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No the root of the problem is that there's too much forest that hasn't burned. Blaming PG&E is missing the actual problem. For instance the Beirut explosion wa

No the root of the problem is that there's too much forest that hasn't burned. Blaming PG&E is missing the actual problem. For instance the Beirut explosion was the fault from the welders causing the explosion. Yes, but the larger and more important issue is why are there so many explosives in the first place? California's mismanagement with it's forest is the same issue. These forests should be periodically burned the remove rather than letting them accumulate into such a large blazing fire.

Akronymus 6y ago
The policy of not clearing underbush at all just seems ripe for even more wildfires.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  A wildfire that regularly clears out only the underbush is what was the place historically (and the ecosystems have adapted to this), human prevention of these fires plus climate change has led to fires consuming way more material than they should.
awalton 6y ago
> Yes, but the larger and more important issue is why are there so many explosives in the first place? Ah, so the problem is negligence. And what negligence was there? PG&E not maintaining their towers as clearly documented (or rather, not documented as the thread shows), or even possibly the federal government not maintaining Bureau of Land Management and USDA Forest lands? No - it's California's fault, spoken as if even a healthy forest wouldn't burst into flames if someone threw molten hot aluminum on a kindling pile. But where could that idea possibly have come from? Perhaps the Federal govermnent, whose head has basically been parroting that exact line? What an astounding coincidence.
- resonantjacket5 6y ago
  The problem has been built up for decades through both democratic and republican administrations.
machello13 6y ago
It's possible for more than one cause to contribute to an event. California needs to manage its forests better, but PG&E is also clearly at fault.
- jagged-chisel 6y ago
  That dockside warehouse needs to handle its explosives better, but the welder is clearly at fault.
- biztos 6y ago
  Does California need to do this, or the Federal government? Where I'm from in NorCal it's all National Forest except for the parts that are private land. A quick search indicates that some 58% of California forest is managed by the Feds and about 3% by the state. So -- in addition to PG&E being at fault, shouldn't we be talking about Washington more than Sacramento here?
  - yostrovs 6y ago
    Which parts are burning? The federal or state?
    - biztos 6y ago
      AFAICT both, with more of it being federal. I also think it matters (in terms of response) where the fire starts.
  - bsagdiyev 6y ago
    California, federal had tried to do controlled burns and was rebuked at local air boards.
- Spivak 6y ago
  My take on this is that PG&E way/is behaving negligently and the investigation that resulted from the fire uncovered that. They are literally the cause of the fire in the sense that their actions are what produced the initial flame. However, I don't think the fault should lie with them because something was going to start a fire and they just happened to be the unlucky bunch stuck holding the match. There is no way you could say "if it wasn't for their negligence there wouldn't have been a fire."
biztos 6y ago
> California's mismanagement with its forest is the same issue. I agree that the forests should be managed differently, but if this being "California's mismanagement" is an actual thing as opposed to political disinformation, I'd love to see a couple links to back it up. Some quick googling suggests that it's mostly a Federal problem, which has very different implications especially right now. Am I wrong?
- bluGill 6y ago
  blame the feds, blame CA, blame the natural state of forests in CA... Any way too much blame is on PG&E.
  - SQueeeeeL 6y ago
    What an odd sentiment...
    - pixl97 6y ago
      Why? There is such a thing as a multi domain fault. He never said this wasn't PG&E's fault, just that out of 100% they don't bear all the fault. I mean, California is in the middle of burning down from a lighting complex at this moment. Suing mother nature isn't going to do much good if you want to put the blame on her for that fire. As long as people live in the Wildland Urban Interface, and we live in a climate that's getting hotter and drier year over year, and we don't have defense in depth around our homes, houses are going to continue to burn and people will die from it. At the end of the day we cannot stop the fires, they are a natural part of the landscape. The question is can we reduce the impact on humans? Some we cannot, the smoke will still affect us negatively. Some we can, a hard parameter around our house with no flammable bushes, and eves that protect against cinder build up that set houses on fire will help.
      - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
        The twitter thread makes this exact point. The camp fire would likely have happened with or without this maintenance error on PG&E's part. This is because a tree fell on a different power line and started the Camp B fire, and this was determined not to be the result of a preventable error. Just that fact alone suggests that the main component of the problem is not PG&E's neglect.
mdavidn 6y ago
No, the problem is that PG&E was relying on a century-old part of unknown metallurgy to suspend a 115 kV conductor.
- wrycoder 6y ago
  Worse. They ignored the easily inspectable fact that the part was worn halfway through. There must be many more like this. Have the been replaced?
jerska 6y ago
I don’t disagree with your point that there’s shared responsibility. But a big reason the welders aren’t the focus of the blame is that they were the first ones to die in the explosion. The consequences for PG&E were simply 4 millions here, which is a ridiculously small amount. Also, you don’t treat individuals and companies the same way.
briffle 6y ago
That is part of it, the other part is the homes of paradise did not take 'best practices' into account for their homes. (or town, that one narrow road out seems like a deadly bottleneck) There were many news articles at the time talking about how homeowners couldn't prune back the woods far enough from their house, couldn't use less flammable materials in their home construction, etc.
- mint2 6y ago
