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once again, completely backwards understanding.. PG&E has been avoiding many upgrades to their millions of miles in cables, for decades, and has repeatedly outs
by mistrial9 2y ago
once again, completely backwards understanding.. PG&E has been avoiding many upgrades to their millions of miles in cables, for decades, and has repeatedly outsourced the maintenance that they were required to do.. they falsified records to avoid doing maintenance, the pipes blew up, and PG&E became the first public utility to be convicted of murder AFAIK
The utility repeatedly plants stories about how much they are doing, and how expensive upgrades are, in the public media as a reflexive PR device and that is what is being repeated, apparently
- whimsicalism 2y agoi'm not sure why you're mixing and matching stuff about electrical cables causing fires and the San Bruno explosion. upgrades are expensive, PG&E is barely profitable, and it operates in a very challenging regulatory environment. California liability law + juries impose extremely outsized liability judgements compared to the rest of the country... other utilities have caused actions that lead to death but it generally does not mean billions of dollars in liability judgement. Compare the West fertilizer explosion in Texas, the liability it generated, with PG&E liability judgements. I understand that it is always attractive to have a simple explanatory story with a clear villain. I encourage you to resist that appeal.