PG&E stock plunged 32% after it disclosed a possible link to California’s fire
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-to-burn/
1. Our entire approach to fighting forest fires may just be making them worse.
2. Smart and simple design decisions can save houses.
A house can be thirty feet from an entire forest on fire and never burn down.
We learned this through hardcore experiments in Canada where they built homes to test and lit forests on fire nearby.
One of the immediate takeaways was to change roofing materials to resist embers, but there are other options for materials and landscaping that could make homes basically impervious.
The problem is probabilities. Fires are common, constant. They are exceedingly rare in any one location though. So fire resistant design is no one's urgent problem, fires are always something that seems like it will happen to somebody else.
Though we are talking many, many orders of magnitude less damage from tornadoes in the Southeast when compared with California forrest fires. My state gets an average of 20 per year, and almost all of these hit uninhabited areas. If a tornado destroys four houses, it makes state news.
It’s possible to build a home on the beach to even withstand a catastrophic hurricane, but at possibly double the construction cost.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/14/us/hurricane-michael-flor...
I recall after there were bad fires in the Everglades many years ago there had been some work to build a foam that could be sprayed on a home to protect it in advance of an approaching fire. I think the person who came up with the idea was inspired by the amount of liquid diapers can hold. I wonder what came of that.
Edit: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2006/jul/19/gel-inspired-by...
It's absolutely possible to build solid safe housing from most natural disasters, but it costs money, and often a lot of it.
https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...
I’m reading antifragile right now and he’s talking about systems which improve with a certain amount of volatility and stress. It seems forests are “antifragile” on their own, and our efforts may in fact introduce fragility.
I commend you for that, I just find his writing style to be so annoying that I can't even finish reading a simple article of his.
> Given the fixed price at which buyers will buy, sellers will sell only when they hold "lemons" (since plemon < pavg) and they will leave the market when they hold "peaches" (since ppeach > pavg).
My point is that this is a highly idealized and theoretical model. Life doesn't work this way.
> My point is that this is a highly idealized and theoretical model. Life doesn't work this way.
Such is every nonbehavioral economics paper ever written.
After spending millions on nets and ditches, they've lodged a plan to replant trees above the road...
And the australian BAL standard for bushfire rating houses
The crux of the issue is though (from a policy perspective) that defending against low recurrance interval events is most cost effectively done by restrictive zoning, which is (politically) a very hard sell. Observed preference is that people actually prefer band aids over real solutions. It's a hard problem.
Fires are necessary for ecological reasons. You can either start them on purpose and control them, or you can wait until they happen anyway and watch them get totally out of control.
Exacerbating the situation, I heard on NPR this morning that some POAs in California forbid cutting down trees on your property. Something has to change. Even if you put a complete stop to human-caused fires somehow (not possible) and stop climate change tomorrow, you will still have fires from lightning strikes, etc. You can either thin forests and underbrush (incredibly labor intensive) or you can have controlled burns.
...Because of the lack of controlled burns combined with weather conditions.
California is not larger than the eastern US. We do very large controlled burns here in rugged terrain. As far as I can see, it's a lack of political will and funding, combined with the reality that it's gone so long that its much more difficult than it should be. There are a few prescribed burns done in California, they're just not anywhere near the necessary scale.
California can either bite the bullet now and dramatically increase the number and area of controlled burns, or watch as things get worse and worse. There is no alternative. I'll repeat again: fires are a natural part of the ecology, with or without human intervention. You can either do it yourself and lessen the impact, or wait for nature to do it and have regular disasters.
EDIT: Just to get a sense of scale, the southeast burns eight million acres in prescribed burns annually. The west burns about three million. California looks to be only in the tens of thousands. The Camp fire has burned approximately 138,000 acres at the last report I can find.
http://www.stateforesters.org/sites/default/files/publicatio...
You discuss this issue as if there is some steady-state solution that can be applied. This is not the case. The climate is in now in transition from one state to another, much warmer and drier state. Controlled burns are difficult or impossible to apply under such a transition, with the number of dead standing trees (hundreds of millions in California) and the unprecedented soil moisture levels and evaporative load.
https://www.arb.ca.gov/smp/progdev/pubeduc/pbfs.pdf
Secondly, if that is what you believe, then the solution is to burn now, not later. You cannot save forests already damned by climate change, and the longer you wait, the worse it will be.
> Vast majority of California’s forests are fossils. If you burn them they don’t grow back, you get something else.
Then how did they get there in the first place? Human-started fires have been a normal and natural part of California's ecology for thousands of years. Waiting for the weather to get even warmer and drier will just result in more forest being destroyed, more homes being burned, more people dying, because there will be fires, no matter what you do. You can choose to limit their fuel now and save some forest, or you let natural fires have more fuel and burn even hotter and wider and lose all your forest.
Presumably they established themselves when climate conditions were different than today.
> Stine, who has spent decades studying tree stumps in Mono Lake, Tenaya Lake, the Walker River and other parts of the Sierra Nevada, said that the past century has been among the wettest of the last 7,000 years.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/01/25/california-drought-pa...
Fires have similarly been a natural part of the ecology for thousands of years.
What's new is not very dry conditions or fires. What's new is the California fire management over the past century or so. The biggest different climate condition isn't the weather, it's the lack of regular fires burning up fuel. Now, tons of fire-fuel has accumulated and fires burn hotter than normal. But there is no way to solve this other than by ripping off the band-aid now. If you don't, things get worse.
Paradise is a wet place that gets quite a bit of rain - what matters is that it is coming too late.
For this reason, I don't think it is very relevant that the last century has been the wettest in awhile.
That said, there are likely many factors involved, and it is probably not super useful to point at one thing and ignore all the rest.
Sounds like you don't accept that climate change is exacerbating these fires. As others have noted, average and historical rainfall isn't a direct indication of fire risk.
London [1] has the same annual rainfall (23") as San Francisco, but they have very different fire risks.
Timing of the rainfall and other weather events matters a lot more when it comes to particular events - and the ever later onset of rains in CA is a big factor.
Even then, the fire management practices you point out are in part a response to increasing populations near fire-prone areas. People expect fires near their homes to be suppressed. Unless we stop building homes in such areas, or build fireproof homes, that demand isn't going to go away.
These dry conditions are not abnormal when looking at any longer timeframes. The severity of the fires is abnormal, but only because both humans and nature were regularly setting fires and letting them burn until they burnt out for many, many thousands of years. Only recently did mankind intervene in the natural ecology by stopping fires.
> People expect fires near their homes to be suppressed.
