is not to go around and check every single c-hook. The solution is to set up a plan (at the utility, state or federal level) so that this kind of avoidable accidents happen much less often. I'm not saying that nothing like this would ever happen again, but even if such a plan could reduce such events by ten times, that would look like a success to me.
scythe 6y ago
It's instructive to consider the alternative. Many US towns expand in a dendritic pattern by branching cul-de-sacs off of interconnecting roads. By contrast pre-Westphalian cities were always built within convex hulls for defensive purposes. These shapes were imitated by early grid-planned US towns built by capitalist pioneers, but after the introduction of the automobile those towns were soon surrounded by irregular additions. The convex hull is clearly superior in a fire-prone forest, because it permits the introduction of a fire-break. However, it requires us to, from a top-down perspective, decide that we will build a new entire town. We are reluctant to commit to building towns in forests, even though we are equally reluctant to ban people from living in forests. In this situation we have the worst of both worlds: ad-hoc development is subsidized by the "surplus value lying around" when the government pays to build a road/powerlines/etc between two places, but it ultimately depletes that resource and creates new demands which must be fulfilled by the government.
- staticautomatic 6y ago
  This is a very interesting analysis. Thanks for providing it.
himinlomax 6y ago
Imagine an alleged arsonist going to court, and his defense was "not guilty your honor, I didn't put all that fuel in one place, I just flicked a tiny lighter!"
- Tumblewood 6y ago
  This is a poor analogy. Besides the distinction that arson is intentional rather than negligent, arsonists burn things that would not have burned otherwise. While PG&E's negligence sparked the fire, the brush in the area would have burned at some point in the near future regardless of their actions. The Twitter thread mentions the fire that started in the area around the same time because a tree fell, or some other inciting event could have happened. While PG&E should be held accountable for failing to uphold legal standards of inspection, the Camp Fire or a similar one was likely even without negligence, so to compare PG&E to arsonists is misleading.
  - himinlomax 6y ago
    Negligent vs intentional is orthogonal to responsible. You could be responsible but just negligent, like an idiot lighting up a cigar at a gas station. You could intentionally light a fire but not responsible, such as if someone tricked you into doing it or you were poisoned with hallucinogenic drugs, or just plain crazy.
    - mannykannot 6y ago
      None of these corner-cases do anything for your arsonist analogy. Whatever else one thinks of the utility, it is not plausible that either it or its employees intended to start a fire.
      - himinlomax 6y ago
        Talk about missing the point ...
        6y ago
rlt 6y ago
> 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) Or, say, a massive lightning storm such as the ones that sparked many of the wildfires this year.
bjustin 6y ago
You don’t have to speculate about trees causing fires in the area: the thread eventually mentions a second fire, Camp B, caused by a tree falling on a line. It was subsumed by the first Camp fire. It may have caused just as much trouble if it was the only fire.
peter_retief 6y ago
I do remember reading that there was a lack of maintenance by PG&E but as you say it is a systemic governance failure and to single out one point of failure is scapegoating.
20after4 6y ago
I suppose you think that nuclear power plants should be operated under the same "run to failure" maintenance policy?
- 2rsf 6y ago
  No, but if the city nearby insisted on building too close than people suffering from radiation (I'm just inventing a story here) is not just my fault.
NoblePublius 6y ago
CalFire’s budget is lower than it was in 1999 in inflation adjusted dollars. 8/10 CalFire workers are prison laborers. How convenient for the CA government to have cLiMatE chAnGe to blame.
tshaddox 6y ago
> 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. I don’t understand. You’re conceding that if PG&E were a competent and responsible company they could significantly reduce the rate of fires. The fact that some fires might still happen doesn’t mean that 10 fires aren’t better than 1,000 fires.
- cesaref 6y ago
  No, the point is I think that they could reduce the risk further, they are currently maintaining their network, the question is what benefit would be gained by increasing the cost of their maintenance, or whether they would be absorbing the risk from someone else's lack of maintenance (e.g clearing forest debris/making fire breaks). Remember, power lines are not the only source of fires, lightning being a much more frequent cause and power grid maintenance isn't going to alter that risk
- legulere 6y ago
  1000 fires would actually be probably better than 10 because they help keep flammable material at bay and reduce the size of the fires.
  - taneq 6y ago
    So your saying we should introduce chaos monkeys into power grids to improve robustness?
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      No, GP is saying you need to start doing controlled fires on a regular basis, to reduce the accumulation of flammable material. Power grid is not related to that.
    - extropy 6y ago
      Actually yes, since they have a huge incentive to Run to Failure. Chaos monkeys would provide a consistent source of failures to make them do their maintenance. Similar to red teams in security.
harha 6y ago
Take driving as an analogy - there's a non-zero risk of having a crash, but it's significantly higher if you don't follow the rules (drunk, speeding, broken car). This feels like PG&E was betting it wouldn't happen to them. I think for a utility the risk should be very very close to zero, you can really do a lot of planning around it and make sure that if you're running infrastructure in a dangerous area to take sufficient measures to avoid all likely failures, and if one part breaks it doesn't end in a catastrophe. Maintenance schedules are there for a reason and keeping records helps improve the data for risk models. But there might also be some blame on the general planning of the area, if it's too dangerous to run a power line, there shouldn't be one there. If other causes are likely, it shouldn't be unreasonable to expect this to be one of the government tasks to make sure that they set up some form of protection.
- onetimemanytime 6y ago
  >>I think for a utility the risk should be very very close to zero They can lower the risk by a lot, but are you ready to pay 65 cents (or whatever) a KW ? PG&E, with all its faults, has been put in an impossible position: one fire (that is bound to happen no matter what because wires fail) can bankrupt them since it can burn hundreds of thousand of acres, thousands of homes, untold deaths and other property destruction. You can't really blame them for everything. Manage forests, stop building a town in the middle of the freaking forest and raise electricity rates for a complete audit of all the lines. Otherwise, nothing can be done, just talk.