  The only way to get developers and builders to build more resiliently is more strong regulation. As it stands, developers have zero incentive to cut into their profit to build a fire resistant structure since they immediately sell it and it doesn’t matter what happens after that, at least to them. In fact, If they are a follower of the perverted philosophy of the past couple decades, if have shareholders it would be their duty to maximize profits by not spending extra.
g_sch 6y ago
I don't feel like your analogy makes sense here. The fact that there were explosives stored in the Beirut Port for years is exactly the same kind of institutional failure as PG&E failing to maintain their equipment for decades. It's true that there are natural factors at play here, but in the case of Beirut, that might be more akin to asking "why is there such a large market for ammonium nitrate?"
edge17 6y ago
Seeing as there is a lot or harangue and no data being presented, here is some data https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s42408-019-0041-0#Sec3 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s42408-019-0041-0#... In general, the study contends that the fires are fuel-dominated (too much forest) and not wind-dominated fires. It also contends that the California drought climate has contributed significantly to the problem. > On the timber-rich interior US Forest Service (USFS) forests of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range, anomalously large fuel loading due to a century of successful fire suppression and timber harvesting practices has been a dominant factor The problem is likely too much forest at these level of droughts, so forest management bears some responsibility. Economically speaking though if PG&E has been given such a lucrative business opportunity as a sanctioned monopoly, they ought to be held responsible as well. Also, the part that is not clear to me and I would appreciate if someone has an answer - speaking cynically, if PG&E as a private company causes damage and tax payers pay, and if PG&E as a state run company causes damage and tax payers pay, why do I care who runs it? Is it just that the prevailing politics in California is that corporate=bad and civic=good?
- yesdocs 6y ago
  Under this approach, we would have to burn all of our natural forests down to the ground because of climate change. It will soon be too dry for any forest to be in it’s natural state. Plus I don’t see how this is strictly a California problem, federal funds are required to manage federal lands. Especially since the current federal administration is fueling the onset of climate change like no other. I’ve witnessed the billions spent by PG&E in trimming trees away from these poles, but they should have spent a little more and gone the distance to just bury these lines underground. PG&E is a failed experiment. They have shown when confronted with the challenge of what’s best for the public and what’s best for the shareholders, they always choose the latter
  - edge17 6y ago
    That's not how natural dynamic systems work. There is a level of stability (some optimal level of forest) that the natural system wants to have, and it will naturally burn away excess if the people were not present. Much of the fires this year were caused by lightening (nature). > Plus I don’t see how this is strictly a California problem Indeed it is not just a California problem. Believe it or not, there are other places in the country that do more controlled burns and manage fires better. The US Southeast burns nearly 2x the acreage as California on an annual basis.
coryfklein 6y ago
If PG&E is maintaining power transmissions lines that are surrounded by a known gigantic reservior of combustible material then they are still responsible for when their equipment ignites that material. That doesn't remove the onus on land management to engage in best forestry practices, but PG&E still has a significant burden of responsibility.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> California's mismanagement with it's forest is the same issue. The majority (57%) of forest land in California is managed by the federal government even before considering the part managed by tribal governments, which are also out of state control though subject to federal oversight. Only 3% is directly under state control. 47.7% of the total land in California is federally owned (not uncommon in the West, where most federal land is; outside of 12 Western states, the Federal government owns only 4% of the land in the rest of the country.) Western land management problems are, generally, problems of federal administration, not state government. EDIT: But, it's important to note I am not saying the fires involving PG&E equipment are a federal problem rather than a PG&E problem. While the current federal administration and their cheerleaders likes to blame forest management and seems blind to the fact that, if true, that would be a federal issue, PG&E’s deliberate, knowing cutting of maintenance corners, curtailing inspections and cutting inspector training, knowingly leaving specific faulty equipment in place years after it was identified as faulty and dangerous, and covering up that it did all those things, are well documented. While they accepted a plea bargain to 84 counts of manslaughter, the facts documented in the investigation would seem to more than support conviction of 2nd degree murder (of the “abandoned and malignant heart” type), based on other cases where that has been applied in CA based on willful disregard of safety factors.
- cogman10 6y ago
  Yeah, lots of issues came together for the perfect storm. Personally, I do think that PG&E should have seen a harsher punishment. If some pyro had went in and started the same fire, they'd have been in jail for life. PG&E does this shit and they got a slap on the wrist. But, your point is very valid. This place was a tinderbox. They were one lightning strike, on cigarette butt, one illegal bonfire away from going up in flames spectacularly. The federal government has blame for not maintaining land. Beyond that, they have blame for not aggressively addressing climate change (which has contributed to the level of dryness). All of this points to a common societal issue. Rather than spend money to fix things, we wait until everything blows up before asking questions. This shit scares me. How much more of our world is teetering on the edge of catastrophe?
  - 6y ago
EricE 6y ago
> Blaming PG&E is missing the actual problem. No, two things can be true at the same time. 1) CA sucks at forest management. 2) PG&G was grossly negligent in maintaining their power lines. That both happened to be true at the same time just happened to be exponentially bad for all the people affected :(