Then they will have to readjust their expectations. I would also say they should pay attention to the Cal Fire messaging about the necessity of fires. ( http://www.calfire.ca.gov/communications/downloads/live_w_fi... )In the rest of the country, we have prescribed fires even in and near residential areas. Clearly they must be managed more carefully now that Californians have allowed the situation to get so bad (e.g., fires started in wetter conditions which won't burn enough, followed by a second fire in drier conditions), but they are the only thing short of everyone leaving that can resolve the situation.
I'm not sure why Californians believe they are special and different. People in this thread keep citing terrain (mountainous areas are burned in the rest of the country), wind (the highest-wind states are actually those with the most controlled burns according to the wind map posted and the forestry website I linked), dryness (not out of historical norms, just recent history.)
Human-driven climate change is a factor, but what we're seeing is Californian climate returning to recent (in a relative sense) historical norms, not some kind of incipient Armageddon. We're not seeing something that's never been seen before. Again, the entirely dominant factor is the insufficient amount of prescribed burns.
Regardless of the cause, the only long-term solution is more controlled burns. The climate is going to get drier and hotter. Fires will happen. There is absolutely nothing you can do to prevent this. Even if you waved a magic wand and took fire away from mankind, fires still occur naturally. The longer you wait, the more dry fuel you accumulate and the worse the fires will be. It might hurt in the short term, some houses may indeed be destroyed in controlled burns (it happens elsewhere, too), but the alternative is more houses burned and more ecological destruction and more people dead. You cannot get around this.
There is a significant risk in building in these areas, exacerbated by all the aforementioned factors. This will probably be accounted for in insurance rates going forward, which will hopeful deter people from building flammable houses in wildfire zones.
edit: We also had a Firewise grant over the last few years to provide free thinning on private property.
Wait what? California doesn't do controlled burns?
Mother of God: https://www.quora.com/Why-does-California-not-institute-a-co...
I find this _unfathomable_. I'm from a desert state where during dry times it was illegal to light fires and we absolutely did controlled burns.
California's plan is to let everything burn down and then blame a utility (true or not is irrelevant) and try to collect $20B they definitely don't have? This is unbelievable.
Many of the answers on that quora link seem to indicate that ca does in fact do controlled burns?
This is a serious public safety issue which if left alone is guaranteed to end in widespread death and destruction.
California shouldn't be expected to maintain forests on someone else's property.
And like I keep saying: these fires are not burning in forests. They are burning in suburbs, exurbs, and dense residential areas. In towns. Up steep canyons that are treacherous to hike up, let alone tote a pulaski and mattock. In many of the pictures, it's obvious that trees are damaged but survive. It's shrubs, grasses, brush, and chaparral that's burning.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/what-is-going-on-wit...
I mean, yeah, we can intensively thin and manage forests to protect high-value, critical areas. We can encourage landowners to pursue defensible space treatments, and maybe save their home, if not their neighbors'. But honestly, I don't see any practicable way to prevent fires like the Camp Fire. Or the Thomas. Or Carr and Mendocino and Ferguson and County and Delta and Hirz and the other 7,579 fires that have burned in California this season. I wish I could claim otherwise.
In California, everything is dry enough that even a tiny ember escaping the burn area can turn a controlled burn into a massive fire. In fact, excluding the massive fires of the past 3 years, some of California's biggest blazes were controlled burns that got out of control.
Do you know what sort of embers these sorts of fires generate? The kind that fly hundreds of feet, retaining enough heat to light structures on fire when they land. Take a look at the shots of the Malibu portion of the Hill/Woolsey fire: there are structures that burned almost a quarter of a mile away from the closest flora.
So the reason that California cut back on controlled burns? Because due to the factors described above, controlled burns very quickly become massive, uncontrolled conflagrations. Controlled burns are something you can do when the trees and climate is relatively wet, since only the stuff you set on fire burns, or where flora is far enough apart and weather patterns mild enough that the fire can't spread on its own.
But you know what's really unbelievable? Someone who doesn't know diddly squat about what they're talking about who thinks they know better than the people who actually have to deal with this on a regular basis.
Meanwhile, California apparently agrees with hs, because they plan on increasing the number of prescribed burns.
Yeah what a disaster a massive, uncontrolled burn would be.
> But you know what's really unbelievable? Someone who doesn't know diddly squat about what they're talking about who thinks they know better than the people who actually have to deal with this on a regular basis.
Your righteous indignation falls pretty flat when there is plain evidence that they are doing a bad job. Here is a list of the 20 largest CA fires https://www.fire.ca.gov/communications/downloads/fact_sheets... 19 are from the last 50 years, 16 in the last 20. How many more hundreds of thousands of acres have to burn before the approach is changed?
Controlled burns are probably done best during a short 1-2 month window when ground cover is dry enough, but those are also typically high wind months. To have any control of a burn here you need to be lucky (low winds for a few days), it needs to be a very small prescribed area, and probably needs to be at less than peak fuel.
This all amounts to a very small window for doing a prescribed burn. Given how big many of the forests are, and how much of the state is covered with them, I don’t see how you can have much of any control over a prescribed fire started there.
Certainly not without the heroic effort it takes to put out wildfires. I don’t know how we can ask firefighters to risk their life for a prescribed burn.
https://www.sonomacountygazette.com/cms/pages/sonoma-county-...
This article gives a sense of the actual nonsense a homeowner must endure to cut down a tree. It might sound good to some people on paper, but I can feel the frustration of following such an expensive, bureaucratic process just to cut a tree in your own land. That entire process sounds ridiculous when looking at the aftermath of one of these fires such as the Camp or Malibu fires. The environmentalists responsible for such tripe should be made to work with a fire crew for a single hour to see the consequences of their horrid, naïve and completely ignorant policies.
Here is the money paragraph:
“What does Cal-Fire consider to approve a plan?
Basically, they want to make sure that trees are removed in a way that does the least amount of harm to wildlife habitat, that diversity of plant life is maintained, shade and sun balanced for a particular environment, and watersheds and watercourses are disturbed the least amount possible.
For instance, if protected species are in the area, then either the work is not done, or it is postponed during mating and rearing stages. If trees are removed on a hillside, then potential erosion is part of what is considered, monitored and controlled. There are many factors, and they all need to be taken into consideration.”
Sorry, but Cal-Fire should be concerned about preventing fires first. There are protected species everywhere; so delaying fire prevention forestry so some salamander can do whatever it is salamanders do; that’s just ridiculous. Over 17,000 acres of “protected” stuff just burned up in Paradise, California, so perhaps tripping over a dollar to pick up a nickel doesn’t make the best sense for either the environment or people.
> Sorry, but Cal-Fire should be concerned about preventing fires first.