  - harha 6y ago
    I understand the constraints and I'm not blaming them for everything, creating this dangerous situation is also a great issue, but I think this was handled very badly on their part as well. As a utility they should have a set of rules and guidelines on how to operate safely. If it isn't possible in a situation, they should say no to the other party. With the rules they should be able to point at exactly what is missing and get the other side to fix their part (e.g. the risk or get them to pay extra for maintenance) or stop operating that bit. This looks like they intentionally looked the other way.
  - 6y ago
jmspring 6y ago
Pge has a history of diverting maintenance to profits. That has been proven. Communities and forests in CA do not keep up adequate maintenance, that is taken as fact. The super dry conditions coupled with wind exacerbate any fires that pop up. We’ve had fires due to pge, gun shots (detwieller), a flat on a trailer causing sparks over 5 miles. Yet, the fires would not have been as severe if conditions on the forest floor were not so dire. Plumas National Forest is pretty clean compared to many - yet winds kicked up on the Bear fire and Berry Falls was torched and Oroville threatened. Santa Cruz mountains, many homes saved either had defensible space or neighbors nearby with such that stayed up and helped out. Not sure I have a point, just some facts.
formerly_proven 6y ago
> With proper engineering This tower looks weird. Overhead three-phase transmission is super common in the EU and I've never seen anything like this "transposition tower" that swaps the wires around in the air and I don't really see why it would make much sense to do so mid-line. Wouldn't it be easier to swap the wires around at the start or end of a line, or inside a substation? Also, as far as I can tell (from sometimes photographing these things with telephotos), the insulators seem to generally be bolted to the mast instead of being hooked in, so this entire failure mode of hooks wearing out (or dislodging?) doesn't exist. (Okay, now you have to worry about changing loads on bolts, fair enough).
- petertodd 6y ago
  Swapping the wires around at the start or end of the line doesn't swap them frequently enough. It's actually quite like a twisted pair in an ethernet cable: you swap the order frequently to average out the different position-dependent electrical characteristics to get a uniform characteristic. The EU probably does that less frequently simply due to higher density, and thus fewer long stretches of transmission line. I've personally seen a transposition tower in the EU on a line running across a mountain, so they do exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposition_tower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposition_tower
  - formerly_proven 6y ago
    TIL. Germans of course have their Verdrillschemata to place Verdrillmasten properly, but it seems they're quite rare. There's a Wikipedia article with an example transmission line, but it notes that all Verdrillmasten have been removed from that line over time.
    - petertodd 6y ago
      TIL too! The German wikipedia articles are quite detailed: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdrillmast https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdrillmast https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdrillschema https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdrillschema I'd be interested to know if the twists have been removed from the lines. It might be the case that they've replaced the special twisting masts with other ways of twisting, eg taking the lines into a substation and re-orienting them on the way back out. If they've added a lot of substations as the land gets developed more, that may be the case. Also, I'm sure twisted masts are a bit more expensive. So this might just be a gradual process of saving money as equipment gets replaced rather than any specific engineering goal. There's many other things that unbalance lines, and twisting masts may not make enough of a difference compared to other issues.
ajuc 6y ago
At some point there's going to be a lightning or something and the fire will happen anyway.
- pixl97 6y ago
  Like right now? The feather river canyon near Paradise is on fire as we speak from a lighting induced fire that has caused fatalities. The Camp fire burn out area is actual one of the boarders of the North Complex fire.
throw0101a 6y ago
> PG&E does ultimately have some responsibility […] Don't stop there; remember they're regulated: > California’s public utilities commission prioritized rates, green power; wildfires exposed shortcomings * https://www.wsj.com/articles/pg-e-caused-over-400-fires-in-2018-where-were-the-regulators-11575834385 https://www.wsj.com/articles/pg-e-caused-over-400-fires-in-2... * https://archive.is/czAB3 https://archive.is/czAB3 (paywall) > A state lawmaker on Wednesday demanded an extensive review of the California Public Utilities Commission to determine whether regulators’ lax oversight enabled neglect at Pacific Gas & Electric that triggered catastrophic wildfires, a messy bankruptcy and exasperating blackouts. * https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/01/16/california-lawmaker-demands-probe-of-pges-chief-regulator/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/01/16/california-lawmaker-d...
- awalton 6y ago
  So what you're saying is we need more regulations to cover these kinds of cases? Aren't you "regulations" people usually against regulations? Like, normally wouldn't I be arguing against someone screaming about how the free market can take care of these things and that the free market knows better than the government? Or, once again, is it just an amazing coincidence that people have suddenly completely flipped their stance because it happened in California?
  - throw0101a 6y ago
    > So what you're saying is we need more regulations to cover these kinds of cases? Please quote back to me where in my post I say "more regulation". > Aren't you "regulations" people usually against regulations? ??? Who is the "you" that is being referenced? Perhaps you are projecting onto me positions that I have not stated and may not actually hold. I have not stated whether more free market is good/better or bad/worse, or whether more regulations would be better or worse. I'm simply pointing out that, in addition to PG&E, there may be other parties that may share responsibility in the chain of events that led to the situation at hand. PG&E operates in a regulatory context: is it worth examining if that context contributed to the current situation that California is in? Are the regulations a problem? Or how they are interpreted or applied? Are more needed, or less? Perhaps they need to be streamlined (proscriptive versus descriptive)? I have no answers to these questions. See also: the FAA and Boeing (737 MAX).