Akronymus 6y ago

The policy of not clearing underbush at all just seems ripe for even more wildfires.

mschuster91 6y ago
A wildfire that regularly clears out only the underbush is what was the place historically (and the ecosystems have adapted to this), human prevention of these fires plus climate change has led to fires consuming way more material than they should.

awalton 6y ago

> Yes, but the larger and more important issue is why are there so many explosives in the first place? Ah, so the problem is negligence. And what negligence was there? PG&E not maintaining their towers as clearly documented (or rather, not documented as the thread shows), or even possibly the federal government not maintaining Bureau of Land Management and USDA Forest lands? No - it's California's fault, spoken as if even a healthy forest wouldn't burst into flames if someone threw molten hot aluminum on a kindling pile. But where could that idea possibly have come from? Perhaps the Federal govermnent, whose head has basically been parroting that exact line? What an astounding coincidence.

resonantjacket5 6y ago
The problem has been built up for decades through both democratic and republican administrations.

machello13 6y ago

It's possible for more than one cause to contribute to an event. California needs to manage its forests better, but PG&E is also clearly at fault.

jagged-chisel 6y ago
That dockside warehouse needs to handle its explosives better, but the welder is clearly at fault.
biztos 6y ago
Does California need to do this, or the Federal government? Where I'm from in NorCal it's all National Forest except for the parts that are private land. A quick search indicates that some 58% of California forest is managed by the Feds and about 3% by the state. So -- in addition to PG&E being at fault, shouldn't we be talking about Washington more than Sacramento here?
- yostrovs 6y ago
  Which parts are burning? The federal or state?
  - biztos 6y ago
    AFAICT both, with more of it being federal. I also think it matters (in terms of response) where the fire starts.
- bsagdiyev 6y ago
  California, federal had tried to do controlled burns and was rebuked at local air boards.
Spivak 6y ago
My take on this is that PG&E way/is behaving negligently and the investigation that resulted from the fire uncovered that. They are literally the cause of the fire in the sense that their actions are what produced the initial flame. However, I don't think the fault should lie with them because something was going to start a fire and they just happened to be the unlucky bunch stuck holding the match. There is no way you could say "if it wasn't for their negligence there wouldn't have been a fire."

