This electrical transmission tower has a problem
twitter.com
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With proper engineering and maintenance, PG&E could probably reduce the frequency of fires significantly, but there's always going to be a non-zero risk of fire, both from power lines and other sources, and it seems basically inevitable that one of them would have started another fire at some point. If this failure hadn't happened, and the same fire had happened a year later due to an "excusable" cause (like a tree falling on a line, or someone's house catching on fire), would that outcome have been any better?
PG&E does ultimately have some responsibility, due to the fact that they were the immediate cause, but it really seems like people want to blame PG&E for the entire situation while avoiding the much harder truth: that this area will likely never be safe without significant policy changes (if ever).
So while PG&E can be blamed for that specific fire that doesn't really address the root cause of "why can some sparks in one place cause such huge destruction and can we do anything about that?"
I'm just not so sure that if you accidentally knock over one domino and a cascading whole room full of dominoes falls that you should take the blame for the cascading effects. Maybe whoever setup the dominoes behind the first one shares the blame as well...
If the wildfires in CA were a new thing this season, I wouldn't want to witch hunt this year's culprit. But it's been a huge hazard for years now -- negligent sparks can't be tolerated.
My favourite: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-mendocino-compl...
Someone tried to stop an angry yellowjacket nest by driving a concrete stake into the hole in the ground and their hammer thew off sparks and started a 459,123 acre fire-- the largest recorded in state history at the time.
Yet if you had a wasps nest, you'd totally be tempted to douse it with a bit of gasoline, believing you could put it out before it spread to anything else... Except you couldn't...
And when the investigators came round, you'd totally tell them about the stake but not the petrol...
Out of the millions of people who use a hammer to strike metal on metal every day, one of them will manage start a fire eventually.
Even the unlikeliest events are actually pretty likely at scale.
Sure, two thirds of them may just be lying, but unless you can prove they are (which really shouldn't be that hard, considering burning fuel leaves obvious traces), you should assume each of them are telling the truth.
It has to be a clear bowl to trick the wasps to think that they can still get out otherwise they will dig a new exit.
There was a famous story here a couple years ago here where a mountain biker lit some toilet paper on fire and caused half a hillside to go up in flames.
Negligence, sure. Stupidity, no doubt. But it's also dry here in the summer, and that hasn't changed year after year. So sure, I guess, let it be the weather's fault or global warming, why not.
It's easier, afterall, to place the blame on other people or forces than to change behaviors that would prevent disasters in the first place.
We do blameless post-martens as a best practice in engineering so that when we don’t have constant outages of critical internet infrastructure and that it comes up quickly when issues arise.
Why ignore a successful strategy that may show better results than just blaming whoever happened to be responsible for some sparks this time around? Who are you going to blame when lightning is the spark?
First, those don't exist -- despite any evidence to the contrary.
Second, engineers don't have shareholders demanding stock buy backs.
That's a hilarious image, but I doubt that literally happened
Forest fires happen naturally all the time, but we've gotten so good at putting them out quickly, that at some point a huge buildup of dry underbrush will have amassed in a huge area, until a fire happens that is so big that we have no way to stop it. We're basically accumulating these huge powderkegs instead of letting the gunpowder burn one handful at a time.
Yes, you do and should take the blame under the eggshell skull doctrine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull). If the initial action was unlawful, then the perpetrator bears liability for the full set of consequences -- even if those consequences are more severe than normal based on unknown factors. Here, PG&E was clearly guilty of gross negligence in their maintenance, so they bear liability for the consequences.
Worse yet, this background situation wasn't previously unknown. The enhanced fire risk was widely understood, which would put PG&E under an even greater obligation to ensure their equipment was operated safely.
PGE has a very long track record of neglectful behaviours. From leaking chromium into drinking water in socal, san mateo gas main explosion, and the electrical fires in northern California.
There is something very wrong with how PGE approaches it's infrastructure and public safety. It would happen regardless of climate change.
In this case we're not even talking about tree trimming, we have a 100 year old tower. It's obvious it will fail soon, there should be an internal maintenance program to replace/update it. There are no such programs, PGE operates in a way that there would never be such a program. PGE should be held liable for predictable out comes of its behaviours. (see all it's other catastrophic failures across the state)
A normal company would not exist after one PGE level negligent catastrophe. PGE is still around because it holds the state hostage to our energy infrastructure. This is not acceptable.
The key recurring theme is negligence. That's the reason PGE faces such high liabilities for the disasters it causes. This is not an act of God.
I believe it's totally possible to operate a for profit utility that's safe and reliable. PGE can't do that, now how can california untangle this mess.
It seems clear to me that for-profit business is the wrong model for an infrastructure monopoly like power delivery networks.
PGE has a long term organizational culture in leadership that creates this environment of negligent behaviours. Essentially all of PGEs problems are due to PGE -climate, environment, geography and company profit motives are secondary causes of these disasters at best.
No doubt, but I'm just pointing out the reality -- make them responsible for any size fire set off by their equipment, and they will respond by turning off electricity during high fire danger periods. This isn't something that "might" happen, this is exactly what did happen.
So simply assigning more liability is not the answer.
Are you suggesting it's a good thing that they run their poorly maintained lines with a high chance of causing a fire during periods of high fire danger?
People want power, but they also don't want to die in a fire.
In my opinion, it is the average cost of a fire, most of which are small and don't cause much damage.
That this particular fire blew up into a big disaster was the result of many factors, only a few of which were actually in PGE's control.
Example: a roller coaster has broken seat belts. Usually nothing bad will happen because physics keeps the rider in their seat. In one case, a rider falls to their death because they were leaning a particular way on a particular turn. Should the theme park not be punished because nobody was hurt in the average case? Or everyone who rode the roller coaster and wasn’t injured needs to sue for their piece of the pie (because the average damage is one death divided by the total number of riders)?
In terms of _average_ cost vs. actual costs, according to my non-lawyer reading of the Wikipedia article on the eggshell skull rule, it doesn't matter that these particular conditions made the fire significantly more costly than average. They have to answer for the damages from the fire they caused, not to the "average" or even "foreseeable" damages from such a fire.
No need to assign culpability strictly to either PG&E or calfire for systematic wildfire mismanagement. We can blame them both! Also climate change.
So very much of America's infrastructure is aging and used past planned capacity. How can you tell ahead of time which infrastructure will bite you the worst? Water control structures (dams, levees, locks) are a great place to look because of their potential for widespread, costly disasters.
If this C-hook had failed during a rainstorm, there would have been localized power loss for some time, and extra work for a repair crew.
Now, as it happens, California is naturally prone to wildfires; add to that climate change, poor vegetation control, people wanting to live next to trees[0] - it really is only a matter of time before people are killed. Just look at all the fires burning now. How many of them were caused by faulty C-hooks?
Take the example from Fight Club:
> "Narrator: A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
The Narrator has provided us with a very vivid example: a fiery crash caused by a specific part. But what about all the other components? What about the other cars on the road? What about the guy that falls asleep while driving an affected vehicle and has a single car accident? There's a lot of noise in the real world.
0. For instance, I also live next to trees and love it (but not in California).
The issue is that the failure in this case was both predictable and ignored. PG&E willfully failed to inspect/maintain the equipment.
Accidents happen and you can't control for everything. But this is a very clear and obvious failure. The failure isn't specific to what failed in this case (The c-hook) but the failure of PG&E to do any due diligence.
I'm not sure that's the point. C-hooks are an example of a preventable accident. The problem isn't the c-hook itself but the policy / culture at PG&E and probably outside the company (as you point below) that allowed this to happen.
> So very much of America's infrastructure is aging and used past planned capacity. How can you tell ahead of time which infrastructure will bite you the worst?
Exactly. I see the twitter thread as an example of this broader issue. Of course, the solution is not to go around and check every single c-hook. The solution is to set up a plan (at the utility, state or federal level) so that this kind of avoidable accidents happen much less often.
I'm not saying that nothing like this would ever happen again, but even if such a plan could reduce such events by ten times, that would look like a success to me.
The solution is precisely to check every single one at least a few times a century. This is not that much to ask.
The convex hull is clearly superior in a fire-prone forest, because it permits the introduction of a fire-break. However, it requires us to, from a top-down perspective, decide that we will build a new entire town. We are reluctant to commit to building towns in forests, even though we are equally reluctant to ban people from living in forests.
In this situation we have the worst of both worlds: ad-hoc development is subsidized by the "surplus value lying around" when the government pays to build a road/powerlines/etc between two places, but it ultimately depletes that resource and creates new demands which must be fulfilled by the government.
Or, say, a massive lightning storm such as the ones that sparked many of the wildfires this year.
I don’t understand. You’re conceding that if PG&E were a competent and responsible company they could significantly reduce the rate of fires. The fact that some fires might still happen doesn’t mean that 10 fires aren’t better than 1,000 fires.
Similar to red teams in security.
Seems like doing it in winter would defeat the purpose.
People die [like my neighbors here in Sonoma, CA] - it's not an EC2 instance that gets replaced.
Further, one does not just 'restore' the power grid after an outage:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_outage#Restoring_power_a...
Run it forwards, pick and event and allow it to run its course.
When designing simulation runs there are bunch of dimensions to consider
* Fidelity or simulation resolution, spatial and temporal
* Number of runs, it is a linear search, spatial search, random, gradient
* If you are testing specific parameters, like will this bridge hold this static load, multiple simulation runs are done with the inputs varied slightly, input sensitivity analysis. [1]
The simulations don't have to be entirely on the computer, they could also couple with them physical and human components. One could page k/n employees that might be on duty at the random time. Response times in real life could be inferred by response to the actual pages. But people were harmed, no actual failures occurred.
If society approached civilization seriously, we would apply the full power of science AND engineering while we fail horribly at the application of engineering and suffer its excesses.
Given other pro PG&E comments in this thread, and how so many factors were in play and this and that. It all boils down to money and acceptable risk and how to package that up in a way that PG&E gets a slap on the wrist. Well done!