zhte415 6y ago
This is a failing of engineering reliable systems: A part is tested to a point of failure, based on the quality parameters you specify. I'd put safety pretty high on a 115,000V line. Choose your sigma level based on your goals. I'd wager 97 years is out of the ballpark of "Yes, this might fail". And to save on cost, don't come back every year "OK, it's still OK." Replace it - it saves cost (and in this case, potentially lives). So yes, I'd assign them blame. Be it an engineering part, an asphalt road, a power pylon. There will be outliers, but this was an outlier of systematic negligence, with no (recorded) documentation prior to the year 2000. Scheduled replacement saves costs in the long term, if bottom dollar is the aim.
- andromeduck 6y ago
  iF iT AiNt BrOkE dOnT fIx It
  - zhte415 6y ago
    Clearly it broke. Was fixed, sort of but not actually, and failed. Observe, test, measure, analyse, mitigate (did I create a new acronym to add to the vast QC vocabulary, OTMAM?). Scheduled replacement! Mitigate problems before they cause knock-on effects that shutdown a production line or endanger lives and livelihoods. (I do get the sarcasm in your reply, BTW.)
jessaustin 6y ago
..."excusable" cause (like a tree falling on a line... No that would not be excusable for an American power company. Trees are trimmed and felled on a regular basis wherever they threaten power lines. Except, somehow, in California? That would be surprising.
joppy 6y ago
Surely seeing an organisation being so careless in its maintenance of an extremely dangerous asset is criminal, regardless of whether or not a fire was started. “I own giant death cables in the sky but skimp on their upkeep costs” is already worth punishing or holding someone accountable for.
2rsf 6y ago
My thoughts exactly, PG&E are to blame and should be punished but it seems like someone forgot to ask the 5 why's- why did the fire spread so fast ? why didn't people got a warning in time ?
snarf21 6y ago
Yes, they have blame. Yes, they diverted profits from maintenance. Yes, they could have made less money and done more maintenance and (slightly?) reduced the likelihood of a fire. The issue is that the incentives are not aligned. They are also regulated and have to ask for permission to raise rates. This is the double sided coin of regulated utilities. There should be mandatory annual rate hikes and those should be mandated for maintenance and safety. It is verified and if not done, the utility pays a fine of 2x the rate hike. These systems are clearly aging and that needs to be built into the legislation. What happens if PG&E just goes bankrupt? People still need power. The infrastructure is still in shambles. The legislation must have a path to sustainability. This feels very similar to how the legislature has crippled the Post Office.
dfsegoat 6y ago
Here in Sonoma County [Tubbs fire, kincade fire, LNU Lightning fires] PG&E has had 2-3 contracted helicopters out pretty much every day doing line maintenance/checking. I watch flightaware pretty constantly, so it's easy to see their contracted helicopters up in the area. Point being, they are trying -- I think people also fail to understand just how huge and rural Northern CA is.
- rasz 6y ago
  3 x brand new ROBINSON R-44 ~$1.5mil. 3x pilot salary, lets be generous ~$400K. $220/hour operating cost includes insurance and amortized overhaul, flying 5 hours a day = ~1200 hours per year, 3x $250K. $2.7 million all in all. they make >$500mil a year, they can afford to try harder.
oconnor663 6y ago
> this area will likely never be safe without significant policy changes What policy changes would those be? I've never lived near there so I don't have a clue.
onetimeusename 6y ago
PG&E did request to be able to clear brush up to 15 feet away from the power lines which I believe Gov. Newsom granted a CEQA exemption to them to do[1]. Prior to that, they were only allowed to clear four feet.[2] That doesn't change the broken equipment but some of the blame can be placed on environmental regulations that cause this. What I am not sure of is whether environmental regulatory approval decreases funding and/or increases costs/time of repairing power lines. The power line upgrades do have to be reviewed and approved by environmental regulators. Here is an example[3]. [1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/california-tests-new-strategies-to-prevent-deadly-wildfires/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/california-tests-... [2]: https://www.sierraclub.org/california/cnrcc/pge-clearcuts-power-lines https://www.sierraclub.org/california/cnrcc/pge-clearcuts-po... [3]: https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/Environment/Info/mha/cabrillosantaynez/CabrilloSantaYnez.htm https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/Environment/Info/mha/cabrillosantayn...
ljm 6y ago
Take the fire out of the picture and PG&E have total responsibility for maintaining this infrastructure and keeping it safe. They can't blame it on the geography of the area. Put the fire back in and, yes, they still have significant responsibility. The same way that someone setting off a firework or lighting up a barbecue in the brush or holding a gender reveal party is held responsible. They don't get off easier because they're a big business and it's tough for them. Their CEO and shareholders can live with a smaller return to properly take care of their equipment. It has nothing to do with stopping all fires, or making them responsible for reducing them. It's holding them to account for causing one.
LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
I don't mean to come over as arrogant, snotty or something here, but speaking of proper engineering and maintenance in the context of high-voltage transmission lines in the USA instantly makes one burst out in laughter when comparing that to how they are built in Germany. While we had some fuck-ups too, we have way larger pyhsical safety margins, as in more space between the wires, more space between the wires and ground, more space between wires and vegetation (which is cut back when growing into that space), while usually we don't even have weather which makes it dry like tinder. Honestly, this all looks like toys to us. Inconceivable.
zelon88 6y ago
Honestly for what this cost in human loss of life and financial loss it would have made sense to clean the ground underneath the towers or perhaps install fire suppressor systems the entire length of the line. A few sprinklers at the bottom of each tower and a single water main to supply them can't possibly cost the same $16 billion that a wildfire costs. Even if you put a $100 Raspberry Pi with a temperature sensor, smoke sensor, and computer vision at the bottom of each tower to detect fires. 85 people would be alive right now. But no. They won't even replace a $12 hook.
kazinator 6y ago
> the forest is so dry and overgrown that pretty much ... ... it is impossible to maintain records of WTF they are doing.