I'm sorry, but soil erosion is not some boogieman invented by pot-smoking hippies who live in a commune. It's a real and serious problem, and leads to landslides, wash-outs, loss of topsoil, loss of other trees (Which often act as windbreaks).
Also, the recent drought is really exacerbating things. A lot of the trees in the forests are dead now and are just waiting to burn. Yes, we should remove some of this dead wood and thin the forests, but this will be a huge task given the large amount of forest.
As far as POAs and local laws... I am sure some of then are overreaching on things. But, some of them also protect areas from legitimate threats. Many people would gladly cut down all the trees on their property around Lake Tahoe so they can have an unobstructed view. Pretty soon we would have no trees around the lake and the landscape would be drastically changed. Some degree of protection is warranted in places.
That test in Canada seems to have been done under pretty much zero wind conditions though; the California ones (as also mentioned in the article) deal with high winds as well.
100 feet of urban California real estate costs substantially more than the house - houses are often built right up to the property line, and lots are measured in sqft, not acres.
Dense urban areas have a compensating advantage, though: it's much more economically efficient to set up a firebreak and prevent the fire from reaching 100,000 residents in a densely-packed neighborhood, than it is to set up a perimeter around the one wealthy person's home built in the middle of the forest.
The article seems to be suggest (but doesn't explicitly state) a policy like this: "Use public resources to provide a fire protection around the urban growth boundary of major cities, but if you're a homeowner outside that boundary, you're on your own. Design your structure to survive a fire in the surrounding wilderness. We won't suppress fires within the wilderness anymore." In other words, instead of shooting for containment, where the firefighters attempt to control the size of the fire and eventually put it out, they just let the wilderness burn periodically and protect habitation. The added benefit of this is that once the brush is cleared out, future wildfires will be less strong, since there's less fuel.
Also makes sense in economic free-market terms, where public resources are used only when they can defend many properties at much lower cost than the property owners defending them themselves, and property owners who are not situated to benefit from these efficiencies of scale are responsible for defending their own property.
My home was built in a new division 2014, and it requires low maintenance front yards (all wood chips and plants/shrubs), and came with a young tree in the front yard and young trees planted on the other side of the sidewalk easement, so eventually it will be very easy for a fire to spread. I live in Santa Rosa.
The only way to do this, of course is not to live on the urban-wildland interface, but to live behind agricultural fields. Or do like Pepperdine in Malibu and water the world's largest lawn.
If you read the article, the issue was embers floating the air and gathering on roofs and parts of the house that are not resistant to flames. So that's why the material has to be changed too, it's not about distance.
Another relevant podcast episode is this one from planet money:
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/02/16/586600540/epis...
They explore wildfire investigations and the legal fallout. It is a great explanation of why PG&E's stock lost 1/3 of its value.
Fires in CA apparently went as high as 300 feet (~100m) so no, that would not have helped. Heat alone, with zero wind would probably melt everything with xx meters. If they want to build, don't build in forests or clean out a zone and build a 50-100m buffer. If it was not burned today, it will be burned tomorrow.
Now imagine real forests with underbrush and 150 feet tall trees.
As the article states, though, it really is all about the embers. If you keep burning material from landing on other combustible material, fire is not going to start. That's why it suggests using non-combustible materials for roofing, avoiding areas where embers can catch, and keeping treetops away from structures.
I haven't read whole article yet, but here's an abstract:
Residential losses associated with wildland fires have become a serious international fire protection problem. The radiant heat flux from burning vegetation adjacent to a structure is a principal ignition factor. A thermal radiation and ignition model estimated structure ignition potential using designated flame characteristics (inferred from various types and densities of vegetation) and flame- to-structure distances. Model results indicate that ignitions from flame radiation are unlikely to occur from burning vegetation beyond 40 meters of a structure. Thinning vegetation within 40 meters has a significant ignition mitigation effect.
https://www.fs.fed.us/rm/pubs_other/rmrs_1998_cohen_j001.pdf
High risk fire areas should be made lower risk by proper forest management — forest management that has been ridiculously incompetent in California for a long time.
Lots of open space that builds up vegetation and then dries out, turning into perfect fuel for a fire. Cutting these shrubs, creating firebreaks, and doing controlled burns would at least create much more manageable zones if a wildfire does start.
Taxpayers are already paying for it, and the state has plenty of labor. The prison system alone runs many firecrews that can engage in this work. Compared to fighting fires and rebuilding damage, the maintenance cost is trivial.
You could even imagine a closed-system that collects rain/sprinkler water from the roof guttering and drains around the property and channelling them into the pool/sump. You'd lose a lot of water to evaporation/steam in a fire I guess, but it could buy you some time.
The other alternative I guess is just dont build your house out of combustible materials. I guess some stuff might just melt in hot-enough conditions, but by that stage where ceramics and metals are just melting in ambient temperatures I think its pretty much a game-over situation regardless... but before that extreme you can probably get a lot of mileabe by building your houses out of brick (there seems to be a lot of brick foundations left in the footage I am seeing on TV)
PDF warning: http://www.apsp.org/Portals/0/2016%20Website%20Changes/2015%...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories...
Might be more fruitful to look at a per-capita metric?
As in, it's not uncommon to live here and not know anyone with a pool.
Brick construction itself is seismically unsound, which makes it a bad choice for California. You can use brick cladding to make a building more fire resistant, though, but this isn't a panacea.
Granted, they're not very pretty 'by default' (although they can be made so and still remain flame-proof) but as far as practicality/value/safety goes, that is what I would do if I was buying/building a home in a place like CA.
“We know from the experience of the 2009 Victorian bushfires that some people did perish in what they thought were bushfire shelters that they’d built themselves. Whether it was secondary to a wine cellar or it was some sort of building container, shipping container, they died. And it wasn’t necessarily they died because of fire; they suffocated. The oxygen was extracted out of the bunker because it wasn’t air-tight or the heat essentially killed them.”
https://www.gatewaycontainersales.com.au/shipping-containers...
What I meant is that the interior of the house would have been protected from burning up, so any inanimate things inside would have been safe.
In zero wind. The fires in Santa Rosa were driven by 60 mph (100 kph) winds. Even 30 mph winds will pick up the top 15 meters of a burning Ponderosa Pine and carry it 400 meters away and start a new fire.
After the Santa Rosa fires I saw newspaper photos of melted barbeque grills. A fire hot enough to melt cast iron is going to light or melt any roofing material I can think of.
With some simple actions you can change the odds of 100% of homes burning down to 10-50%. This isn’t made up, these are facts proven by evidence and experiment.
Your comment is like saying no one should bother building basements in tornado country because a strong F5 will kill you anyway. The vast majority of tornadoes aren’t strong F5s so taking some precautions absolutely will save lives and property.