It very well could be that we as a society, decide we are ok with these risks, but that we need mediation. And it could be that we A) turn off at risk lines during likely conditions, as shown in simulation or via direct perception B) Have fire bomber planes in the sky during high likely occurrences.
But money is cheaper. You gotta spend it to make it.
Your Option A is basically how it is done already for Public safety power shutoffs: they (PGE) have an extensive forecasting department, and they de-energize certain areas for risk based on their analyses. It doesn't work all the time: E.g. Camp Fire [2].
B isn't really an option when many of these incidents occur overnight. Otherwise Cal Fire already fly's their spotters during the day during Red Flag events. And their is a network of remote cameras (alertwildfire.org) for surveillance.
This all is beside the point though: Controlled burns in CA have decreased by 50%+ since the 90s/2000s, and 90s era environmental policies killed logging operations in a lot of CA. Fuel built up, and after that, thermodynamics take over.
If we can get back to mitigating the fuel load - controlled burns [1], and require PG&E to put more budget towards brush clearance and line maintenance - instead of mandating they enter into losing renewable contracts [3] - then we can certainly avoid a lot of these issues.
1 - https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-...
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Fire_(2018)
3 - https://www.wsj.com/articles/pg-e-wins-ruling-allowing-it-to...
These are all tactics, PG&E had no strategy other than decide by committee so they couldn't be responsible for the resulting deaths and losses.
There are so many folks trying to slip their agendas into the remedies in this discussion. All of those are literal smoke screens for the greed driven structure of PG&E.
PG&E didn't start doing meaningful shutdown on lines until after the Camp fire.
How much would it take to make a useful scale model in a warehouse somewhere? I'm certainly not knowledgeable enough to understand how the smaller scale would relate to real-life fires, but it certainly seems plausible that, for a relatively small outlay, we'd have an important tool for establishing a much better understanding of wilderness fires. Given how much CA alone spends fighting forest fires, a 10 or 20 million project to build facilities and fund researchers seems like an obvious and much needed project.
PG&E isn't setting fires often enough to do that, so the downsides of every random fire they set strongly outweigh the upsides. If we need more fires, we should use carefully planned ones.
The storm that can through last month started several of these fires with dry lightning or very little rain accompanying the lightning.
They tended to do this during the [very] wet season.
But PG&E is still on the hook for taking better care of their infrastructure.
It all comes down to dollars and [non]sense. Some actuary has determined that an occasional lawsuit and rotten press run is cheaper than maintaining the wires.
Here in New York, many of the buried water mains that transfer water to the city from upstate are well over a century old. Many are made of cast iron, and even wood.
There’s no plan to dig them up and replace them with more robust materials. They just wait for them to fail, then replace the small part that failed.
They do give city water some real taste, though. It’s probably actually nutritious.
At some point, all the older parts will get so old that it fails frequently and at a greater rate, that the fix cost will greatly exceed the budgeted amount.
Being a quite cynical person, I would say that up to that point management will have collected fat bonuses, then cry poverty and push for ruinous rate increases.
Along the same lines, CT just had an issue with a rate increase that doubled most bills.
The point being spreading out the cost over years and limiting "downtime" is a lot better than 1 huge event that leaves customers without. (re: Detroit and bottled water)
https://www.fox61.com/article/news/local/eversource-and-ui-a...
Yes, but that’s disingenuous. The largest civil engineering project in America right now is the new water tunnel for NYC. It’s been in progress for fifty years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Water_Tunnel_No....
They replaced a corroded and failed section of pipe, repressurized the line and POP! went the next section... Two or three times as I recall.
[1] Although I think the thread is rather vague as to the damages assigned to PG&E no?
If you act in good fait, follow all regulations, act responsible, the law might see it as an accident where you don't get blame.
For instance the Beirut explosion was the fault from the welders causing the explosion. Yes, but the larger and more important issue is why are there so many explosives in the first place? California's mismanagement with it's forest is the same issue. These forests should be periodically burned the remove rather than letting them accumulate into such a large blazing fire.
Ah, so the problem is negligence. And what negligence was there? PG&E not maintaining their towers as clearly documented (or rather, not documented as the thread shows), or even possibly the federal government not maintaining Bureau of Land Management and USDA Forest lands? No - it's California's fault, spoken as if even a healthy forest wouldn't burst into flames if someone threw molten hot aluminum on a kindling pile.
But where could that idea possibly have come from? Perhaps the Federal govermnent, whose head has basically been parroting that exact line? What an astounding coincidence.
Where I'm from in NorCal it's all National Forest except for the parts that are private land.
A quick search indicates that some 58% of California forest is managed by the Feds and about 3% by the state.
So -- in addition to PG&E being at fault, shouldn't we be talking about Washington more than Sacramento here?
However, I don't think the fault should lie with them because something was going to start a fire and they just happened to be the unlucky bunch stuck holding the match. There is no way you could say "if it wasn't for their negligence there wouldn't have been a fire."
This thread is going in circles. What people are saying is that PG&E should be expected to do what's required of them to maintain their equipment, and that failing to maintain their equipment was a cause of this specific fire. You're right, it's basically bad luck that their decades of negligence led to this disaster, but it still did lead to it. Whether or not there was a pre-existing condition that made fires more likely.
Again going back to the Beirut Explosion analogy -- yes the welders could have taken better precautions. Perhaps someone could have maintained the explosives better too. Maybe we could even hire firefighters on standby and install alarms next to the port.
But none of this removes the large pile of explosives that shouldn't be placed there.
I agree that the forests should be managed differently, but if this being "California's mismanagement" is an actual thing as opposed to political disinformation, I'd love to see a couple links to back it up.
Some quick googling suggests that it's mostly a Federal problem, which has very different implications especially right now. Am I wrong?
There is such a thing as a multi domain fault.
He never said this wasn't PG&E's fault, just that out of 100% they don't bear all the fault.
I mean, California is in the middle of burning down from a lighting complex at this moment. Suing mother nature isn't going to do much good if you want to put the blame on her for that fire.
As long as people live in the Wildland Urban Interface, and we live in a climate that's getting hotter and drier year over year, and we don't have defense in depth around our homes, houses are going to continue to burn and people will die from it.
At the end of the day we cannot stop the fires, they are a natural part of the landscape. The question is can we reduce the impact on humans? Some we cannot, the smoke will still affect us negatively. Some we can, a hard parameter around our house with no flammable bushes, and eves that protect against cinder build up that set houses on fire will help.
An extreme analogy: if a car is built in a way that a fender-bender causes a fire[1], how much of that is on the person who cause the fender-bender? Fender-benders are preventable by better driving, but the consequences were massively exaggerated because the car was unsafe.
The PG&E example isn't this clear but if the severity of the fires is substantially caused by poor forest management—an empirical question to which I do not know the answer—then it's clear that PG&E should not shoulder the entire blame. We're still left with the thorny question of how much blame they deserve (certainly not none), but the rhetoric I see around it is using the company as a scapegoat to let the CA and federal government avoid taking any responsibility at all.
[1]: I don't know if the Ford Pinto was actually this bad, but this is a hypothetical example anyway :).
In the fender-bender example, I can see how you would structure your logic the way you have. As an example of how I and others might structure it: The car causes the accident when a wheel falls off, and the accident happens to happen where there was a prior gas spill. The presence of the gas spill is unfortunate, but the car caused the accident, and that should never happen with good design and maintenance. The accident was exacerbated by the presence of gas, causing a fire and injury and death, etc.
Now, to bring it full circle. Replace a car with a train (the situation is largely under the control of a single company), the accident with a train falling off the rails and hitting a gas pipeline, AND the company knew the gas pipeline was there, and knew the danger all along, and still managed to not put on a proper maintenance plan to ensure the train didn't derail especially in a place that has a gas pipeline right there.
We are talking about what ought to be, not what is. The law falls under the category of is, and does not imply ought. I think everyone in the conversation understands that PG&E bears some amount of legal liability for these fires.
We’ve completely screwed up our planet.
Climate change makes the problem worse, but the fact is fires are a natural part of the regional ecology.
If we keep looking at fires as one problem with one cause, we will keep dying in fires and losing houses.
The elements of that blew game I got are "climate change makes weather warmer and drier, which increases risk" question about that Mr. Trump said "California is terrible in clearing out the forests" to which it is being responded "we need funding and many forests are federal forests" always good to work on blaming for the past, not to work on a solution for the future ...
There are two narratives here. The Democrats want to blame Climate Change. Republicans want to blame California's mismanagement. Both are correct but there is no policy that any government could implement that will solve climate change in the next few decades. But you literally have Biden going around and blaming Trump for these fires when there is no climate policy that United States could have implemented in the last 2 decades that would have made any difference.
On the other hand, regardless of climate change, California has implemented policies that created this problem and California can implement policies that will prevent future wildfires from spreading out of control. But California is a mess. Controlled burns are constantly challenged in court by activists and NIMBYs and bogged down by environmental regulations. California needs to perform controlled burns of around a million acres of land, but is doing something on the order a few thousand even with a backlog of 20 million acres[1]. Logging policy has clear-cut forest replaced with dense bush[2]. And bad vegetation management policy has been the mantra for decades in California.
In this case, the Democrats are wrong and are engaging in outright lying in order to deflect blame. Climate change is an important issue, but climate change policy is not going to result in a solution for these wildfires.
>Some quick googling suggests that it's mostly a Federal problem
How? How is this a federal problem?
[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01/why-isnt-california-...
[2] https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-10-14/newsom-clea...
But, to make matters worse, the baseline expected rate of fires is higher due to climate change, and is much higher due to PG&E negligence.
We can and should attack all factors with regulation, maintenance policy change, etc. The fact is, we had maintenance policies for PG&E's portion, and they were negligent.
Yes. But we can't control the climate. Or rather climate change will require policies spanning decades or centuries.
>and is much higher due to PG&E negligence
Sure. PG&E should be held accountable for their part. But to mark them as a cause is not right. California was a tinderbox waiting for a spark to start the explosion. It could have been anything, and in fact, there were many 'sparks' that started a bunch of these fires. You make PG&E the scapegoat, you're going to miss the true culprit - bad vegetation management.