by 43920 6y ago

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.
- bhawks 6y ago
  Climate change shouldn't be used as a get out of jail card free card for catastrophic events like this. PGE has a very long track record of neglectful behaviours. From leaking chromium into drinking water in socal, san mateo gas main explosion, and the electrical fires in northern California. There is something very wrong with how PGE approaches it's infrastructure and public safety. It would happen regardless of climate change.
  - Johnny555 6y ago
    Assigning them unlimited liability for catastrophic wildfires leads to the unintended consequence of making it risky for them to run power at all during high fire danger conditions, so they turn off power in these areas.
    - bhawks 6y ago
      They've been willfully negligent and reckless to the infrastructure they own to service their customers. In this case we're not even talking about tree trimming, we have a 100 year old tower. It's obvious it will fail soon, there should be an internal maintenance program to replace/update it. There are no such programs, PGE operates in a way that there would never be such a program. PGE should be held liable for predictable out comes of its behaviours. (see all it's other catastrophic failures across the state) A normal company would not exist after one PGE level negligent catastrophe. PGE is still around because it holds the state hostage to our energy infrastructure. This is not acceptable. The key recurring theme is negligence. That's the reason PGE faces such high liabilities for the disasters it causes. This is not an act of God. I believe it's totally possible to operate a for profit utility that's safe and reliable. PGE can't do that, now how can california untangle this mess.
      - 20after4 6y ago
        Where I live in rural Missouri, we have "rural electric cooperatives." They are customer-owned utilities set up in the 1930s. From my experience and that of everyone I've talked to in the region, the coops are incredibly reliable, take safety and maintenance very seriously, and provide service at very reasonable rates. It seems clear to me that for-profit business is the wrong model for an infrastructure monopoly like power delivery networks.
tuna-piano 6y ago
I think the point is that PG&E negligently caused sparks. But many things can negligently cause sparks, including dozens of human and natural causes. Even among power operators, sparks seem to not be too rare (for example, the tree that fell on the line). So while PG&E can be blamed for that specific fire that doesn't really address the root cause of "why can some sparks in one place cause such huge destruction and can we do anything about that?" I'm just not so sure that if you accidentally knock over one domino and a cascading whole room full of dominoes falls that you should take the blame for the cascading effects. Maybe whoever setup the dominoes behind the first one shares the blame as well...
- free_rms 6y ago
  Many things can crash cars but if you crash one you're liable. If the wildfires in CA were a new thing this season, I wouldn't want to witch hunt this year's culprit. But it's been a huge hazard for years now -- negligent sparks can't be tolerated.
  - ajmurmann 6y ago
    I love the car comparison because I think the comparison to car manufacturers' stance pre-"Unsafe At Any Speed" seems quite fitting. In fact car manufacturers at least had drivers to blame, whereas PG&E can really only blame themselves or "acts of god"
- nullc 6y ago
  > But many things can negligently cause sparks, including dozens of human and natural causes. My favourite: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-mendocino-complex-cause-california-fire-20190606-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-mendocino-compl... Someone tried to stop an angry yellowjacket nest by driving a concrete stake into the hole in the ground and their hammer thew off sparks and started a 459,123 acre fire-- the largest recorded in state history at the time.
  - scollet 6y ago
    Problem solved, I guess.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dvduval 6y ago
Right, and it also outlines how records were not kept up-to-date. I would be interested to know what has happened since then. What type of records are being kept now? it seems likely that with today's technology we can use something to keep an eye on these things without sending people in as often too. Perhaps we can use cameras or drones.
- woliveirajr 6y ago
  There is a project from my former professor (?) and electrical company: use drones + cameras with specific filters to capture variation of temperature, wear and debris in towers.
creato 6y ago
Yes, PGE did cause a fire through negligence. That's a problem. However, what is the appropriate penalty for this? In my opinion, it is the average cost of a fire, most of which are small and don't cause much damage. That this particular fire blew up into a big disaster was the result of many factors, only a few of which were actually in PGE's control.
- shajznnckfke 6y ago
  That’s an argument you could make in any kind of liability lawsuit. It falls flat because the lawsuit isn’t worth filing in the average case, so nobody ends up being held to account for anything. Example: a roller coaster has broken seat belts. Usually nothing bad will happen because physics keeps the rider in their seat. In one case, a rider falls to their death because they were leaning a particular way on a particular turn. Should the theme park not be punished because nobody was hurt in the average case? Or everyone who rode the roller coaster and wasn’t injured needs to sue for their piece of the pie (because the average damage is one death divided by the total number of riders)?