The biggest ones are:
- fire-resistant roofing; the vast majority of homes that burn in these evens are set on fire by embers long before the fire line even gets close, which makes firefighting efforts basically pointless
- fire-resistant siding; if a fire is near this makes it much less likely that the siding will catch from brief contact or by being heated to its ignition point. If the side walls catch the house is a goner.
- keep tree tops 30-60 ft away from structures. Fires often leap from treetop to treetop, then from there to the structure.
- use non-flammable landscaping near the home.
Here is a page from such a group attempting to oppose a measure that would allow private citizens to cut down trees on their own land, if that land is under 300 acres in area: http://winewaterwatch.org/2018/08/kill-ab-426-allowing-road-...
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
The ability of "private citizens to cut down trees on their own land" doesn't turn on AB 425. The code already has specific provisions for firebreaks, and AB 425 doesn't change them one way or another:
https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/public-resources-code/prc-sect-...
No, my comment is like saying clearing 30 feet around your house is an absolute no-brainer, of course do it, but don't expect that alone to miraculously save you from a fire.
Saying this as someone who's mountain cabin survived the Detweiler fire, largely because of vegetation control.
Ok, but that's not what you said. You just ignored it completely like you were disregarding it. If it was such a no-brainer everyone would have done that in California, which was clearly not the case and it's why we're having this discussion now.
It's like someone posting stats about seatbelts saving lives in response to tons of vehicle deaths where people weren't wearing seatbelts. Then you come along and point out that if you drive off a 500 ft cliff a seatbelt won't save your life and some of the deaths were caused by driving off of a cliff.
Either the implication is that the safety mechanism would not have helped, or you are offering a useless observation that it's not making them impervious.
Considering that the original post literally used the phrase "could make homes basically impervious", I don't consider this a useless observation. I found it quite informative.
Watch the videos coming out of the area. These people have trees touching their homes.
the quoted line "A house can be thirty feet from an entire forest on fire and never burn down." says exactly that.
Nothing will save a house that's close to a forest fire while not being fire-resistant, however.
It's a bit tricky because in truth a house may be touching trees that are one fire and "will never burn down" (in the sense that it won't that time) can also be a true statement.
I think a generous interpretation is that "A house can be thirty feet from an entire forest on fire and never burn down." is meant to mean that a house thirty feet away from the forest fire likely won't while a house right next to the forest fire likely will.
It was poorly worded, but it isn't necessarily saying what you state.
Like with anything, you have to pick what the likely scenario should be and build to it. You can build a nuclear power plant to resist 40ft high swells and still get a 50ft swell and be powerless. Obviously more protected is better, but also more expensive (which makes housing less available and affordable, etc). The recurrent nature of the problem suggests to me that the code may be too lax currently, and that the solutions are non-trivial: likely major work for existing homes (from a homeowner perspective, forest management may be able to do more).
Huh, I think that's the first time I've been accused of being non-cooperative for saying what is essentially "I think perhaps how you're interpreting that statement is not how it was meant and you're talking past each other."
All I was saying is that it appears that zzzeek interpreted the original statement as "do X and Y can't happen" when I think ambiguous wording was used and that wasn't the intent, as I didn't interpret it that way.
I'm arguing semantics because I think there is a misunderstanding of people's positions because of those semantics. I understand that it got a little long into the weeds, but there was a point.
The word used was “can” and it means something is possible.
Your misunderstanding is quite commmon in English these days. People say things like “men are pigs” or “chickens fly” and many will interpret that as if a broad claim was made. But “all chickens fly all day long” is a totally different sentence than “chickens fly” and “chickens can fly“.
That (for a layman like me) can easily be interpreted as fire proofing.
Cast iron is the material of choice as it is cheaper than surgery grade stainless steel, it retains the heat and it is a traditional material that people expect.
As for where you can buy yourself a grill made from cast iron, the options are many. In towns there are shops that sell such things. You can walk into such a shop, exchange money and get your own BBQ grill in genuine cast iron.
It’s extremely common in mid to high end grills.
No, they are “plated steel” for the cooking grate, and “heavy gauge steel” for the charcoal grate; at least per the specs on their website. (Which matches every Weber I've used over several decades.)
From their site, “how to care for your cast iron cooking grates”. Quoting Weber’s website, “All our 2017 gas grills except for the Summit and Genesis II LX come with porcelain enameled cast iron cooking grates.”. The spec sheet on the site for virtually every gas grill lists a cast iron grate.
https://www.weber.com/US/en/blog/tips-techniques/how-to-care...
I'm sure there are lots of ways to build houses to resist fire more, and we should be doing that, but "basically impervious" is an overstatement.
> when the four mile canyon fire swept through it was so hot it even melted all the metals like copper and steel. There was nothing left.
But exposing clay to really hot fire just hardens it into fired clay. Hence the term. What happened there?
I have no real concept of the sorts of heats involved in fires like the one described above. But even if the clay isn’t melting, it’s fun to know that ceramics aren’t magical non-melting, non-burning things—they just require unusually much, typically impractically much, heat to achieve it.
https://nhmu.utah.edu/sites/default/files/attachments/Wildfi...
A fire suppression water spray to keep the roof wet would probably save most brick buildings. Most fires burn out within half an hour or so, so one wouldn't even need too big a supply of water.
Basically impervious was an overstatement for emphasis, you're right. I was trying to draw a stark contrast with the sometimes thoughtless status quo, but I should have been more precise.
And to be fair that crown fire study was just looking at thermal ignition, which isn't the whole picture. The strategies to prevent spread through embers are more complex and sometimes not possible in all areas -- vegetation control, standoff zones, irrigation...
Still, as I think we both agree, much more can and should be done.
Here's a document explaining Rancho Santa Fe's approach (PDF): https://www.rsf-fire.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/SIP_for_...
Some of the requirements:
* Boxed or Heavy Timber Eaves
* Non‐Combustible (Class‐A) Roofing
* Fire Sprinklers
* Ember‐Resistant Vents
* Landscaping
* Roadway Width
* Defensible Space
* Spark Arrestors
* Tempered Windows
* Water Supply
This seems like a very inefficient way of allocating risk. California is naturally fire prone and has become more so over recent years due to drought. Anyone operating an electricity distribution network is therefore operating assets that are inherently fire and explosion prone - even if operated and maintained correctly - there is no way to move that much energy over those distances without it occasionally being released in an undesirable way - in a place where the consequences of that are severe.
Simple logic dictates that you only expose companies and individuals to economic risks that are within management control, otherwise you just end up with an economic role that is necessary but impossible to fill.