If the federal government wants better forest management in the National Forests, they should increase funding for forest management and hire more employees into the US Forest Service.
You can certainly blame California for allowing people to build homes at the wildland urban interface and for not requiring homeowners to take better fire defensibility measures. The forests are a more complicated issue and the feds take much of the blame.
If Trump drastically increases the budget to the USFS and starts a new and improved forest management program, I will gladly applaud the effort. Sadly, I doubt that will happen.
Newsom relies on blaming PG&E and Global Warming; he seems to be the political version of the Deep Pockets Theory.
Neither politician offers help for people whose homes are in imminent danger.
I'm actually very surprised we haven't heard him blame the feds.
I think what's interesting, and a real problem, is that all reasons about causes of the fires is seen as a political stance, when the factual causes of the fires should be not a political issue.
All of these things are true. They're not political statements: 1. CA mismanaged its forests by not doing proper controlled burns 2. Climate change making conditions ripe for fires 3. PG&E was negligent in maintaining its infrastructure
But people want to assign the blame to either #1 or (#2 and #3), and by doing that they are implicitly taking a political stance.
It's not productive and makes finding robust solutions to these problems harder.
[0]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01/why-isnt-california-...
[1]: https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article239475468.html
[2]: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Top-scientist-knew-Bi...
It’s also not clear to me that - regardless of the party in question - it is fair to call it mismanagement unless credentialed people had pointed out the risk of not allowing controlled burns and the government insisted on doing them anyway because of different priorities, aka mismanagement.
https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-...
They are actively killing the native forests by over zealous fire suppression and lack of controlled burns. Environmentalism in name only - sound and fury signifying nothing.
Over 50% of forest land in the state, but almost 50% of the total land area of the state.
This is fairly common in the West and wildly different from the situation outside of the West.
That's highly debatable.
> They're not political statements:
At least the first is a political judgement.
> 1. CA mismanaged its forests by not doing proper controlled burns
The vast.majority of the first within the State are not subject to state management; 3% of the forest land is controlled by the state or administrative subdivisions. 57% of forest land in the state (and 47.7% of total land area of the state) is directly controlled by the federal government and some of the rest by federally-but-not-state supervised tribal governments. In between there is some private land which the state has less control over than the state-owned land but more than the federally-controlled land from which it is excluded from management. So even if there was mismanagement by the state, there's very limited potential impact.
> 2. Climate change making conditions ripe for fires
This is true.
> 3. PG&E was negligent in maintaining its infrastructure
This understates the case; PG&E was between grossly reckless and actively malicious in maintaining it's infrastructure.
If CA was requesting that the federal govt do controlled burns to better protect their citizens from wildfires, and the fed govt refused, then you would have a point, but from the research I’ve done (and I cited 3 random examples above) that’s not what happened. In fact it’s the opposite where organizations which controlled the land desperately wanted to perform prescribed burns, but were prevented from doing so because of local regulations.
As far as #1 being a political judgment: That you think #1 is false and 2 and 3 are true, one can guess how you feel about a host of other political issues, most have which have absolutely nothing to do with forest management.
There must be many more like this. Have the been replaced?
But a big reason the welders aren’t the focus of the blame is that they were the first ones to die in the explosion.
The consequences for PG&E were simply 4 millions here, which is a ridiculously small amount.
Also, you don’t treat individuals and companies the same way.
It's true that there are natural factors at play here, but in the case of Beirut, that might be more akin to asking "why is there such a large market for ammonium nitrate?"
In general, the study contends that the fires are fuel-dominated (too much forest) and not wind-dominated fires. It also contends that the California drought climate has contributed significantly to the problem.
> On the timber-rich interior US Forest Service (USFS) forests of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range, anomalously large fuel loading due to a century of successful fire suppression and timber harvesting practices has been a dominant factor
The problem is likely too much forest at these level of droughts, so forest management bears some responsibility. Economically speaking though if PG&E has been given such a lucrative business opportunity as a sanctioned monopoly, they ought to be held responsible as well.
Also, the part that is not clear to me and I would appreciate if someone has an answer - speaking cynically, if PG&E as a private company causes damage and tax payers pay, and if PG&E as a state run company causes damage and tax payers pay, why do I care who runs it? Is it just that the prevailing politics in California is that corporate=bad and civic=good?
> Plus I don’t see how this is strictly a California problem
Indeed it is not just a California problem. Believe it or not, there are other places in the country that do more controlled burns and manage fires better. The US Southeast burns nearly 2x the acreage as California on an annual basis.
The US Southeast has a land area of 580,000mi², California is 163,000mi². So, just to be even as a proportion of land area, the former would need to burn 3.5 times the acreage of the latter on an annual basis. Unless your claim is that California’s problem is that its controlled burns are too extensive, I'm not sure what your point is.
[1] https://assets.climatecentral.org/pdfs/May2019_Report_TheBur...
Then you should have said that.
And, to the extent you believe that's a problem, you should probably address the entity that controls most forest land in California (and directly owns and excludes from state control almost half of the total land of the state.) Their executive HQ can be contacted at:
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
There are similar problems with homes on beaches and in flood plains. Not only is private home ownership allowed, it's federally subsidized via the National Flood Insurance program.
That doesn't remove the onus on land management to engage in best forestry practices, but PG&E still has a significant burden of responsibility.
The majority (57%) of forest land in California is managed by the federal government even before considering the part managed by tribal governments, which are also out of state control though subject to federal oversight. Only 3% is directly under state control.
47.7% of the total land in California is federally owned (not uncommon in the West, where most federal land is; outside of 12 Western states, the Federal government owns only 4% of the land in the rest of the country.)
Western land management problems are, generally, problems of federal administration, not state government.
EDIT: But, it's important to note I am not saying the fires involving PG&E equipment are a federal problem rather than a PG&E problem. While the current federal administration and their cheerleaders likes to blame forest management and seems blind to the fact that, if true, that would be a federal issue, PG&E’s deliberate, knowing cutting of maintenance corners, curtailing inspections and cutting inspector training, knowingly leaving specific faulty equipment in place years after it was identified as faulty and dangerous, and covering up that it did all those things, are well documented. While they accepted a plea bargain to 84 counts of manslaughter, the facts documented in the investigation would seem to more than support conviction of 2nd degree murder (of the “abandoned and malignant heart” type), based on other cases where that has been applied in CA based on willful disregard of safety factors.
Personally, I do think that PG&E should have seen a harsher punishment. If some pyro had went in and started the same fire, they'd have been in jail for life. PG&E does this shit and they got a slap on the wrist.
But, your point is very valid. This place was a tinderbox. They were one lightning strike, on cigarette butt, one illegal bonfire away from going up in flames spectacularly.
The federal government has blame for not maintaining land.
Beyond that, they have blame for not aggressively addressing climate change (which has contributed to the level of dryness).
All of this points to a common societal issue. Rather than spend money to fix things, we wait until everything blows up before asking questions.
This shit scares me. How much more of our world is teetering on the edge of catastrophe?
Are you buying? It's really easy to justify spending other peoples money if you make everything about life and death.
If power companies what to run lines through these areas they need to take responsibility for what’s going to happen.
No, two things can be true at the same time.
1) CA sucks at forest management. 2) PG&G was grossly negligent in maintaining their power lines.
That both happened to be true at the same time just happened to be exponentially bad for all the people affected :(
Point is there's two parties with some degree of negligence.
No. He's saying that even if "PG&E were a competent and responsible company", the fire would still start, but through some other mechanism because it is a powder keg waiting to be set off by something. California wildfires are due to bad forest management policy spanning decades.
I think for a utility the risk should be very very close to zero, you can really do a lot of planning around it and make sure that if you're running infrastructure in a dangerous area to take sufficient measures to avoid all likely failures, and if one part breaks it doesn't end in a catastrophe. Maintenance schedules are there for a reason and keeping records helps improve the data for risk models.
But there might also be some blame on the general planning of the area, if it's too dangerous to run a power line, there shouldn't be one there. If other causes are likely, it shouldn't be unreasonable to expect this to be one of the government tasks to make sure that they set up some form of protection.
They can lower the risk by a lot, but are you ready to pay 65 cents (or whatever) a KW ? PG&E, with all its faults, has been put in an impossible position: one fire (that is bound to happen no matter what because wires fail) can bankrupt them since it can burn hundreds of thousand of acres, thousands of homes, untold deaths and other property destruction.
You can't really blame them for everything. Manage forests, stop building a town in the middle of the freaking forest and raise electricity rates for a complete audit of all the lines. Otherwise, nothing can be done, just talk.
As a utility they should have a set of rules and guidelines on how to operate safely. If it isn't possible in a situation, they should say no to the other party. With the rules they should be able to point at exactly what is missing and get the other side to fix their part (e.g. the risk or get them to pay extra for maintenance) or stop operating that bit. This looks like they intentionally looked the other way.
1) We are talking about criminal negligence, saving money is not a good reason of not dealing with crime.
2) we are talking about parts not being replaced in 100 years, the OP is not asking for some crazy level of maintenance thats going to break the bank.
3) once you take into account collateral damage and potential punitive damages, is it actually any cheaper?
4) whats the point of having cheap electricity if ut's inreliable, and ready to fail at any moment?
Thus the better model for utilities are Coop's, member / consumer owned businesses where the goal is delivering reliable, safe power at a reasonable rate.
Utilities by their nature lend themselves to Market Monopoly, regulations added to that almost assures it so for most people having that service provided by a member owner COOP instead of an Investor Owned corporation will result in a better safer, more reliable outcome
> Don't forget, at the current rate we're all subsidizing the rural power users.
I'm sure this is true to some extent—just as it is for telecommunications and mail delivery—but this tower wasn't just for rural power users, was it? I think it was some sort of high-voltage long-distance transmission line. There's a region-wide electrical grid, in part because power generation doesn't happen in city centers. Urban and suburban consumers depend on rural transmission lines.