- phendrenad2 6y ago
  They should be fined the cost of the fire multiplied by the increased risk of fire that they caused. So (cost of camp fire) * ((chance of fire happening due to unmaintained c-hook) / ((chance of fire happening from unmaintained c-hook)+(chance of fire happening from all other sources)
- content_sesh 6y ago
  Whatever the appropriate monetary penalty is, it feels like jail time for executives and management within PG&E, who are ultimately responsible for the apparent culture of negligence within PG&E, is appropriate as well. In terms of _average_ cost vs. actual costs, according to my non-lawyer reading of the Wikipedia article on the eggshell skull rule, it doesn't matter that these particular conditions made the fire significantly more costly than average. They have to answer for the damages from the fire they caused, not to the "average" or even "foreseeable" damages from such a fire.
andbberger 6y ago
And if you read all the way to end you'll learn that the Camp fire would have been started anyways. No need to assign culpability strictly to either PG&E or calfire for systematic wildfire mismanagement. We can blame them both! Also climate change.
csours 6y ago
We're all thinking about C-hooks because that's what failed here. What if the foundation had failed? Or any one of a million other things. I'm not saying that PG&E are clear by any means, just that it's really easy to point fingers after an incident. Be very wary of hindsight bias. So very much of America's infrastructure is aging and used past planned capacity. How can you tell ahead of time which infrastructure will bite you the worst? Water control structures (dams, levees, locks) are a great place to look because of their potential for widespread, costly disasters. If this C-hook had failed during a rainstorm, there would have been localized power loss for some time, and extra work for a repair crew. Now, as it happens, California is naturally prone to wildfires; add to that climate change, poor vegetation control, people wanting to live next to trees[0] - it really is only a matter of time before people are killed. Just look at all the fires burning now. How many of them were caused by faulty C-hooks? Take the example from Fight Club: > "Narrator: A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one." The Narrator has provided us with a very vivid example: a fiery crash caused by a specific part. But what about all the other components? What about the other cars on the road? What about the guy that falls asleep while driving an affected vehicle and has a single car accident? There's a lot of noise in the real world. 0. For instance, I also live next to trees and love it (but not in California).
- hellotomyrars 6y ago
  The issue isn't specifically what failed. The issue is that the failure in this case was both predictable and ignored. PG&E willfully failed to inspect/maintain the equipment. Accidents happen and you can't control for everything. But this is a very clear and obvious failure. The failure isn't specific to what failed in this case (The c-hook) but the failure of PG&E to do any due diligence.
- vladvasiliu 6y ago
  > We're all thinking about C-hooks because that's what failed here. What if the foundation had failed? Or any one of a million other things. I'm not saying that PG&E are clear by any means, just that it's really easy to point fingers after an incident. Be very wary of hindsight bias. I'm not sure that's the point. C-hooks are an example of a preventable accident. The problem isn't the c-hook itself but the policy / culture at PG&E and probably outside the company (as you point below) that allowed this to happen. > So very much of America's infrastructure is aging and used past planned capacity. How can you tell ahead of time which infrastructure will bite you the worst? Exactly. I see the twitter thread as an example of this broader issue. Of course, the solution is not to go around and check every single c-hook. The solution is to set up a plan (at the utility, state or federal level) so that this kind of avoidable accidents happen much less often. I'm not saying that nothing like this would ever happen again, but even if such a plan could reduce such events by ten times, that would look like a success to me.

scythe 6y ago

It's instructive to consider the alternative. Many US towns expand in a dendritic pattern by branching cul-de-sacs off of interconnecting roads. By contrast pre-Westphalian cities were always built within convex hulls for defensive purposes. These shapes were imitated by early grid-planned US towns built by capitalist pioneers, but after the introduction of the automobile those towns were soon surrounded by irregular additions. The convex hull is clearly superior in a fire-prone forest, because it permits the introduction of a fire-break. However, it requires us to, from a top-down perspective, decide that we will build a new entire town. We are reluctant to commit to building towns in forests, even though we are equally reluctant to ban people from living in forests. In this situation we have the worst of both worlds: ad-hoc development is subsidized by the "surplus value lying around" when the government pays to build a road/powerlines/etc between two places, but it ultimately depletes that resource and creates new demands which must be fulfilled by the government.

staticautomatic 6y ago
This is a very interesting analysis. Thanks for providing it.

himinlomax 6y ago

Imagine an alleged arsonist going to court, and his defense was "not guilty your honor, I didn't put all that fuel in one place, I just flicked a tiny lighter!"

