As a South African, the initial reaction is a knee-jerk, snide comment "get some", since we have frequent power outages due to a combination of institutional incompetence and malicious actors. (Apparently, at one point, we had outages that were "staged" in order for the Gupta family to make money from coal sales; I am not sure how it worked.)

But as a more sober and conscientious observer, what are the reasons for this? Is it that fires have been causing too much damage? Is it that the utility companies are slacking? From the article it is not clear whether putting off the power is a successful mitigation strategy. It's a bit unimaginable for California to have the same problems that we have. In our case we have politics that inadequately qualified people are promoted to management and hence my question about whether there is logic to this.

But the main difference is we don't have the same fire issues that California has, or at least, situations where the power lines are the cause of fires.

Edit: We do have fires, but I think we have other (less straightforward/tangible) issues that we debate in our spare time.