> They should absolutely pay more if it costs more.
Rural areas produce the food urban areas need. I suppose your goal is to encourage people to move from rural areas to urban areas to lower total societal cost. Presumably you don't also want the food supply to fall and/or food insecurity to increase among the urban poor. So it'd be irresponsible to make this change without careful monitoring and matching policy changes to prevent those effects. You need to keep food affordable, to keep farming affordable, to keep providing services farmers need affordable, etc.
I have no idea. It's a hard question to answer. You are sure with no citation so I think you're wrong.
How do you define "rural" and how do you define a "town"? The US Census—which probably was directly or indirectly the source of your 10%—defines rural as not urban. Urban clusters must have a population of 2,500, [1] which already excludes a lot of what I'd call towns. And as a spot check, I don't see Grundy Center, IA on the list, despite meeting the population requirement (and not being included in a larger urban cluster AFAIK). Maybe it fails one of their other requirements. It is in their list of "incorporated places".
How do you define "involved in food production"? If I live with my family on a farm but picked "truck driver" as my occupation, am I involved in food production? If I am a teacher to farmers' kids, in a town of 500 people (see above), am I involved in food production? etc. Farmers don't exist in a vacuum. They need services like everyone else.
Even if you are right, "only about 10%" doesn't mean you won't cause pretty significant problems for everyone by messing with those folks...
[1] https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g...
We shouldn't just throw money at companies and hide the subsidies. The help should go to the people who ask for it and that way it's much clearer to everyone involved.
If anything they need to have more responsibility in such areas not less responsibility. If they can’t detect a tree is at risk or not then either cut down more trees or use underground power lines in that area.
The fires we are having are a human caused problem, and by human I don't necessarily mean PG&E. Trying to put this blame on one company is going to accomplish pretty much nothing and just lead to more deaths in the future as we piss around looking for the wrong people to blame and avoid solutions.
Also, underground cables still cause fires. I know this from experience.
Blaming PG&E is relevant because they are one of the few companies operating in these areas. When fires start in suburbs they rarely grow out of control, it’s when their far from human habitation that you see major issues. Another option would be adding sensors to PG&E equipment to allow for rapid responses and thus vastly limited growth.
Underground cables still causing fires doesn’t mean much when their significantly less likely to cause wildfires.
Do you know what 'Wildland Urban Interface' means?
Do you know where most of the houses burn?
Do you understand why this is the case?
PG&E is regulated, like most utilities are.
Where are/were the regulators?
Communities and forests in CA do not keep up adequate maintenance, that is taken as fact.
The super dry conditions coupled with wind exacerbate any fires that pop up.
We’ve had fires due to pge, gun shots (detwieller), a flat on a trailer causing sparks over 5 miles. Yet, the fires would not have been as severe if conditions on the forest floor were not so dire.
Plumas National Forest is pretty clean compared to many - yet winds kicked up on the Bear fire and Berry Falls was torched and Oroville threatened.
Santa Cruz mountains, many homes saved either had defensible space or neighbors nearby with such that stayed up and helped out.
Not sure I have a point, just some facts.
This tower looks weird.
Overhead three-phase transmission is super common in the EU and I've never seen anything like this "transposition tower" that swaps the wires around in the air and I don't really see why it would make much sense to do so mid-line. Wouldn't it be easier to swap the wires around at the start or end of a line, or inside a substation?
Also, as far as I can tell (from sometimes photographing these things with telephotos), the insulators seem to generally be bolted to the mast instead of being hooked in, so this entire failure mode of hooks wearing out (or dislodging?) doesn't exist. (Okay, now you have to worry about changing loads on bolts, fair enough).
The EU probably does that less frequently simply due to higher density, and thus fewer long stretches of transmission line. I've personally seen a transposition tower in the EU on a line running across a mountain, so they do exist.
I'd be interested to know if the twists have been removed from the lines. It might be the case that they've replaced the special twisting masts with other ways of twisting, eg taking the lines into a substation and re-orienting them on the way back out. If they've added a lot of substations as the land gets developed more, that may be the case.
Also, I'm sure twisted masts are a bit more expensive. So this might just be a gradual process of saving money as equipment gets replaced rather than any specific engineering goal. There's many other things that unbalance lines, and twisting masts may not make enough of a difference compared to other issues.
The upside is that rewiring them is somewhat safe and easy since you don't have to do it over the entire length between towers, only a few dozens meters on a single tower.
edit: quite a few places also use single-level masts, that don't have this issue at all.
What do you mean by "moving parts"? The US lines don't have any parts that move more than slightly, which EU lines do as well (they have too: the lines themselves expand and contract, and move in the wind, so the insulators have to have flexibility).
Don't stop there; remember they're regulated:
> California’s public utilities commission prioritized rates, green power; wildfires exposed shortcomings
* https://www.wsj.com/articles/pg-e-caused-over-400-fires-in-2...
* https://archive.is/czAB3 (paywall)
> A state lawmaker on Wednesday demanded an extensive review of the California Public Utilities Commission to determine whether regulators’ lax oversight enabled neglect at Pacific Gas & Electric that triggered catastrophic wildfires, a messy bankruptcy and exasperating blackouts.
* https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/01/16/california-lawmaker-d...
Or, once again, is it just an amazing coincidence that people have suddenly completely flipped their stance because it happened in California?
Please quote back to me where in my post I say "more regulation".
> Aren't you "regulations" people usually against regulations?
??? Who is the "you" that is being referenced?
Perhaps you are projecting onto me positions that I have not stated and may not actually hold. I have not stated whether more free market is good/better or bad/worse, or whether more regulations would be better or worse.
I'm simply pointing out that, in addition to PG&E, there may be other parties that may share responsibility in the chain of events that led to the situation at hand.
PG&E operates in a regulatory context: is it worth examining if that context contributed to the current situation that California is in? Are the regulations a problem? Or how they are interpreted or applied? Are more needed, or less? Perhaps they need to be streamlined (proscriptive versus descriptive)? I have no answers to these questions.
See also: the FAA and Boeing (737 MAX).
A part is tested to a point of failure, based on the quality parameters you specify. I'd put safety pretty high on a 115,000V line. Choose your sigma level based on your goals. I'd wager 97 years is out of the ballpark of "Yes, this might fail". And to save on cost, don't come back every year "OK, it's still OK." Replace it - it saves cost (and in this case, potentially lives).
So yes, I'd assign them blame. Be it an engineering part, an asphalt road, a power pylon.
There will be outliers, but this was an outlier of systematic negligence, with no (recorded) documentation prior to the year 2000.
Scheduled replacement saves costs in the long term, if bottom dollar is the aim.
Observe, test, measure, analyse, mitigate (did I create a new acronym to add to the vast QC vocabulary, OTMAM?). Scheduled replacement! Mitigate problems before they cause knock-on effects that shutdown a production line or endanger lives and livelihoods.
(I do get the sarcasm in your reply, BTW.)
No that would not be excusable for an American power company. Trees are trimmed and felled on a regular basis wherever they threaten power lines. Except, somehow, in California? That would be surprising.
They are also regulated and have to ask for permission to raise rates. This is the double sided coin of regulated utilities. There should be mandatory annual rate hikes and those should be mandated for maintenance and safety. It is verified and if not done, the utility pays a fine of 2x the rate hike. These systems are clearly aging and that needs to be built into the legislation. What happens if PG&E just goes bankrupt? People still need power. The infrastructure is still in shambles. The legislation must have a path to sustainability. This feels very similar to how the legislature has crippled the Post Office.
I watch flightaware pretty constantly, so it's easy to see their contracted helicopters up in the area.
Point being, they are trying -- I think people also fail to understand just how huge and rural Northern CA is.
$2.7 million all in all. they make >$500mil a year, they can afford to try harder.
What policy changes would those be? I've never lived near there so I don't have a clue.
[1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/california-tests-...
[2]: https://www.sierraclub.org/california/cnrcc/pge-clearcuts-po...
[3]: https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/Environment/Info/mha/cabrillosantayn...
Put the fire back in and, yes, they still have significant responsibility. The same way that someone setting off a firework or lighting up a barbecue in the brush or holding a gender reveal party is held responsible. They don't get off easier because they're a big business and it's tough for them. Their CEO and shareholders can live with a smaller return to properly take care of their equipment.
It has nothing to do with stopping all fires, or making them responsible for reducing them. It's holding them to account for causing one.
While we had some fuck-ups too, we have way larger pyhsical safety margins, as in more space between the wires, more space between the wires and ground, more space between wires and vegetation (which is cut back when growing into that space), while usually we don't even have weather which makes it dry like tinder.
Honestly, this all looks like toys to us. Inconceivable.
But no. They won't even replace a $12 hook.
... it is impossible to maintain records of WTF they are doing.
What makes it bad is how fire-prone California is. I'm of the opinion that humans should not be living in areas that burn regularly. And in PG&E's defense I doubt anyone was living near the lines when they were built 100 years ago.
If forest fire was an acceptable outcome of line failure 100 years ago when the lines were built, is it PG&E's fault that tons of people moved into this fire prone area? In my mind the cities nearby should have paid them to make the lines safer. To me this is like the people that move near a concert hall then complain that it's loud. Or move to a floodplain and complain when it floods...
It seems like it's been known that these lines were a fire risk for a very long time, and cities should have paid to make them safer before zoning so much land for residential. I assume, but cannot prove, that PG&E probably enumerated the risks when the land was sold or rezoned but their concerns were ignored. Having done a study on the wear of the hooks themselves, it seems unlikely they would not have notified communities nearby of the risk. My prediction is that they start to point fingers at the government, but people continue to sue the power company because sueing the government is hard.
Of course they can. A failure is an unplanned shutdown, and I doubt that leads to better outcomes than a planned shutdown. Also this thread demonstrates that PG&E replaced _other_ parts of the same tower.
> I'm of the opinion that humans should not be living in areas that burn regularly.
I'm of the opinion that climate change makes this a moving target, and this is simply one of the obvious repercussions.
