4 ms·

I have what I think is a legitimate question. Wouldn't it be an order of magnitude cheaper just to clear all the trees 120 feet either side of the power line?

• dfsegoat 5y ago
  What you describe is essentially the program they had in place already. Maybe not 120 feet, but certainly some distance. They hire contract helicopters year round to survey lines, and task crews to clear brush. I live in Sonoma County, CA [1,2,3] - so we see the effort. I think you might also be underestimating the scale of the power infrastructure in CA. The hydro etc. power generators in the north of the state are located in extremely remote areas. My brother was a consulting engineer for PG&E in Northern CA, on a lot of their Hydropower infrastructure - most of the generation sites were only accessible by humans with helicopter flights, or 2-3 hr drives on poorly maintained roads. The transmission lines are not really accessible except by helicopter survey. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LNU_Lightning_Complex_fires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LNU_Lightning_Complex_fires 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_Fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_Fire 3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tubbs_Fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tubbs_Fire
  • SOMA_BOFH 5y ago
    it may be hard work but it's necessary.
• smt88 5y ago
  That would destroy thousands of miles of wildlife habitat, and it would certainly cover some private property too. Plus you'd have to do it regularly, not once.
• carpdiem 5y ago
  Not really. Trees are actually somewhat hard to burn, so most wildfires start by catching dry underbrush on fire instead. So in this case, that would just be the alfalfa. Key to remember is that power lines can spark when they're damaged by winds (which can lead to the lines themselves being close enough to the ground for the spark to traverse to the underbrush).
• lazide 5y ago
  Probably not. A lot of this land is in remote areas with no irrigation, steep, rocky, or otherwise difficult to manage. No one is interested in farming alfalfa on 25% slopes with rocks 6” under any topsoil and massive trees to clear before it would even be usable.
• zombie357 5y ago
  As someone who can see the Dixie fire column daily, had family evac’d by the Bear fire last year (basically burned 100K+ acre area just SW of the Dixie), and lives 10 minutes from Paradise (the town mentioned in the article), most of the PGE right-of-ways do look like freeways now through the forest, little to no under story growth. I believe they’re limited to how far out they can go due to easements. To add, basically the last 4 years has been the burnout of a huge swath of forest in this area between the Camp fire, Bear fire, and now the Dixie fire, not to mention the many “small” fires that were caught/didn’t get established. The majority of land between highway 32 to the La Porte/Quincy highway has burned. Don’t have a good estimate since I’m on my phone, but 100s of square miles of mostly back country forest. Both the Camp and Bear fires made 10-15 mile runs in one day, and Dixie’s put up massive pyrocumulonimbus pretty much every day this week. Edit to add: it’s also been incredibly dry, most of June-July has been upper 90s-low 100s, with a few 110+ periods. Humidity has also been extremely low, in the afternoons 8-12%. Even overnight it only recovers up to 40-45%. Higher elevations are cooler, but not so much that it mitigates, so the forest is pretty tinderbox right now. Once it’s lit it’s hard to put out.
  • tjr225 5y ago
    …and? Why did you create an account 27 minutes ago to post this? Sincerely curious.
    • nostrademons 5y ago
      S/he has useful and relevant information to add to the discussion. Why not?
      • shmageggy 5y ago
        The only relevant part out of the whole multi paragraph thing was this one sentence > most of the PGE right-of-ways do look like freeways now through the forest, little to no under story growth. I read the whole thing waiting for a point but there wasn't one. Just a waste of time. We already know the fires are bad, and that isn't relevant to the thread anyways.
• Animats 5y ago
  This is for what utilities call "medium voltage" distribution (1KV to 35KV), not high tension towers. These are the cables you see around your neighborhood, upstream of the pole transformer. They're usually not insulated other than by airspace. Clearcutting around those would wipe out the trees in most residential areas. The big high tension towers go through clear-cut rights of way. The big headache is not burying cable. If there's nothing else in the ground, that's not too hard. It's working around water lines, sewer lines, gas lines, driveways, phone, data, cable TV...