biztos 6y ago

> California's mismanagement with its forest is the same issue. I agree that the forests should be managed differently, but if this being "California's mismanagement" is an actual thing as opposed to political disinformation, I'd love to see a couple links to back it up. Some quick googling suggests that it's mostly a Federal problem, which has very different implications especially right now. Am I wrong?

bluGill 6y ago
blame the feds, blame CA, blame the natural state of forests in CA... Any way too much blame is on PG&E.
- SQueeeeeL 6y ago
  What an odd sentiment...
  - pixl97 6y ago
    Why? There is such a thing as a multi domain fault. He never said this wasn't PG&E's fault, just that out of 100% they don't bear all the fault. I mean, California is in the middle of burning down from a lighting complex at this moment. Suing mother nature isn't going to do much good if you want to put the blame on her for that fire. As long as people live in the Wildland Urban Interface, and we live in a climate that's getting hotter and drier year over year, and we don't have defense in depth around our homes, houses are going to continue to burn and people will die from it. At the end of the day we cannot stop the fires, they are a natural part of the landscape. The question is can we reduce the impact on humans? Some we cannot, the smoke will still affect us negatively. Some we can, a hard parameter around our house with no flammable bushes, and eves that protect against cinder build up that set houses on fire will help.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
      The twitter thread makes this exact point. The camp fire would likely have happened with or without this maintenance error on PG&E's part. This is because a tree fell on a different power line and started the Camp B fire, and this was determined not to be the result of a preventable error. Just that fact alone suggests that the main component of the problem is not PG&E's neglect.

mdavidn 6y ago

No, the problem is that PG&E was relying on a century-old part of unknown metallurgy to suspend a 115 kV conductor.

wrycoder 6y ago
Worse. They ignored the easily inspectable fact that the part was worn halfway through. There must be many more like this. Have the been replaced?

jerska 6y ago

I don’t disagree with your point that there’s shared responsibility. But a big reason the welders aren’t the focus of the blame is that they were the first ones to die in the explosion. The consequences for PG&E were simply 4 millions here, which is a ridiculously small amount. Also, you don’t treat individuals and companies the same way.

briffle 6y ago

That is part of it, the other part is the homes of paradise did not take 'best practices' into account for their homes. (or town, that one narrow road out seems like a deadly bottleneck) There were many news articles at the time talking about how homeowners couldn't prune back the woods far enough from their house, couldn't use less flammable materials in their home construction, etc.

mint2 6y ago
The only way to get developers and builders to build more resiliently is more strong regulation. As it stands, developers have zero incentive to cut into their profit to build a fire resistant structure since they immediately sell it and it doesn’t matter what happens after that, at least to them. In fact, If they are a follower of the perverted philosophy of the past couple decades, if have shareholders it would be their duty to maximize profits by not spending extra.

g_sch 6y ago

I don't feel like your analogy makes sense here. The fact that there were explosives stored in the Beirut Port for years is exactly the same kind of institutional failure as PG&E failing to maintain their equipment for decades. It's true that there are natural factors at play here, but in the case of Beirut, that might be more akin to asking "why is there such a large market for ammonium nitrate?"