> is it PG&E's fault that tons of people moved into this fire prone area?
No, it's their fault that even though they made $550 million in profits in 2018, and made other improvements to these towers, they still failed to keep them in proper repair. Also, it's not always "fire-prone." California experienced a bit of drought in 2018.
> and cities should have paid to make them safer
Shouldn't the company making $550 million in profits pay to make them safer?
PG&E would love to spend more money on maintenance. It doesn't cut into their profits, because their expenses and profits are set by state government commission anyway. Of course, the government commission has some incentive to keep the rate low, to make citizens happy, which makes it limit how much money PG&E can make and spend.
The above is not meant to imply that if PG&E worked like any normal company, they'd maintain their shit better -- I have no idea if they would. However, in the current regime, where CPUC exercises so much control over what PG&E does and how much money it makes and spends, the blame cannot be solely placed on PG&E side.
Who makes decisions at the CPUC? It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is circular logic.
Yeah, their series of felony convictions for violating the law regarding maintenance, and obstructing investigations into those failures, tells a very different story.
At some point companies need to take responsibility and be held accountable for their (in)actions. I know this is an unpopular opinion for HN, given its venture funding roots, but companies shouldn’t be given a free pass every time they screw up due to placing greed above all else.
My point here is not to argue that with less regulation, PG&E would do better job when it comes to maintenance — I don’t know if it would. However, considering how deeply regulated it actually is, and how much the regulator controls everything it does, some blame must also be placed on the regulator’s side.
...and did they ask? It's their job to ask. You can't blame the oversight organization's interference if it didn't interfere.
As clarification, your statement makes it sound like CPUC makes unilateral decisions about what PG&E can or cannot do when, in fact, CPUC makes those decisions based on requests made by PG&E. While CPUC does have a certain level of decision making power, a lot of their decisions are made based on what PG&E says is the right/necessary thing to do.
From the linked CPUC Decision Making in the above comment, there are multiple examples where PG&E have advocated for increased spending for safety purposes, but organisations such as the Division of Ratepayer Advocates and The Utility Reform Network were pushing back. Ultimately, however, it is the CPUC that weighs the arguments of the different parties and determines allowable spending.
A pedantically accurate retort, but ignores the real point.
Shutting down these lines for "inspection" is not feasible. These lines are the backbone of a grid that millions of people and services rely on 24/7/365, and there is zero redundancy. They are responsible for delivering power to hospitals, traffic lights, schools, airports, grocery stores, homes, businesses, and the list goes on.
Telling people "We need to turn off your power for a couple days every couple months for inspections" is going to create a lot of backlash, no matter how good the reason.
Also, the lines in question aren't like closing a two lane road in a small neighborhood for a couple hours where a few annoyed people can take alternate routes. It's more like shutting down all the freeways in a major city for a day just so that the DOT can finally get some street sweeping done. Good luck not starting a riot.
The problem is, these systems are old, too many people rely on them, and there is no redundancy.
If we want to take a step towards fixing the problem, the best start is to create redundancy for power supply to consumers, imo. Preferably more localized power generation via wind/solar/etc with some localized power storage.
Also, their profit margin for one year is not a fair argument towards them being at fault. Economics of public companies are about a lot more than "We made extra money, so we should have just spent it on making our product better". If shareholders don't make money in a company, they pull their investments. You pull enough investments in PG&E, that means they have to cut costs. Meaning, less money for inspections and improvements to the grid.
Economics at scale is not a black-and-white, napkin math, solvable problem.
Maybe not every couple of mounts, but they could probably get away with doing them more frequently than a century... Also, you can do visual inspection even without having to shut down power.
They were happy to tell people "We need to turn off your power for a couple of days because of wind." Granted, in this particular case, they weren't talking about the 115kV line that ultimately caused the fire.
To me, this just further highlights their "run it till it breaks" philosophy. This becomes a little more obvious when you read their plans for fixing this mess, and it involves a dual-circuit transmissions system. So, you can literally shut half of it down without completely stopping power.
It's also not impossible to serve one neighborhood with two power lines, in fact it's quite common.
> Also, the lines in question aren't like closing a two lane road in a small neighborhood
It is a single 115kV line. That's exactly like what it is. For the rest of the state your analogy falls apart because there is a significant amount of redundancy and additional capacity that can be used to route power. For example, lookup "Path 46" and the "Pacific DC Intertie." Which is interesting in it's own right because it can be run in two different modes, one for nearly double the power capacity in certain conditions.
> The problem is, these systems are old, too many people rely on them, and there is no redundancy.
The California regulator has been asleep at the switch here, and they do share some culpability, but again.. it's not impossible to design around this constraint. You're going to pay twice as much for aluminum and nearly twice as much for everything else, but it's not impossible to solve. Just no one wanted to and no one was going to make them.
> Also, their profit margin for one year is not a fair argument towards them being at fault.
They are a state granted monopoly. I think it's entirely fair.
> Economics at scale is not a black-and-white, napkin math, solvable problem.
Sure, but you can start on the napkin and see if you're even in the ballpark. I think if you put even $100 million down on a napkin, you'd be surprised at what can fit in your ballpark.
No, stronger than that. The problems with these lines were noticed without shutting them down, at least by someone, but it didn't get acted on.
We don't even know if replacing these parts would have required shutdowns, but it would have been easy to justify shutdowns for such visible problems.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Wilson Wilson was the driving force behind the 1996 legislation that deregulated the state's energy market, which was the first energy utilities deregulation in the U.S. and aggressively pushed by companies such as Enron.[28]
I'm not an infrastructure professional, I'm in automation and manufacturing, but all too often I come across equipment that must never be shut down and must be functional 100% of the time, but which has been run long past its service life. Windows 98 or XP computers on their 9th resurrection due to parts from eBay, castings full of helicoils, electrical cabinets with wires strung across like cobwebs... If the business was successful before the machine was built, downtime now costs tens of thousands of dollars per hour, and the whole machine cost 500,000 dollars 100,000 hours ago, maybe someone should start thinking about building a replacement (or, better, a pair of replacements) and phasing this one out?
I know the front office likes to write off machine depreciation as a tax deduction. With a 10 year useful life on a $500k machine, you get $50k in tax deductions. In the 11th year, you get no tax deduction, but the machine is still making money.
I feel strongly that there ought to be some kind of financial penalty for operating a machine that's depreciated beyond its claimed useful life - not a direct tax penalty, but some kind of non-cash-expense liability that subtracts from the big positive number on the front page of the quarterly financials which the CEO uses to claim they deserve a bonus.
PG&E's more regulated than just painting them as a for-profit business with $550M in the black would suggest. They have maintenance and capital expenditures that they need to make. But those regulated books didn't show the single-point-of-failure risks and long-past-useful-life liabilities, and they should!
(This is from memory, so if I got any specifics wrong, see replies for corrections.)
The proof is in the thread. Barely 10 years ago, PG&E pleaded guilty to another felony, when its under-maintained gas pipeline in San Bruno exploded, killed 8 people, and leveled a neighborhood. That utility has a cultural problem going to the very top that prioritizes profit over safety, and I sincerely hope it emerges from bankruptcy reformed.
There is something seriously wrong with PGE and it's attitude towards it's infrastructure and public safety.
The state next to Victoria does, and did recently.
https://www.sapowernetworks.com.au/data/304387/catastrophic-...
Regulations should require sufficient redundancy for scheduled outages on individual lines for regularly scheduled service during non-critical times.
Communities should not be allowed to form, and should be actively wound down if they are within dangerous areas with seasonal problems. Fires, Floods, Extreme doubts, unsustainable water table use, etc. This should _begin_ at a federal level with a re-location act, and should involve planning and support at every stage of government to proceed in an orderly way for society.
Edit: Also, of course, the company is still at fault, I forgot to point that out while going over other aspects of the systemic failure of society (people and organizations of people) as a whole.
But when we abandon most of the West (earthquake, fire, drought), midwest (flooding, tornados, east and particularly gulf coast (hurricanes), there's a whole lot of economic output lost from working land (farming, mineral extraction, etc.) that won't be replaceable when you crowd the remaining population into whatever safe bubble you have left.
The reason people live in dangerous areas is because they are often inherently economically productive, and in fact many of the things that make land suitable to human habitation are associated with periodic risk (freshwater supply and flood risk tend to go together, for instance.)
PGE demonstrates neglectful behaviours towards all of its infrastructure. It has transmission lines everywhere and has the same general attitude to maintenance and safety. Ask the people of San Mateo how safe they feel with PGEs gas lines. There are serious long term problems inside PGE and it's doubtful they are going to change.
PGE presents a serious risk to Californians everywhere.
Is the local government dissolved, so the county or state pays for this?
Any info is appreciated, I am very curious of how this works in practice.
Instead, the approach is they will simply shut off the power during these high risk days.
Interesting that they actually warned that they could shut off power in the days leading up to the fire, but never actually did. To me, those are the meetings to zero in on when it comes time to lay the blame. I wonder, what was the calculus to cutting power (which itself can have health & safety impacts to the populace) and how much of it was political?
PG&E has 100,000 miles of transmission lines, so perhaps about a million of these towers. To put that in perspective, historically they spend billions of dollars a year on maintenance and upgrade on the order of 100-200 miles of transmission lines per year.
You don't need to physically inspect every item to be safe, here. You rely on precaution, standard shelf life, and operational procedures.
If that's difficult, so be it. That's the price people pay for choosing to live in the sticks. This should all be accounted for.
You think that hospitals inspect every item every 3 months? Hell no. A lot of things have lifecycles and it's just replaced because that's the tolerance, and it's safer in the long run. PG&E should be the same.
PGE took this information and did nothing.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EiErOkaUMAA178t?format=png&name=...
This is not how you maintain critical infrastructure. This is embracing failure and simply not caring about the consequences.
I’m not sure a single person at any one time has ever knowingly caused this much damage through negligence. I mean ever in human history. Failures this large due to negligence tend to be systemic. But it would be a very interesting to hear an example.