Tumblewood 6y ago
This is a poor analogy. Besides the distinction that arson is intentional rather than negligent, arsonists burn things that would not have burned otherwise. While PG&E's negligence sparked the fire, the brush in the area would have burned at some point in the near future regardless of their actions. The Twitter thread mentions the fire that started in the area around the same time because a tree fell, or some other inciting event could have happened. While PG&E should be held accountable for failing to uphold legal standards of inspection, the Camp Fire or a similar one was likely even without negligence, so to compare PG&E to arsonists is misleading.
- himinlomax 6y ago
  Negligent vs intentional is orthogonal to responsible. You could be responsible but just negligent, like an idiot lighting up a cigar at a gas station. You could intentionally light a fire but not responsible, such as if someone tricked you into doing it or you were poisoned with hallucinogenic drugs, or just plain crazy.
  - mannykannot 6y ago
    None of these corner-cases do anything for your arsonist analogy. Whatever else one thinks of the utility, it is not plausible that either it or its employees intended to start a fire.
    - himinlomax 6y ago
      Talk about missing the point ...
      - 6y ago

rlt 6y ago

> 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) Or, say, a massive lightning storm such as the ones that sparked many of the wildfires this year.

bjustin 6y ago

You don’t have to speculate about trees causing fires in the area: the thread eventually mentions a second fire, Camp B, caused by a tree falling on a line. It was subsumed by the first Camp fire. It may have caused just as much trouble if it was the only fire.

peter_retief 6y ago

I do remember reading that there was a lack of maintenance by PG&E but as you say it is a systemic governance failure and to single out one point of failure is scapegoating.

20after4 6y ago

I suppose you think that nuclear power plants should be operated under the same "run to failure" maintenance policy?

2rsf 6y ago
No, but if the city nearby insisted on building too close than people suffering from radiation (I'm just inventing a story here) is not just my fault.

NoblePublius 6y ago

CalFire’s budget is lower than it was in 1999 in inflation adjusted dollars. 8/10 CalFire workers are prison laborers. How convenient for the CA government to have cLiMatE chAnGe to blame.

tshaddox 6y ago

> 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. I don’t understand. You’re conceding that if PG&E were a competent and responsible company they could significantly reduce the rate of fires. The fact that some fires might still happen doesn’t mean that 10 fires aren’t better than 1,000 fires.

cesaref 6y ago
No, the point is I think that they could reduce the risk further, they are currently maintaining their network, the question is what benefit would be gained by increasing the cost of their maintenance, or whether they would be absorbing the risk from someone else's lack of maintenance (e.g clearing forest debris/making fire breaks). Remember, power lines are not the only source of fires, lightning being a much more frequent cause and power grid maintenance isn't going to alter that risk
legulere 6y ago
1000 fires would actually be probably better than 10 because they help keep flammable material at bay and reduce the size of the fires.
- taneq 6y ago
  So your saying we should introduce chaos monkeys into power grids to improve robustness?
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    No, GP is saying you need to start doing controlled fires on a regular basis, to reduce the accumulation of flammable material. Power grid is not related to that.
  - extropy 6y ago
    Actually yes, since they have a huge incentive to Run to Failure. Chaos monkeys would provide a consistent source of failures to make them do their maintenance. Similar to red teams in security.

harha 6y ago

Take driving as an analogy - there's a non-zero risk of having a crash, but it's significantly higher if you don't follow the rules (drunk, speeding, broken car). This feels like PG&E was betting it wouldn't happen to them. I think for a utility the risk should be very very close to zero, you can really do a lot of planning around it and make sure that if you're running infrastructure in a dangerous area to take sufficient measures to avoid all likely failures, and if one part breaks it doesn't end in a catastrophe. Maintenance schedules are there for a reason and keeping records helps improve the data for risk models. But there might also be some blame on the general planning of the area, if it's too dangerous to run a power line, there shouldn't be one there. If other causes are likely, it shouldn't be unreasonable to expect this to be one of the government tasks to make sure that they set up some form of protection.

onetimemanytime 6y ago
>>I think for a utility the risk should be very very close to zero They can lower the risk by a lot, but are you ready to pay 65 cents (or whatever) a KW ? PG&E, with all its faults, has been put in an impossible position: one fire (that is bound to happen no matter what because wires fail) can bankrupt them since it can burn hundreds of thousand of acres, thousands of homes, untold deaths and other property destruction. You can't really blame them for everything. Manage forests, stop building a town in the middle of the freaking forest and raise electricity rates for a complete audit of all the lines. Otherwise, nothing can be done, just talk.
- harha 6y ago
  I understand the constraints and I'm not blaming them for everything, creating this dangerous situation is also a great issue, but I think this was handled very badly on their part as well. As a utility they should have a set of rules and guidelines on how to operate safely. If it isn't possible in a situation, they should say no to the other party. With the rules they should be able to point at exactly what is missing and get the other side to fix their part (e.g. the risk or get them to pay extra for maintenance) or stop operating that bit. This looks like they intentionally looked the other way.
- 6y ago

jmspring 6y ago

Pge has a history of diverting maintenance to profits. That has been proven. Communities and forests in CA do not keep up adequate maintenance, that is taken as fact. The super dry conditions coupled with wind exacerbate any fires that pop up. We’ve had fires due to pge, gun shots (detwieller), a flat on a trailer causing sparks over 5 miles. Yet, the fires would not have been as severe if conditions on the forest floor were not so dire. Plumas National Forest is pretty clean compared to many - yet winds kicked up on the Bear fire and Berry Falls was torched and Oroville threatened. Santa Cruz mountains, many homes saved either had defensible space or neighbors nearby with such that stayed up and helped out. Not sure I have a point, just some facts.

