If a car crashes into a power pole and sparks an inevitable fire, is the driver liable? If the normal operation of a mower triggers an inevitable fire, is the operator liable?
Typically it's a hundred yards on either side of a high voltage line. And with the liabilities P&G is facing, I'd clear cut a hundred yards on either side of medium voltage lines too.
That's a 1km^2 of cleared forrest for every 10 km of line. California has (tens of?) thousands of km of lines.
Which of course the fires are going to burn no matter what PG&E does. “But for an electrical spark” is a great way to lay the blame but ignores the hundreds (thousands?) of forest fires each year that start from non-electric sources.
In the scale of the maintenance required to have zero risk of fire — hundreds of billions of dollars — the $4 billion in dividends is a rounding error.
CA is going to have to do the math and decide it’s not worth $100 billion in guaranteed economic depression due to cutting power to try to save a 5% chance of a $100 billion fire.
CA is also going to have to do the math that no one is going to pay to maintain a grid that’s fire proof but charges $3/kWh for power.
I was discussing this incident last night:
https://www-m.cnn.com/2018/10/02/us/az-off-duty-border-patro...
https://www.greenindustrypros.com/lawn-maintenance/mowing/ne...
At some point, we have to accept that wildfires are natural and that if we’re going to hold people accountable for the total outcome of their (fairly random) part in the ignition event, we’re going to find people and companies naturally taking a risk-mitigation stance, including stopping maintaining firebreaks and proactively turning off power to large parts of the grid in high-risk areas until some other unlucky sod triggers the fire instead.