edge17 6y ago

Seeing as there is a lot or harangue and no data being presented, here is some data https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s42408-019-0041-0#Sec3 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s42408-019-0041-0#... In general, the study contends that the fires are fuel-dominated (too much forest) and not wind-dominated fires. It also contends that the California drought climate has contributed significantly to the problem. > On the timber-rich interior US Forest Service (USFS) forests of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range, anomalously large fuel loading due to a century of successful fire suppression and timber harvesting practices has been a dominant factor The problem is likely too much forest at these level of droughts, so forest management bears some responsibility. Economically speaking though if PG&E has been given such a lucrative business opportunity as a sanctioned monopoly, they ought to be held responsible as well. Also, the part that is not clear to me and I would appreciate if someone has an answer - speaking cynically, if PG&E as a private company causes damage and tax payers pay, and if PG&E as a state run company causes damage and tax payers pay, why do I care who runs it? Is it just that the prevailing politics in California is that corporate=bad and civic=good?

yesdocs 6y ago
Under this approach, we would have to burn all of our natural forests down to the ground because of climate change. It will soon be too dry for any forest to be in it’s natural state. Plus I don’t see how this is strictly a California problem, federal funds are required to manage federal lands. Especially since the current federal administration is fueling the onset of climate change like no other. I’ve witnessed the billions spent by PG&E in trimming trees away from these poles, but they should have spent a little more and gone the distance to just bury these lines underground. PG&E is a failed experiment. They have shown when confronted with the challenge of what’s best for the public and what’s best for the shareholders, they always choose the latter
- edge17 6y ago
  That's not how natural dynamic systems work. There is a level of stability (some optimal level of forest) that the natural system wants to have, and it will naturally burn away excess if the people were not present. Much of the fires this year were caused by lightening (nature). > Plus I don’t see how this is strictly a California problem Indeed it is not just a California problem. Believe it or not, there are other places in the country that do more controlled burns and manage fires better. The US Southeast burns nearly 2x the acreage as California on an annual basis.

coryfklein 6y ago

If PG&E is maintaining power transmissions lines that are surrounded by a known gigantic reservior of combustible material then they are still responsible for when their equipment ignites that material. That doesn't remove the onus on land management to engage in best forestry practices, but PG&E still has a significant burden of responsibility.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> California's mismanagement with it's forest is the same issue. The majority (57%) of forest land in California is managed by the federal government even before considering the part managed by tribal governments, which are also out of state control though subject to federal oversight. Only 3% is directly under state control. 47.7% of the total land in California is federally owned (not uncommon in the West, where most federal land is; outside of 12 Western states, the Federal government owns only 4% of the land in the rest of the country.) Western land management problems are, generally, problems of federal administration, not state government. EDIT: But, it's important to note I am not saying the fires involving PG&E equipment are a federal problem rather than a PG&E problem. While the current federal administration and their cheerleaders likes to blame forest management and seems blind to the fact that, if true, that would be a federal issue, PG&E’s deliberate, knowing cutting of maintenance corners, curtailing inspections and cutting inspector training, knowingly leaving specific faulty equipment in place years after it was identified as faulty and dangerous, and covering up that it did all those things, are well documented. While they accepted a plea bargain to 84 counts of manslaughter, the facts documented in the investigation would seem to more than support conviction of 2nd degree murder (of the “abandoned and malignant heart” type), based on other cases where that has been applied in CA based on willful disregard of safety factors.

cogman10 6y ago
Yeah, lots of issues came together for the perfect storm. Personally, I do think that PG&E should have seen a harsher punishment. If some pyro had went in and started the same fire, they'd have been in jail for life. PG&E does this shit and they got a slap on the wrist. But, your point is very valid. This place was a tinderbox. They were one lightning strike, on cigarette butt, one illegal bonfire away from going up in flames spectacularly. The federal government has blame for not maintaining land. Beyond that, they have blame for not aggressively addressing climate change (which has contributed to the level of dryness). All of this points to a common societal issue. Rather than spend money to fix things, we wait until everything blows up before asking questions. This shit scares me. How much more of our world is teetering on the edge of catastrophe?
- 6y ago

EricE 6y ago

> Blaming PG&E is missing the actual problem. No, two things can be true at the same time. 1) CA sucks at forest management. 2) PG&G was grossly negligent in maintaining their power lines. That both happened to be true at the same time just happened to be exponentially bad for all the people affected :(