The closest I can think of could be some of the famous bridge design failures, where people died, and people did go to jail, but not forever.
Because ensuring safety of the lines during very high risk days is impossible, a big part of the strategy was to add local generation redundancy so that they can switch off the transmission lines during high risk events but still keep the power on. These redundant stations would have to be natural-gas plants though, and CA has carbon-free mandates that prohibit them, so they have been prevented from implementing this strategy.
Frankly, it’s not clear that demand for this unreliable grid electricity can support the growth of the ratebase (the property being maintained).
At some point the ROI on switching to solar and batteries is net positive in the first month (based on financing the cost at a reasonable rate), and I’m not sure that point is much higher than $0.50/kWh for a household using 600kWh+ per month.
The more people that just opt-out of a grid connection entirely, the fewer people the ratebase is divided across, the higher rates must be set for those that remain.
Luckily the lithium-ion supply is fairly limited right now, but over the next 10-20 years that won’t remain the case.
PG&E currently has about $40 billion of debt, and recently issued $5 billion of debt at a B1 rating (junk). These issues also drive up their borrowing costs, which further shows up in the rates.
This is a good overview of the challenges they face;
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/four-hurdles-pg...
I predict that in 10-15 years we could hear calls to outlaw or prohibitively tax any new battery/solar systems that take new houses in CA off-grid, because the grid will be in “solar death spiral”.
Replacing them every 30 years won't bancrupt anyone.
However unlike PG&E we take high resolution photographs of every major component on a transmission tower, and manually inspect and classify every image take. Images of this type would have identified this fault, at least once during inspections taken during the last couple of decades.
Source: Worked for a company that did these inspections.
yes, they can.
>I doubt anyone was living near the lines when they were built 100 years ago.
Paradise, CA was on a railroad map ca 1900:
Along similar lines of thinking, humans should not be living in areas that flood regularly, or that have earthquakes regularly, or that have hurricanes regularly, or that have tornadoes regularly, or that have insufficient water, or that have excessive heat or cold regularly, or that have high rates of animal-transmitted disease.
This doesn't leave many places for people to live.
Yes an asteroid could hit anywhere but the notion that suburban sprawl out into every corner of the wilderness is justified by that is ludicrous.
But there’s got to be a higher resolution one out there.
But people like living near the oceans, mountains, and where weather is nice. That should be okay, but the government shouldn't be throwing money at them. Let them know the area is dangerous, and if they want to live there, they're on their own.
I get miffed when we bail these people out with federal funds for disaster relief. They should be required to have private insurance, with insurance free to set rates based on risk. If it's too expensive to get insured, don't live there
(Yes, it failed, but you have to admit that it had a pretty good run! 97 years is not bad for a moving part!)
I personally achieved completely automatic renewals (https://jrock.us/posts/rotating-envoy-certs/) but it involved some work. (It also works so well that I don't even believe it. I have to go manually check from time to time because my monitoring never shows me any errors, and there are so many moving parts that I am continually amazed that everything works perfectly.)
Other people just aren't willing to do that. They like their nginx/Apache sitting on a lonely Linux box that they ssh into once every 5 years. The cost of changing any of that software is high, and they don't have a good system for running new software, like Certbot. We definitely didn't fix that.
Father: Son, some day, all of this will be yours. And since we don't expect to do maintenance, some other day, it will explode and kill you or your grandchildren.
If you build something to last 100 years, you leave little incentives for maintenance and all but guarantee a catastrophic failure a century from now.
If you build something to last 10 weeks, you're creating a lot of waste - wasted labor, money, energy and natural resources, involved in producing and shipping replacement parts, as well as performing the maintenance job. You're also making everything that depends on your construction more fragile - the system is always a couple weeks from catastrophic failure, so it won't survive a localized crisis - like a natural disaster, pandemic, economic problems, maintenance company going bankrupt, etc.
So what's the correct trade-off function[0] here? How can we minimize waste and maximize reliability, while ensuring necessary maintenance happens on time?
--
[0] - f: specifics of project -> trade-off
I jest.
Regardless, it seems ‘waste’ is what is needed to drive the economy.
Wasted labor is still people employed, getting a paycheck, and participating in the economy.
I don’t know if we want to eliminate waste without UBI or some other social safety net.
If we were to eliminate waste, less people would have jobs.
... or more people would be available to take on work that's more needed and not currently being done. Otherwise, why have machines and technology, if they all primarily automate tasks your fellow laborers could be doing?
I think that work which exist only to provide jobs is a waste at societal level. But it's also a waste at company level - why would you make your product labor-intensive to maintain, where you could make it robust instead? In reality, the trick is to ensure you're not the one paying for maintenance - and then you save money by making more fragile products.
-- My comment about a family above was sarcasm, not a picture of reality. A large organization is quite capable of determining what maintenance is needed for its infrastructure and doing that maintenance. PG&E knew quite a while back that they were in trouble here. It wasn't the long time frame but profit and regulatory incentive structure that drove their decisions. They'd have done the same for short-lived infrastructure. They've done the same thing in the case of tree-trimming; something they should be doing constantly and haven't (note, living in Portland, or, the local utility, Portland General Electric (called PGE for kicks), trimmed trees with abandon, which is better than the alternative).
Sure, designing for maintainability is a nice strategy but fixed lifetime + replace is an effective strategy too.
Basically, the whole line of reasoning about short versus long lifetimes is a complete red herring and the neglect and decay of PG&E's infrastructure was an explicit on the company's part and documented as such and has nothing to do with how infrastructure was designed.
Fail safely. In this case the failure of the beam should have broken the cables or fallen in such a way to not create a pathway across the non-zero phases.
Of course PG&E has a cultural problem, not a technical problem. So I doubt they would do this at all.
I doubt people back then were expecting this to be left unmaintained for 97 years.
Wtf is the role of the private sector then? What are they contributing?
US corporate charter exists to exonerate decision makers from personal liability for crimes committed by the company. That absolution of responsibility is in my opinion the primary motivator for having incorporation at all - its a shield explicitly designed to protect you from culpability.
At that a fair judgment would then be something along the lines of - all acting leadership of PG&E or any other corporation using their immunity to be negligent and cause harm must disbar their ownership or face incarceration for being a threat to life. Because they are when they behave like this, at scales that the most deranged mass murderer could only hope to approach.
You do go on to agree that there should be disincentives for antisocial behaviour, so I think mostly we agree. Only that perhaps I would consider incarceration a reasonably cost-effective disincentive for such behaviour.
That's just a restating of an idea that superiors are responsible for the actions of their subordinates. I think it's called "vicarious liability", though IANAL.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_groundwater_contaminat... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Fire_(2018)#Infrastructur... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion
Imagine some asshole puts an incendiary in an orphanage, and rigs it to go off when a nearby speed trap detects someone going more than 10mph over. Eventually, someone does, and the orphanage catches fire. Further, the group responsible for constructing and maintaining the orphanage hasn't looked at the place for 50 years, and so all the orphans are trapped inside and die.
Who's at fault? Obviously the the asshole, and almost certainly the maintainer. But the driver? They were the direct cause of everything, and had they not broken the law those orphans would still be alive! Right?
But most people will identify the driver as being at worst minimally at fault. They may have triggered things, and it may have even been predictable that speeding could kill someone, but someone was going to come along and trigger things eventually, or the speed trap would misfire, or lightning would strike the orphanage and cause a fire directly.
To me, PG&E is the driver here. Yes, they didn't do maintenance they should have. But as fires have demonstrated this year... fires are going to happen. Lightning, gender reveals, a broken muffler... Something will provide the spark. So instead we should blame the people who set up the situation such that a fire in the wrong place could kill dozens.
Which, IMO, is two things. One is the set of forestry management practices that lets brush build up to the point that crown fires are inevitable - which we do by putting out all fires as soon as possible - and the second is constructing houses to be vulnerable to forest fires. Forest fire proof construction is possible! It's just not quite so cheap, or might not allow a tree right up next to a house in the most aesthetically pleasing fashion.
But until we fix at least one of (and preferably both of) those things, fires like this will keep happening. No matter how much PG&E gets fined.
But let's not apologize for PG&E. Read the whole Butte DA report. It's extremely damning without needing to resort to hyperbole or sensationalism. PG&E has willfully ignored problems and chosen to "run to failure" effectively their entire system, ignoring outcomes of those failures.
And on top of that, they're absolutely milking the ratepayer.
Separately, everyone responsible for the failing tower to be able to light such a disastrous fire, should be prosecuted as well. PG&E certainly isn't solely responsible for the fire, but they are completely responsible for the tower failing.
Its quite possible for the former to be accidental and the latter deliberate, such as when you both deliberately reduce inspections and deliberately by policy eliminate the training for inspectors. And when you create a program with a name that indicates it is being used to follow up on safety problems to deceive regulators and just use it as a slush fund for capital improvements with no safety criteria. Which are just a few of the things the investigation that led to PG&E’s manslaughter convictions in the Camp Fire (not it's first felony convictions in deadly incidents!) revealed.
They specifically and knowingly failed to maintain the lines, eliminating training for the people who were supposed to inspect the lines, and took active steps to conceal those facts; the lack of maintenance was a deliberate choice, and, also, they specifically and knowingly left many broken parts on the line for extended periods of time, which was extensively documented in the investigative document produced from the investigation that led to their manslaughter charges.
I've seen this sentiment in other replies also. To me it implies that you're saying that fires are being started at near the maximal rate allowed by the forest conditions, so that increased sparks are ultimately meaningless. Is this the case?
In this example, we are meant to assume that the incendiary is the equivalent of fuel overload in mismanaged forests. But the analogy is bunk. No one is planting bombs (it's not a willful act), the policy of stopping fires was once considered good, and when it was no longer considered good, there were also issues of homes and property to protect. And then there is climate change that is ostensibly creating dryer and longer fire seasons, so the underlying factors have changed.
Yet the thought puzzle is designed to have obvious answers (aka bias) that the author wants us to apply in the real world. This is manipulation. Give us the real world problem and more information to think about it, we are smart enough.
