If you build something to last 100 years, you leave little incentives for maintenance and all but guarantee a catastrophic failure a century from now. -- My co

If you build something to last 100 years, you leave little incentives for maintenance and all but guarantee a catastrophic failure a century from now. -- My comment about a family above was sarcasm, not a picture of reality. A large organization is quite capable of determining what maintenance is needed for its infrastructure and doing that maintenance. PG&E knew quite a while back that they were in trouble here. It wasn't the long time frame but profit and regulatory incentive structure that drove their decisions. They'd have done the same for short-lived infrastructure. They've done the same thing in the case of tree-trimming; something they should be doing constantly and haven't (note, living in Portland, or, the local utility, Portland General Electric (called PGE for kicks), trimmed trees with abandon, which is better than the alternative). Sure, designing for maintainability is a nice strategy but fixed lifetime + replace is an effective strategy too. Basically, the whole line of reasoning about short versus long lifetimes is a complete red herring and the neglect and decay of PG&E's infrastructure was an explicit on the company's part and documented as such and has nothing to do with how infrastructure was designed.