formerly_proven 6y ago

> With proper engineering This tower looks weird. Overhead three-phase transmission is super common in the EU and I've never seen anything like this "transposition tower" that swaps the wires around in the air and I don't really see why it would make much sense to do so mid-line. Wouldn't it be easier to swap the wires around at the start or end of a line, or inside a substation? Also, as far as I can tell (from sometimes photographing these things with telephotos), the insulators seem to generally be bolted to the mast instead of being hooked in, so this entire failure mode of hooks wearing out (or dislodging?) doesn't exist. (Okay, now you have to worry about changing loads on bolts, fair enough).

petertodd 6y ago
Swapping the wires around at the start or end of the line doesn't swap them frequently enough. It's actually quite like a twisted pair in an ethernet cable: you swap the order frequently to average out the different position-dependent electrical characteristics to get a uniform characteristic. The EU probably does that less frequently simply due to higher density, and thus fewer long stretches of transmission line. I've personally seen a transposition tower in the EU on a line running across a mountain, so they do exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposition_tower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposition_tower
- formerly_proven 6y ago
  TIL. Germans of course have their Verdrillschemata to place Verdrillmasten properly, but it seems they're quite rare. There's a Wikipedia article with an example transmission line, but it notes that all Verdrillmasten have been removed from that line over time.
  - petertodd 6y ago
    TIL too! The German wikipedia articles are quite detailed: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdrillmast https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdrillmast https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdrillschema https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdrillschema I'd be interested to know if the twists have been removed from the lines. It might be the case that they've replaced the special twisting masts with other ways of twisting, eg taking the lines into a substation and re-orienting them on the way back out. If they've added a lot of substations as the land gets developed more, that may be the case. Also, I'm sure twisted masts are a bit more expensive. So this might just be a gradual process of saving money as equipment gets replaced rather than any specific engineering goal. There's many other things that unbalance lines, and twisting masts may not make enough of a difference compared to other issues.

ajuc 6y ago

At some point there's going to be a lightning or something and the fire will happen anyway.

pixl97 6y ago
Like right now? The feather river canyon near Paradise is on fire as we speak from a lighting induced fire that has caused fatalities. The Camp fire burn out area is actual one of the boarders of the North Complex fire.

throw0101a 6y ago

> PG&E does ultimately have some responsibility […] Don't stop there; remember they're regulated: > California’s public utilities commission prioritized rates, green power; wildfires exposed shortcomings * https://www.wsj.com/articles/pg-e-caused-over-400-fires-in-2018-where-were-the-regulators-11575834385 https://www.wsj.com/articles/pg-e-caused-over-400-fires-in-2... * https://archive.is/czAB3 https://archive.is/czAB3 (paywall) > A state lawmaker on Wednesday demanded an extensive review of the California Public Utilities Commission to determine whether regulators’ lax oversight enabled neglect at Pacific Gas & Electric that triggered catastrophic wildfires, a messy bankruptcy and exasperating blackouts. * https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/01/16/california-lawmaker-demands-probe-of-pges-chief-regulator/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/01/16/california-lawmaker-d...

awalton 6y ago
So what you're saying is we need more regulations to cover these kinds of cases? Aren't you "regulations" people usually against regulations? Like, normally wouldn't I be arguing against someone screaming about how the free market can take care of these things and that the free market knows better than the government? Or, once again, is it just an amazing coincidence that people have suddenly completely flipped their stance because it happened in California?
- throw0101a 6y ago
  > So what you're saying is we need more regulations to cover these kinds of cases? Please quote back to me where in my post I say "more regulation". > Aren't you "regulations" people usually against regulations? ??? Who is the "you" that is being referenced? Perhaps you are projecting onto me positions that I have not stated and may not actually hold. I have not stated whether more free market is good/better or bad/worse, or whether more regulations would be better or worse. I'm simply pointing out that, in addition to PG&E, there may be other parties that may share responsibility in the chain of events that led to the situation at hand. PG&E operates in a regulatory context: is it worth examining if that context contributed to the current situation that California is in? Are the regulations a problem? Or how they are interpreted or applied? Are more needed, or less? Perhaps they need to be streamlined (proscriptive versus descriptive)? I have no answers to these questions. See also: the FAA and Boeing (737 MAX).

zhte415 6y ago

This is a failing of engineering reliable systems: A part is tested to a point of failure, based on the quality parameters you specify. I'd put safety pretty high on a 115,000V line. Choose your sigma level based on your goals. I'd wager 97 years is out of the ballpark of "Yes, this might fail". And to save on cost, don't come back every year "OK, it's still OK." Replace it - it saves cost (and in this case, potentially lives). So yes, I'd assign them blame. Be it an engineering part, an asphalt road, a power pylon. There will be outliers, but this was an outlier of systematic negligence, with no (recorded) documentation prior to the year 2000. Scheduled replacement saves costs in the long term, if bottom dollar is the aim.