Even if state standards for safety were updated to reduce the chances of a transformer explosion, circuit breaker arc, or fault in forested areas you'd never get the risk down to zero nor would you remove all the other sources of ignition.
Ahhh, but you assume the legislative body governing 30M people can resort to simple logic :)
(as opposed to just mandating a certain level of safety and then having the government cover costs of accidents if these levels were respected)
These rates need to go up to allow more a more aggressive vegetation control schedule. Sure, I agree with that, and I agree that individual power consumers should pay for that. However the way I think they should pay is precisely through that rate mechanism.
What I do not think is efficient is putting the entire consequential damages of a fire caused by an electrical fault on the utility. That is only an effective mechanism to the extent that the fire damage is preventable by them. While they can reduce the chance of this happening through stepping up vegetation clearance and they probably should, it is not possible to reduce it to zero and given the size of the network there may well be fires every year even in the best possible case.
To say in the context of climate change, forestry policy, the location of houses in areas that face these fire risks, and the construction of those houses of flammable materials that PG&E "caused" this fire and the previous ones and should therefore bear the damages seems strange to me.
The biggest problem is zoning. OK, PGE might caused this, but odds are that within a decade it would have burned anyway. A camp fire, a faulty car exhaust on late August, fire works and so on. ZONING is the real issue now. You know that the area is prone to fires and people build houses in the mountains, surrounded by 100 feet trees?
Also from the article: PG&E will likely use a bankruptcy threat again as a way to get legislative aid, Gimme Credit’s Levenson said.
Please don't let them do that. Have them actually go bankrupt and deal with the fallout from that.
All (most?) states do this, it's the entire role of the public utilities commission to review tariffs proposals by utility companies to ensure they aren't price gouging. This is the tradeoff for having a state-granted monopoly over a region.
> The PG&E and other investor owned utilities that are essentially granted monopoly status in California are guaranteed a negotiated fair rate of return on equity (ROE). PG&E's ROE rate was set at 10.4% and a return on rate base (ROR) was set at 8.06% by the CPUC in December 2012. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Gas_and_Electric_Compa...
PG&E has 81k miles of overhead power lines and 26k miles of underground distribution lines.
How can you operate a system where one screwup -- one decaying tree too close to a line, or one underground construction mistake -- anywhere in 100k miles of power lines can create a $15B bill?
[1] http://www.pgecurrents.com/2017/10/31/facts-about-undergroun...
Honestly, if you cause economic harm, the minimum is that you should pay for it. People lost everything in these fires and insurance companies will pay but then sue the other person /entity responsible.
CA has a big head start here over the rest of the country: in CA, utilities cannot have current-carrying wires that are grounded at multiple points. That practice is widespread elsewhere and is rather dangerous for several reasons. And I think it would interfere with several potential technologies to reduce arcs.
(I don’t really know, but I assume CA’s rule is related to the dairy industry. Utility-induced ground current turns out to be hazardous to cows being milked with metallic equipment.)
Not very big, sparks coming off a tow chain dragging behind a vehicle can start a fire.
http://www.fox13news.com/news/local-news/officer-shows-how-s...
Maybe this situation will progress like the toxic waste disposal business. Break down PG&E into small utility companies so that when the $15B bill comes due the $100 million company just disappears and someone else picks up the tab.
Your objection to the grandparent's "simple logic" seems right to me.
Inverse condemnation could motivate utilities to seek solutions that have longer-term profitability but require higher capital investment, something that would be difficult to legislate.
For example, PG&E could choose to deliver electricity through underground equipment which would cost more than pole-and-wire networks but might reduce forest fire risk. Legislating such a requirement even for strictly regulated utilities might be more complicated than inverse condemnation.
On its face, inverse condemnation does seem to punish utilities even if they are technically in compliance. Perhaps inverse condemnation could exert market influence in ways that are subtler and less technologically constraining than explicit regulation.
So, engaging in an activity with high risk of causing damages that cannot be prevented with reasonable care—a long-established basis for imposing strict liability.
> Simple logic dictates that you only expose companies and individuals to economic risks that are within management control, otherwise you just end up with an economic role that is necessary but impossible to fill.
No, economic roles which are necessary but impossible to fill by private operators, especially natural monopolies, are what government is for.
So there are multiple ways of allocating risk here:
One possibility is to have the entire thing run by the state, that's certainly not uncommon for natural monopolies. The whole risk then sits with the state.
Another is to set tighter technical standards and accompanying higher rates for the regulated utilities and to restrict liability to a certain cap - enough to push investors without making the company unfinanceable - and have the state take the liability for the excess. That insulates the state from minor accidents but leaves it with the catastrophic risk. That's how nuclear regulation works. Of course the criticism of that has always been that socialises the risk while privatising the profit which is a fair criticism.
A third approach is to fine the company per pre-cursor event at a significant level. For instance $100m per fire caused by their assets that spreads beyond their boundary. That would give them a strong incentive to reduce events within their control without holding them responsible for the overall dryness of the state of California which they cannot control.
I disagree.
Government should regulate the minimum required to make society function. If citizens decide they don't want to rebuild their burned down homes every once in while, then this might include some minium safety requirements utilities have to satisfy or be criminals. This has little to do with pricing risk.
Beyond that, we want to find the best cost/benefit trade-offs. And finding those best trade-offs is what we use competing private companies for in the first place. That's the reason the gov hands the privilege to run the local utility to whatever company makes the best offer running it. Only in return do we allow them to keep additional profits competitors couldn't match. Ideally, this should include all externalities, like this preventive measures vs insurance cost trade-off.
I understand the price has to payed by citizens anyway. Either directly to the utility, or by tax funded subsidy, if they want to cap prices. Either is fine. But if we use profit generating companies to optimize cost, then it just makes no sense to not have them optimize on a significant chunk of cost society will suffer.
Not quite. I think some risk of fire is unavoidable but I'm not saying they should do only what the regulatory minimum is and no more.
If we assume that there is a relationship between the amount of "effort" (whether that is money, management insight, or whatever) they put in and the fire risk then we want them to be incentivised through most of the range of that function. If they are good at preventing fires, investors and management should benefit, if they are bad then they should pay penalties.
The point I'm making if that single events can cause 10s of billions of dollars of damage, and if the trigger for that event is something which can be reduced but not eliminated, then the incentive structure ends up being much more like a lottery ticket than a smooth relationship that rewards diligent management.
If they were instead fined a substantial amount (say $100m) every time one of their assets caused any kind of fire in a risky area without being liable for all the damages (which is not within their control) then I think that would drive a much more effective set of incentives.