Anytime a utility decides to upgrade their system they have to think about a couple things. First they need money and that requires them to secure funding from their regulatory body, which will determine if they can raise the cost of electricity for the customers. Next they have to put proposals for work out for contractors. Normally utilities are not staffed to handle major projects so they might hire a 3rd party firm to manage the work. The utility must schedule outages, which requires planners to balance the needs for maintenance with the need for long-term upgrades. If they are going to replace lines, they might as well upgrade to a higher voltage, which may require the replacement of equipment in substations, which can take years depending on the size of the sub. Time of year must be taken into consideration because electrical usage in the summer is higher, and taking one circuit out add load to other circuits and could cause failures.
You might work through all these scenarios and find yourself at the mercy of nature due to endangered animals. Birds will nest on powerlines, and prevent any maintenance to go on for months. Even if you want to do hot-work via helicopter, you are prevented from encroaching the bird by a buffer to prevent disturbing the bird. I don't know how big PG&E's system is, or how much they are willing to spend/are spending now on maintenance but this is an industry-wide problem that some utilities are handling better than others. Maybe wireless electrical transmission will solve this?
... long pause ...
(Yes I have uBlock Origin on my desktop, but I'm not on my desktop)
Also see invidio.us (alternative YouTube frontend) and Bibliogram (alternative Instagram frontend).
"on June 16 of this year, PG&E pled guilty to charges of unlawfully causing a fire and 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter. their penalty? a $4 million fine."
They also settled for damages from several fires (including the Camp Fire) for $25.5 billion, of which 13.5 billion was earmarked for victims.
"Normalization of deviance is a term used by the American sociologist Diane Vaughan to describe the process in which deviance from the right as in the correct or proper behavior becomes normalized in a corporate culture.
Vaughan defines this as a process where a clearly unsafe practice comes to be considered normal if it does not immediately cause a catastrophe: "a long incubation period [before a final disaster] with early warning signs that were either misinterpreted, ignored or missed completely".
The original example cited by Vaughn was the events leading to the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, but the concept has also been applied to clinical practice in medicine and aviation safety."
The traditional, aerospace human factors explanation occurs over timescales from weeks to years.
It normally starts with something incorrect (the deviation) that doesn't cause an immediate problem. Examples would be O-ring burnthrough on Space Transportation System Solid Rocket Booster segments, or maybe a pilot who is always a few knots too fast over the threshold on his approaches. Both are problems - everyone knows it - but since it hasn't cause a problem yet its allowed to slide until it just becomes common practice.
The key point here is that the system (machine, human, organization) has acquired a deviation that means it no longer operates like it was designed and is not fixed because everyone becomes accustomed to the deviation. This degraded state is now the new normal.
One day the weather is too cold, and another assumption about how the system operates is violated. The O-rings don't seat properly when the boosters are fired. The runway has ice on it. Hot gasses escape through the booster joint and impinge on the LH2 tank, and the aircraft finds its braking authority is insufficient, and a runway overrun occurs.
I love to malign PG&E, an organization that I despise, but these forests are loaded guns waiting to go off. If we had zero PG&E towers, they would still catch fire and explosively burn, given the levels of built up fuel.
My source for this is very current and immediate: my volunteer fire department in Marin County just did a post-op debrief, last night, on the (relatively small, 5000 acre) Point Reyes National Seashore fire (the "Woodward" fire) and the photos and descriptions we were shown were very clearly indicative of dense, overgrown, heavy fuel loads.
PG&E, the utility, had reports describing the level of repairs their lines needed and chose to instead not to perform those repairs and return money to their stockholders - so there's a consciousness here.
Start with invasive shrubs like blackberries. They spread wildly and require a ton of work to maintain. (And before people say “use goats”, know they are not a magic bullet.) Limbing trees, where you remove branches under 10’, can help prevent “ladder fires”, but it’s time consuming or costly if you need to hire someone to do it.
Forests need to be thinned, invasive species kept at bay, and fuel in general needs to be removed or burned. And this stuff is alive so it’s a perennial thing to deal with. Even with grants, profit from timber, etc, it’s a lot of work, time, and money.
In retrospect it’s easy to point fingers at the National Forest Service and criticize their policy of putting fires out. Imagine for a second the opposition they’d face had they just let fires burn for the past half century. Even if it’s the “right” thing to do, it would be a very hard sell. People generally want to see action, and have a hard time seeing inaction as “doing something.”
Similarly with controlled burns. I’d love to burn our land every year the way that Native Americans used to — but it’s not without risk. There’s simply too much fuel.
Up in Oregon things have historically been very wet. Comically so. The result is a lot of lush vegetation. Which dries out in a drought and becomes fuel. As these unprecedented burns happen more and more frequently, they push forests into new phases of succession, where a new cycle of shrub-drought-fire becomes the norm. These firestorms are a different breed from the mild creeping forest fires that are part of a natural forest ecosystem.
All of that said, forest management is incredibly important. We need a new approach, and I’d argue we need more grants for the landowners who can’t afford to do the work necessary to prepare their land for this new climate. We also need to take a serious look at all of the development in the wildland-urban-interface and figure out how we’re going to address it. And yes, to the chagrin of many here, we need to address Climate Change.
But, all of that said, none of that IMHO absolves PG&E from gross negligence in failing to properly maintain equipment in areas of known heightened risk.
That said I wouldn't want my house burned down from a forest fire either.
But in the past few thousand years, they were actively managed. Native American Indians burned countless acres annually to maintain a particular ecosystem. Oregon, known now for its Douglas Fir trees, was largely an oak savanna. Oaks are fire resistant and provide food for big game. The annual fires kept other vegetation in check.
Humans have an outsized effect on the planet; I fail to see the humor in why we should recognize our impact, and our moral and ethical responsibilities to the web of life we’re both a part of and depend on.
1. Crazy renewable edicts that do not have base power assumptions (see blackouts over summer).
2. Maintenance programs that are not overseen by a third part. This story. Please read just to see the sheering off of the c hook and the fact it might have been 100 years old!
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_groundwater_contaminat...
Tweets make excellent momentary entertainment. Let's stop using them for anything else.
Maybe I just had low-expectations when I clicked through and I was pleasantly surprised that it represented a useful failure analysis.
It looks like a minor non issue to me. But this being California, I imagine the kind of people in that before mentioned circle jerk might include lawyers, politicians, etc. that are looking to get in on the action (i.e. lawsuits, publicity, and other melodrama) that has nothing to do with the actual technical problem. The latter I imagine is a simple matter of this company getting off their ass and replacing the rusting parts in question.
In short, what's the agenda of the person that wrote this?
twitter/FB/etc serve as infomation sinkholes. sure, you may get a million likes and RT'd by influencers such as Kanye, but after a few days, whatever you wrote is forgotten and no longer discoverable. then it's as if you never wrote it at all, because nobody else will ever find it.
i miss the old web. i miss web rings. i miss just casually surfing from link to link and stumbling across serendipitous information dense and concisely written essays about some thing out there in the world that taught me valuable knowledge.
social media must die. the old web must return.
Why is this framing so prevalent? Isn’t the real issue that you simply cannot do prescribed burns in places where we have houses (and now our houses are everywhere)?
I get it. It’s hard to deal with decades of poor land use planning, but isn’t it better to at least admit it so we don’t continue to perpetuate this mistake?
But I feel our approach to assigning blame still relies on finding a singular villain - and we end up with politically oversimplified narratives about cause and effect.
it's like the line from the old RAW book: "there is no governor anywhere."
https://assets.rte-france.com/prod/public/2020-07/Sch%C3%A9m...
"RTE France" is the entity in charge of those lines.
Plenty of lenghty docs for 10+ years plans:
https://www.rte-france.com/analyses-tendances-et-prospective...
Surprisingly, they also have lines that are 80-100 years old. I hadn't been following this story before, but upon first reading, I was shocked that infrastructure from 100 years ago was still in-place, original, and in operation. Now that seems normal.
My guess was that equipment would be replaced every 40-50 years, or at least renewed. The graph implies that the French policy is to replace after 45-70 years of service, but to allow older ones in limited cases. And they are saying the ones that are 70 years old need to be replaced in 5-10 years, so they allow up to 80 years.
I suppose that if the infrastructure is tested and maintained, and still cheap enough to maintain safely, there is no reason to replace it. As this story shows, you have to know your equipment and it's state of maintenance, and of course actively manage it safely and efficiently.
1 broken century-old hook => $16,650,000,000 damages.
That's like blaming the welders for the Lebanon explosion when in reality it was a combination of like 4 different fails over the course of many years.
There are always other causes and improvements. From how the maintenance is performed and verified, to how the system works and is designed, to the process and culture of the organization.
There were multiple failures on PG&E's part, to an extent, but they were all under the maintenance umbrella. Performing maintenance. Verifying maintenance. The culture around maintenance.
The proximate cause of the fire was a broken hook.
The other failures were:
* Hook was not maintained
* Tower was not adequately inspected
* Record keeping was insufficient to recognise the need for maintenance
* Power lines were built in hard-to-maintain, fire-prone places
* Nobody within PG&E sounding the alarm about this the hook problem specifically, or the lack of maintenance more broadly (or not sounding it loud enough)
* Lack of controlled burns (or equivalent forestry management) that would have reduced the spread of fire
* Homes built in fire-prone areas
* Low population density, with higher per-capita costs of infrastructure maintenance
* Dry conditions, due to climate change, due to energy policy(?)
* PG&E's bizarre blend of the worst parts of public and private business, and their perpetual bankrupt-but-still-operating status.
* Lack of political leadership able/willing to come up with and enact a master plan to stop wildfires
4 is unavoidable
5 is maintenance
6,7,8,9 are not PG&E
10 is "bad management"? Sure, that's a root cause, though a massively vague one.
11 is not PG&E
So yes if you're concerned about external problems then there are things you can mention. I'd never argue that housing location and fire management and climate aren't factors! But in a discussion of what PG&E did wrong it's basically all maintenance.