andromeduck 6y ago
iF iT AiNt BrOkE dOnT fIx It
- zhte415 6y ago
  Clearly it broke. Was fixed, sort of but not actually, and failed. Observe, test, measure, analyse, mitigate (did I create a new acronym to add to the vast QC vocabulary, OTMAM?). Scheduled replacement! Mitigate problems before they cause knock-on effects that shutdown a production line or endanger lives and livelihoods. (I do get the sarcasm in your reply, BTW.)

jessaustin 6y ago

..."excusable" cause (like a tree falling on a line... No that would not be excusable for an American power company. Trees are trimmed and felled on a regular basis wherever they threaten power lines. Except, somehow, in California? That would be surprising.

joppy 6y ago

Surely seeing an organisation being so careless in its maintenance of an extremely dangerous asset is criminal, regardless of whether or not a fire was started. “I own giant death cables in the sky but skimp on their upkeep costs” is already worth punishing or holding someone accountable for.

2rsf 6y ago

My thoughts exactly, PG&E are to blame and should be punished but it seems like someone forgot to ask the 5 why's- why did the fire spread so fast ? why didn't people got a warning in time ?

snarf21 6y ago

Yes, they have blame. Yes, they diverted profits from maintenance. Yes, they could have made less money and done more maintenance and (slightly?) reduced the likelihood of a fire. The issue is that the incentives are not aligned. They are also regulated and have to ask for permission to raise rates. This is the double sided coin of regulated utilities. There should be mandatory annual rate hikes and those should be mandated for maintenance and safety. It is verified and if not done, the utility pays a fine of 2x the rate hike. These systems are clearly aging and that needs to be built into the legislation. What happens if PG&E just goes bankrupt? People still need power. The infrastructure is still in shambles. The legislation must have a path to sustainability. This feels very similar to how the legislature has crippled the Post Office.

dfsegoat 6y ago

Here in Sonoma County [Tubbs fire, kincade fire, LNU Lightning fires] PG&E has had 2-3 contracted helicopters out pretty much every day doing line maintenance/checking. I watch flightaware pretty constantly, so it's easy to see their contracted helicopters up in the area. Point being, they are trying -- I think people also fail to understand just how huge and rural Northern CA is.

rasz 6y ago
3 x brand new ROBINSON R-44 ~$1.5mil. 3x pilot salary, lets be generous ~$400K. $220/hour operating cost includes insurance and amortized overhaul, flying 5 hours a day = ~1200 hours per year, 3x $250K. $2.7 million all in all. they make >$500mil a year, they can afford to try harder.

oconnor663 6y ago

> this area will likely never be safe without significant policy changes What policy changes would those be? I've never lived near there so I don't have a clue.

onetimeusename 6y ago

PG&E did request to be able to clear brush up to 15 feet away from the power lines which I believe Gov. Newsom granted a CEQA exemption to them to do[1]. Prior to that, they were only allowed to clear four feet.[2] That doesn't change the broken equipment but some of the blame can be placed on environmental regulations that cause this. What I am not sure of is whether environmental regulatory approval decreases funding and/or increases costs/time of repairing power lines. The power line upgrades do have to be reviewed and approved by environmental regulators. Here is an example[3]. [1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/california-tests-new-strategies-to-prevent-deadly-wildfires/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/california-tests-... [2]: https://www.sierraclub.org/california/cnrcc/pge-clearcuts-power-lines https://www.sierraclub.org/california/cnrcc/pge-clearcuts-po... [3]: https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/Environment/Info/mha/cabrillosantaynez/CabrilloSantaYnez.htm https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/Environment/Info/mha/cabrillosantayn...

ljm 6y ago

Take the fire out of the picture and PG&E have total responsibility for maintaining this infrastructure and keeping it safe. They can't blame it on the geography of the area. Put the fire back in and, yes, they still have significant responsibility. The same way that someone setting off a firework or lighting up a barbecue in the brush or holding a gender reveal party is held responsible. They don't get off easier because they're a big business and it's tough for them. Their CEO and shareholders can live with a smaller return to properly take care of their equipment. It has nothing to do with stopping all fires, or making them responsible for reducing them. It's holding them to account for causing one.

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago

I don't mean to come over as arrogant, snotty or something here, but speaking of proper engineering and maintenance in the context of high-voltage transmission lines in the USA instantly makes one burst out in laughter when comparing that to how they are built in Germany. While we had some fuck-ups too, we have way larger pyhsical safety margins, as in more space between the wires, more space between the wires and ground, more space between wires and vegetation (which is cut back when growing into that space), while usually we don't even have weather which makes it dry like tinder. Honestly, this all looks like toys to us. Inconceivable.

zelon88 6y ago

Honestly for what this cost in human loss of life and financial loss it would have made sense to clean the ground underneath the towers or perhaps install fire suppressor systems the entire length of the line. A few sprinklers at the bottom of each tower and a single water main to supply them can't possibly cost the same $16 billion that a wildfire costs. Even if you put a $100 Raspberry Pi with a temperature sensor, smoke sensor, and computer vision at the bottom of each tower to detect fires. 85 people would be alive right now. But no. They won't even replace a $12 hook.

kazinator 6y ago

> the forest is so dry and overgrown that pretty much ... ... it is impossible to maintain records of WTF they are doing.