It's fundamentally a contrast between a light-touch regulatory mechanism with uncapped tort liability + insurers requiring certain behaviour and a heavier regulatory incentive where a regulator requires that behaviour but with the liability of the consequences held elsewhere.
To be fair, in many cases the US uses the former and it may just be my European utility regulation perspective that makes me think it is odd since we typically use mechanisms of the second sort. My intuition says that when the cost of the consequences has a power-law type distribution (most fires cost very little but a few cost billions), it is more efficient to use the latter model rather than rely on insurance models but that's admittedly not based on any detailed analysis.
I think that in some environments, fire hazard needs to become a publicly managed risk rather than an externalized one where the liability is pushed onto whoever fails first. Our last big bushfire where I live was started by some silly bastard using an angle grinder near dry grass. The one before that was pinned on our local power utility for a sparking pole-top transformer (iirc).
Our environmental management agency (whose name changes on a regular basis) conducts regular burn-offs to keep overburden down but even so, it feels like we're leaving munitions lying around. In a country where even the wildlife wants to start fires (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3439042/Birds-prey-...) we need a systematic, coordinated approach.
With wildfires, though, I'm not so sure. These forests are giant powderkegs, and that's no fault of PG&E.
They will burn, sooner, or later. It might be from power utility equipment, it might be from a van's hot exhaust, it might be from a lightning strike.
Blaming the last person who touched it seems... Unfair, in many ways.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnstown_Flood is a great example of an organization that should have been held criminally liable - for second degree murder.
http://www.californiachaparral.com/enativeamericans.html
https://phys.org/news/2017-01-anthropogenic-forest-impacted-...
None of these situations are natural.
They are natural, because humans are natural. California's vegetation has evolved to burn and quickly regrow and easily burn again due to anthropogenic fire for thousands of years.
If it were not for human involvement CA might have more fire resistant species.
BTW much of what burns in CA is not large trees but chapparal.
The linked articles I included have more detail.
If you designed a building in SF, you'd be expected to make it resistant to earthquakes. When it's known that a type of natural disaster is prevalent where you're building, the liability is with those that allow inappropriate building in those places.
He publicly blamed the fires on climate change, not PG&E.
As if climate change has made California's forests so hot that they're spontaneously combusting.
In the real world if an unsafe house exists there will always be someone who is desperate enough to live in it. The only way to stop it is to ban the house, not to rely on market forces.
That's why we have building regulations.
I mean this is obvious really. Suppose there's a house that is cheap and huge and in an amazing location but its wiring isn't up to code and the stairs are steeper than building regs allow. Do you really think nobody would rent it?
Sure forest fires may have occurred anyway but if someone started it either intentionally or negligently, well they should be liable for at least some of the damages.
It's more like there's a crowded place with a gun pointed at the middle of the crowd. Every 30m the gun is cocked. 1-10m after that based on a random timer, it fires.
If someone trips and accidentally pulls the trigger after 32m in are they liable? Maybe, but only in the smallest way. The actual problem is the gun or the people walking in front of it.
It's wrong to use the word "may" for these fires. These areas have evolved to burn and will do so unless we shrink wrap each plant.
Humans put the gun there, we started burning which gave rise to an ecosystem that thrived on burning and encouraged more. Then, we settled that area en masse.
If a poorly maintained utility truck didn’t start the fire...maybe eventually there would have been controlled burns/fires that ultimately prevented the damages that resulted from this fire. Or maybe, as you say the forest inevitably catches on fire from a natural act (act of god - a legal term of art) and forest fire burns in a less populated area and no damage is caused to people/homes...or maybe lightning starts the same fire in the same location and causes the same damages, well even then insurance exists to cover that, but otherwise there wouldn’t be liability the same as someone negligently/intentionally setting the fire.
Fires can legally be acts of god, same as the law might treat a hurricane or tornado...but unlike the later humans can’t (at least not yet) cause them intentionally or negligently, obviously fires are different as they canso liability (criminal and/or civil) is appropriate for fires started intentionally or negligently.
If the "accident" could have been averted by making a reasonable effort to maintain equipment and the surrounding area, then it seems like there should be some liability. Whether that is the case, I don't know.
Questions/issues include:
1. Did you build the wall? Were you negligent in building the wall? Did you breach some professional/industry standard?
2. Did you intend to knock the wall down? Were you negligent in knocking the wall down? Did you know or should you have known if you lean against the wall it will fall?
There are an infinite number of facts one could make up that might change the claim and outcome of liability (also note This is generally about civil liability, but it could possibly extend to criminal liability when talking about death).
There is a pretty famous liability case all Law school students come across early in their torts class, as I recall a driver’s tire blew and he lost control of the vehicle and killed someone. Are the liable? Well come to find out that yes, all drivers have a duty to other drivers to make sure their vehicle is safe for the road and in this case a “reasonable person” (another legal term of art) would have known it was not safe to drive on bald tires and the driver was negligent not maintaining their vehicle safety which was the proximate cause of the death.
That's a pretty reasonable question based on my proposed scenario. Everything else is a pretty deep stretch.
There's also the question of what is "right" versus what is lawful, which is a map versus territory situation.
Anyway, I'm sure a case can and will be built. And part of the reason will be that humans need scapegoats.
If you don’t want to sometimes worry about forest fires, don’t build your house in the woods. It isn’t that complicated.
If they neglected fire warnings, there should be some responsability.
This is exactly what happened last year (line that they weren't maintaining caused that fire), and when they blew up san bruno (when a gas line that had even been stated to need maintenance exploded and killed people).
If you can make a profit while doing all the required work, then fair play to you, but if you're turning a "profit" without performing all the maintenance your network requires, and then getting tax payer support whenever that goes wrong you are not running at a profit. You're a tax payer subsidized siphon, taking money from tax payers to fund bonuses and investors. If you can't run a profit without tax payer backup, you aren't profitable.
Yeah, like Malibu. Very wooded.
Bushfires in Australia have previously covered more than 10 million acres. Recently people in greek suburbs were literally driven into the sea. It is pretty complicated.
Forget return on equity and shareholder returns, if you really hold a utility liable like that, not only would PG&E probably go away, I don't know how you'd get another utility to step in. I seriously think you'd need some giant Cal co-op, or you're going to have to charge seriously high prices to make it worth the risk, or go gridless, which sounds cool but infeasible at that kind of scale if you had to do it in a couple years.
Example,
https://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/news/2014/02/06/commi...
I guarantee you that JJ's restuarant in this example is still using MGE for their gas. They have no other choice here. Even though it killed one of their employees through negligence.
No. The short term thinking is saying "here, private corporation, fell free to turn a profit by not maintaining your assets in the knowledge that you will be bailed out when you burn down a city". The long term effect of this is that tax payers do the following:
* Pay the "profitable" corporation to receive what ever utility it is providing.
* Pay vastly more than it would have cost to simply maintain the utility when recovering from whatever disaster is caused by the utility not maintaining their system.
In the absence of liability for failure to maintain their network, a utility has (according to modern corporate policy) a /duty/ to not maintain their network, so they can maximize the money they give to their shareholders.
> if you really hold a utility liable like that, not only would PG&E probably go away, I don't know how you'd get another utility to step in.
You mean like an actual public entity? As has been the case in most countries for a long long time?
> or you're going to have to charge seriously high prices to make it worth the risk
No. If a company needs liability insurance at a feasible price they'd need to actively work to mitigate risk - private insurance would be a good hammer for that as failing to maintain your lines and equipment would increase the costs of your insurance. The other problem with this is it assumes that the cost of "seriously high prices", is higher than the cost for tax payers when they are having to pay to deal with whatever disasters and recovery costs directly.
Ultimately you've got awful forestry management practices that are really to blame for this annual mess.
Agreed, you have to assume forest fires will happen in California eventually (since they have for thousands of years). It's unreasonable to expect there never to be some kind of spark, whether it's an act of god or caused by one of the 40 million humans living in California.
That said, if it were proven that PG&E were directly liable for this fire, how would that play out?
What is the most efficient state run operation? What is the least efficient state run operation?
What is the most efficient market driven operation? What is the least efficient market driven operation?
My sense is that in general a market driven operation will be run more efficiently and practically than a state run operation. There may be particular instances of efficient state run operations that exist in the United States but there are always particular instances of efficient market driven operations too. Taken as a whole, we should skew towards market driven solutions.
What we have here is a decision between one group of accountants getting electricity users to pay, vs a different group of accountants getting taxpayers to pay. The fraction of the population that are net positive taxpayers is much smaller than the fraction of the population that uses electricity, so in a democracy it would be surprising NOT to see the people deciding the few people who are net positive taxpayers will get the bill. The large chunk of the population that pay electric bills while being net negative taxpayers are not going to volunteer to pay more.
Although, it's debatable how avoidable starting fires is in the bone-dry tinderbox of 21st-century California, even if you stick closely to best practices.
Also, people often attribute exclusively to government a class of dysfunctions or inefficiencies that have virtually nothing to do with an organization's ownership structure, but have a great deal to do with management structures typical of large organizations (e.g. wasteful spending due to "use it or lose it" budgets). With respect to these problems, I would be very surprised if substituting public vs. private does anything other than change minor details of how they manifest.
As it always plays out: regular people will only sue via class action lawsuit, meaning there will be a settlement that is a fraction of the damage. The lawsuit with the state as plaintiff will drag on until either a settlement or the statute of limitation is reached.
Businesses and individuals (and public agencies like cities, counties, and special districts) with losses, especially of structures, will in many cases be insured; direct action lawsuits, or the threat thereof, to force a substantially full settlement, to recover from liable parties are a big part of what insurance companies do, and the nature of insurance companies is that each will have much larger losses than any individual, and much more motivation to aggressively pursue them; there may still be settlements that are less than would be recovered in a final judgement (to the extent that time value of money and risk and reduced litigation costs make that a winning proposition), but nowhere near as small a fraction as is typical in a class action.
> The lawsuit with the state as plaintiff will drag on until either a settlement or the statute of limitation is reached.
That's not how statutes of limitations work. They run from the event giving rise to the cause of action to the moment the action is filed; once the case is filed within the statute of limitations, how long it runs is immaterial.
The one with Tesla I am familiar with ran to filing action. The investigation found previously-unknown potential violations which were too far in the past for CalOSHA to initiate legal action regarding them.
Do you have a source for something else?
Note also: PG&E is already being sued for allegedly causing last fall's devastating fires in northern California. That plus damages for this year's fires is very likely to force them into bankruptcy.
Hence a plunging stock price as everyone rushes to get out while they still can.
That said, as a private citizen I don't see how a person starting a fire accidentally (not sure how you prove malice if a transformer fails?) could be held liable for all the property damage further downstream. That's what private insurance is for.
If PG&E did not make efforts to maintain their equipment better after napa, and this is the cause of Malibu, that becomes almost 3rd degree murder, right?
We can’t ‘fine’ the government. All we have are brief elections. So the question becomes - are elections a better incentive for forest safely than financial liability is for a power company?
Seems laughable to claim that.
At the ballot box. You're correct that they can't be held financially liable even to the extent that corporations currently are. That's why I wasn't personally suggesting that the power grid should be nationalized. I'm just saying that "make PG&E pay for everything without limit" leaves no other option, so that's the debate people would need to have.
If a plaintiff who is providing an essential service is driven into bankruptcy then the government will either have to provide operating funds or take over entirely, and we're back to how they can be held accountable. "Their" money vs. "someone else's" money never comes into it. No matter whose money it is, nobody can force the government to do anything it reserves the right not to. As the entity controlling the courts and the enforcement of courts' decisions, they can simply nullify any decision ... until they're held accountable at the ballot box.
The idea that unlimited liability somehow creates accountability is absurd. All it would do is put more things in the hands of government.
Of course, and I dont agree with your intepretation that the courts can nullify requests on the state: the state often pays a lot of damages and compensations, it just does it by taxing third parties.
It's an important detail: if if PGE threatens bankrupcy and for example, endangers payouts to small counties and individuals that lost their homes, you could think that the state should bail out PG&E to help those people. After-all the bailout is free. Or you should think that the state invents a program to raise taxes to alleviate the condition of the victims, and PG&E is not even mentioned.
Even more often it denies suit. It's called sovereign immunity, and at the US federal level it must be explicitly waived before a suit can even start. There are many other ways that governments at all levels protect themselves from the liability a private party would have for doing the same things. An occasional exception doesn't change the fact that they have and use the ability.
> you could think that the state should bail out PG&E
Not "should" so much as "will". I know it's not free, but it's going to happen anyway in the case of essential services. That's the real point. You can't sue PG&E into oblivion. You can just back-door nationalize it via lawsuits. Is that what you think should happen? I'm really not sure what you're trying to get at here, other than repeating a "gubmint is evil" trope that has no bearing on the situation at hand.
Instead of living with nature we push nature off until it overwhelms our defenses.
Eventually humans will learn ?
I understand that some wood fires that start naturally, actually are part of the natural cycle and is necessary. So remote areas could be spared, but still monitored to check its spread.
Maybe a combination of such sensors and satellite data can help catch a fire when it is still small enough to be contained.
Your system will just let debris build up even longer, leading to even bigger fires.
The system can be designed to not add to the fire, we can possibly add this to the already existing power infrastructure.
This is a solvable problem.
Is this possible? Is it just a matter of spending the money to upgrade the infrastructure?
It seems a bad investment to try to live there.
"Surf and ski in the same day brah" is an example of a short term benefit.
Much of the ignition risk comes from transformer explosions, air-insulated CB arcs, and line-to-tree arcs.
Transformer explosions are inherently harder to isolate from flammable material in the American distribution system design than they would be in a European 240v system, that's because the US system has to keep LV (110v) runs short so has extensive HV networks with pole-mounted transformers feeding a small number of properties each. 240v systems can tolerate longer LV runs and use larger pad-mounted distribution transformers with about 20x the power rating of American style pole-mount transformers.
In the Euro configuration, you therefore have many fewer transformers which have a least a fence around them with regular vegetation control within it. You can also put these transformers within enclosures. A typical UK rural/suburban arrangement has the transformer air cooled and outside within a fence with breakers and distribution boards inside a brick or GRP hut inside the fence. In urban areas the whole thing is enclosed in its own structure or in the basement of a building.
Anyway you can't do that with American transformers as there are more of them. These will therefore always be an ignition risk. Yes you can step up planned replacement of older models, be more aggressive about keeping the load per transformer down to lengthen lifetime and reduce fault risk but fundamentally they are a risk.
You can replace air insulated CBs with gas-insulated models at significant expense, that will reduce that risk.
Burying cables as I said is horrifically expensive but you could increase the size of the vegetation-cleared right of way around the overheads and step up the clearance schedule.
None of these will remove every source of ignition.
“bury” is, as we say, “non-trival”.
Wait... In the US for household single-phase it is 240V from the pole transformer to the breaker panel, where the 120V is derived by taking one hot or the other against the neutral, and the range/drier/etc 240V circuits are simply across both hots. So there is no difference between EU or US distribution voltages until it gets inside the house. All the US does is add a neutral so that it is easy to get 120V.
My understanding of the standard US system is that the distribution transformer is fed with one phase, the secondary side of the transformer has a centre-tap neutral and two live phases which have 120v to neutral and 240v phase-phase.
Good to know.
> My understanding of the standard US system is that the distribution transformer is fed with one phase, the secondary side of the transformer has a centre-tap neutral and two live phases which have 120v to neutral and 240v phase-phase.
yes
And yes, nearly every home is served by 220 V phase-to-phase with a center tap. Am I understanding right that UK houses are only fed by single phase at 230 V with neutral?
Is the reason we have pole mounted transformers in the US really because of voltage drop though? It seems to me the reason would be they are inherently smaller due to the lower voltages, higher frequency, and only converting one phase from the distribution side. The UK has lower frequency, higher voltage, and apparently has three output phases which seems like it would require a larger transformer.
That's right, typically houses along a street will alternate phases to maintain overall balance. Standard used to be 60A supply but is now 100A which I believe would be considered low in the US but we don't usually have residential air conditioners and houses are smaller and heated with gas.
I have been told that this is the reason but there are other reasons to prefer the US arrangement so it may not be the only one. US system is more resilient to secondary failure because fewer customers are fed per secondary and you have a much more extensive HV network which is more flexible.
UK distribution transformers are much, much larger. Looks like this: https://cms.esi.info/Media/productImages/Expanded_Metal_Comp... My point was that it is easier to enclose a smaller number of large assets than a large number of small ones which is relevant to fire risk.
However, the real problem is trees/etc growing too close to the lines, compounded by the extra dry drought conditions throughout CA. Regardless of the type of cable or other technical safety features, power lines are always going to be a fire hazard if they don't receive regular inspection and maintenance. The lesson from these fires is that the existing maintenance schedule is severely inadequate.
Tree branches and existing poled electricity is a tricky subject it seems. Locally, the city, electric company and property owners all blame each other for who should trim the branches around poles.
Often nothing gets done and ice storms come to take them down anyways (at the detriment of the city, electric companies, and property owners).
The problem with some kind of packetized transfer of energy between storage batteries is not only is any reasonable packet far more than enough energy to start a forest fire, even the mere capacitance of a long power line, even if given infinite fast commo and protocols, is still way more than enough energy to start a forest fire.
There is no technological way to push energy thru a tinderbox without having occasional failures aka forest fires. You can fix that by only running wires thru a treeless desert, and if you don't have a desert you can make one, or you can not run wires. The idea of only running long distance electricity along a deforested interstate or rail very wide right of way is interesting and would be safe although probably extremely ugly.
Radio waves propagate at the speed of light, and electricity is slower: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_electricity
"Last year, that conflagration came in the form of the Thomas Fire. But Montecito had been readying itself for decades.... They really focused on defensible space around homes, particularly the homes that were closest up against the wildland areas.... When the Thomas Fire hit, Montecito couldn’t rely on aircraft to drop water, but seven homes were lost—not 500."
Of course, a fire-related mudslide soon destroyed many homes there. So a related thought: some places should not be occupied.
The utility’s filing also may have marked the start of a
campaign to get bailed out by California’s lawmakers --
as it was after last year’s fires.
I mean, that's tantamount to saying you'll bail out the company every year forever. You've basically telling the CEO "Don't spend $1 billion of your money on inspections and preventative maintenance so your equipment stops causing fires! Instead, destroy $15 billion of value and we'll pay for it all at no cost to yourself!"
Of course the company would accept that if someone fool offered it to them. It's super-inefficient for that fool, but the company saves a billion dollars!
(Maybe somewhat different because every type of bushfire prevention strategy was in place / overwhelmed and I don't know what the situation is in California.)
Secondly, PG&E and many other regulated utilities, created holding companies to siphon out profits in the go-go 90s. the deregulation of California's electrical energy markets and subsequent ENRON debacle exposed the holding companies in the ensuing crisis discovery process.
Thirdly, PG&E is super-guilty of labor avoiding, subcontracting, penny-pinching and evasive behavior for decades. This includes tree-trimming; this includes inaccurate record keeping of the gas pipeline safety records; many other ordinary, daily management decisions we dont know about, but collectively create the situation as it is.
Do not cry for PG&E, or mimic PR company talking points. Thanks
When a storm erodes the beach out from under your 3-mil beachfront house it's the town's fault for not building erosion controls and they should pay you for it.
When your dumpy trailer in a dumpy trailer park is tossed by a tornado you knew the risks and nobody should give you a cent.
See the double standard?
Local politicians who want a bunch of rich people on their side tend to favor those sorts of things.