What I mean is: the first poster in this thread mentioned a broken hook causing $16 billion in damage, but the difference between a broken hook causing $1 million in damage and a broken hook causing $16 billion in damage was largely out of PG&E's hands.
> 10 is "bad management"? Sure, that's a root cause, though a massively vague one.
To be more specific: PG&E is a 'private company' but it has no competitors, regulations set the prices it can charge, regulations set the shareholder returns, regulations stop them refusing customers, regulations dictate what they can build and where, and regulations allow them to keep bouncing in and out of bankruptcy with minimal consequences.
If a company's already bankrupt and has been for decades, any new CEO is going to insist on a bankruptcy-proof pay package. And what's the difference between liabilities of a million dollars and a trillion dollars when the electricity's going to keep flowing, the prices are going to stay the same, and the CEO's going to take home the same pay?
That's true but they knew that and it was their responsibility and it was easy to prevent if they hadn't failed at maintenance in ten different ways.
I call this sort of thing "three wise monkeys compliance."
The US power infrastructure is dated and super fragile, fixing it would be super costly and would take a long time. The profit oriented nature of these companies is what stops this from being tackled, utilities should be run at cost with public safety as the first order of priority, not profits.
Renovating US infrastructure seems more prescient than another trillion dollar funemployment program.
"Generation and transmission need to be separated. Generation can be a perfectly competitive market and is naturally suited to private business. Transmission is inherently a monopoly and should be publicly owned. Combining the two in one for-profit company is asking for trouble."
This was made illegal during the rise of the automobile, all those companies were forced to split up. This greatly weakened the transit companies and helped undo them (as desired by the oil and auto cabal).
One thing such a grid, and our management approach to it, has to do is not fail catastrophically, showering everything around it with sparks and cutting power to who knows how many customers. I assert that this is not a good thing regardless of whether a huge fire is started and people die as a result.
If you look at PG&E's outage map, it has a way of putting a smiley face on failure. You'll find it at https://m.pge.com/#outages, but of course you will have to look below the fold.
When you do that you will see the "CUSTOMERS AFFECTED" key. If less than 50 customers are affected by a power outage, PG&E calls that "green". There are always many green dots on their map in the Bay Area, whenever I've looked. That's another symptom of simply running things until they fail, and another indicator of the current state of our electrical infrastructure, and certainly an artifact of the culture at PG&E and the politics that allow it to exist.
As we reinvest in and modernize our grid, we need financial incentives for operators around reliability, and standards for both construction and monitoring that support their efforts to improve that. That could begin at the federal level, if we had a functioning federal government, in much the way the largely-successful things we did prior to 2016 have done (the NASA commercial crew program, what-used-to-be-the-CDC, NIST, etc.).
If we could put the right incentives in place and then take one more step - prioritize modernization of the grid in fire-prone areas - then we can look forward to a point in time when we're not shutting off people's power because the wind blows.
Sure, fires start for other reasons and we're living through them now. That's no excuse for keeping our profit motivations in the wrong place. Fewer fires is helpful and reliable power is helpful. Let's start paying businesses for reliability (and efficiency, and renewability while we're at it).
We're getting what we have because we're paying pretty much exclusively for the number of kilowatt hours delivered to where. A lot of things have changed since somebody came up with that. Seems we should blow that bit up, insert ways to measure additional things, and pay for performance.
This brings the Growth Ponzi Scheme to mind:
> What we have found is that the underlying financing mechanisms of the suburban era — our post-World War II pattern of development — operates like a classic Ponzi scheme, with ever-increasing rates of growth necessary to sustain long-term liabilities.
https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
PG&E maintains how many linear miles of power lines? How many towers like this one? Built how long ago?
The reason the Growth Ponzi keeps happening is the cities fail to account for ongoing maintenance costs. When those costs come due, the easiest way out is to build more to increase revenue.
Setting aside the question of intent and liability, I wonder if something similar happened to PG&E.
I am sure someone checked the math etc, but an open hook with decreasing diameter towards the tip seems an odd design choice for a metal-on-metal arrangement that is being pulled hard by winds.
That is not to say that any system keeps on going forever without proper maintenance...
And this makes think if this could be designed so that inspection is easy and a replacement could be scheduled before the breaking point is reached. Maybe something like the marks in car tire treads that show how much wear is acceptable before needing to replace the tire without needing any equipment.
Like a dripping gutter slowly wearing a groove into a block of stone below it.
Being a closed loop would now have changed the outcome here, at best it might have bought more time. But as this fault probably developed over a time period of almost a century, I doubt that more time would have changed the outcome.
> And this makes think if this could be designed so that inspection is easy and a replacement could be scheduled before the breaking point is reached.
Based on the photos, it looks like the groove cut into the hook was almost half the width of the hook at the point of failure. Either the hook simply wasn’t inspected, or the inspector simply didn’t care that solid lump of steel had a half inch slot cut into it. I would hope that something like that would be a clear enough indicator that the hook needed replacing.
We build software for drones to inspect power lines, and this is exactly the kind of anomaly we are looking for, using AI. Unfortunately PG&E is not a customer yet..
If only state run wasn't even worse in the US it could be a better way. It baffles the mind that electricity, gas, internet, etc. is being run on a for-profit basis. Clearly these are all in the nations interest to have top-notch.
The common theme is that this was all done a century ago in a progressive push that was unaware of any environmental consequences or long-term maintenance needs. For example, the Columbia river (NW) was so dammed up for electric generation, it impacted salmon spawning. Today, USACE spends something like $5 million a year to make salmon elevators and in many places, literally truck them upriver so that commercial fishermen can later retrieve about $450k worth of salmon a year downriver.
And as it turns out, we didn't need that much electricity to begin with and the demand never materialized in time to capitalize on it (manufacturing). And unlike salmon, we can't truck electricity elsewhere.
Edit: since I'm a dam dork, here's a construction type breakdown I did five years ago. Edit 2: dam_type not related to year_built, summaries just placed next to each other.
count dam_type year_built count
70,278 Earth <1900 14,623
9,031 (Unknown) 1900-09 2165
1,446 RCC 1910-19 1964
1,215 Gravity 1920-29 2321
724 Concrete 1930-39 3930
455 Other 1940-49 4115
420 Rockfill 1950-59 11,517
201 Masonry 1960-69 18,717
136 Buttress 1970-79 12,910
103 Arch 1980-89 5189
58 Stone 1990-99 4393
51 Timber Crib 2000-09 2290
16 Multi-Arch
And aside from the proximate cause of the fire, the thread highlights a deeper and more insidious issue, namely the diffusion of management responsibility for decisions and their consequences. It seems to me that delegating inspections to an algorithm would make that problem much worse, not better.
By employing such effort and maintaining towers more responsibly, PG&E at least could partially evade the blame and liability. IMO this could be a good startup idea if founders know the right people.
> When the C hook broke and the hanger fell, the steel-reinforced aluminum conductor that carries 115,000 V bounced and shorted out against the metal side of the tower, spraying chunks of white-hot aluminum across the ground underneath the tower. The weather was extremely hot, dry, and windy, and this immediately started a fire. This was the Camp fire, the most destructive fire in California history.
> [...] How long was it rubbing against the hanger bracket? The answer is that we don't know. We think it is about 97 (!) years old, but we're not sure because PG&E didn't keep records about it. After the fire, many of the pieces were taken to the FBI lab's metallurgical unit at Quantico, and they determined that the C hook was made of cast iron. Not all the C hooks on these 100-year old towers were made of cast iron--many were made of steel. but again: no records.
> PG&E knew that this was a problem because at some point they bolted on L brackets and moved the C hooks onto the new brackets, probably concerned that the old bracket hole had mostly worn through. We don't know when they did this because they kept no records. And yes, PG&E is legally required to inspect these towers periodically. We don't know exactly when, because (you guessed it) no records from before the year 2000.
> There's even documented evidence that PG&E knew about the problem with the C hooks and hangers and yet did nothing.
> > [...] to opine the keyhole wear was occurring at a rate of .007 inches per year. Based upon the average wear rate, the PG&E lab scientist determined the useful life of those hanger plates to between 97 and 100 years. PG&E now had scientific confirmation of the body-on-body wear caused by the constant movements of the C hooks within the hanger holes and an estimate of average wear per year. Nothing was done. The report was not distributed through the company and no targeted inspections of older C hooks and hanger holes were ordered. Based upon this report, a reasonable person, knowing they had C hooks which were 90+ years old hanging in hanger holes that were 90+ years old would have taken immediate action to determine the condition of those hooks and holes. The fact PG&E did nothing is evidence of completely and absolute indifference to the inherent danger of a C hook or hanger hole breaking.
> > Despite the efforts of PG&E personnel to distance the company from the "Run to Failure" model, the evidence clearly establishes quite the opposite. [...] Catastrophic failures of the Caribou-Palermo line was not if "if"question; it was a "when" question.
> Sadly, this is not new behavior for PG&E. it's just like the San Bruno gas explosion.
> > PG&E electrical transmission policies and records prior to the Camp Fire mirrored PG&E gas transmission policies prior to the San Bruno catastrophe. [...] The San Bruno investigation also established PG&E intentionally was using the least expensive method of inspection in the least expensive manner. The chosen inspection method also saved money because problems that are not found do not need to be repaired. The investigation also established records relating to inspections, both justifying methods of inspection and the inspection reports, was fraudulent.
---
> [...] So despite PG&E's criminal negligence, there's a good chance that Paradise would have burned down anyway, even if they had good records and had kept the tower maintained. [...] It turns out there was a second, unrelated fire that started at almost the same time and almost the same place! This happened when a tree fell on a distribution line (lower voltage, shorter distance), and [...] this was not PG&E's fault. There's no way the inspectors, even if they were competent, could have known that the tree would fall.
> > [...] The arborist determined the disease was internal and likely would not have been visible to PG&E tree inspectors during their vegetation management inspections. According to the arborist the disease likely only would have been discoverable by an advanced inspection.
> > Before the Camp B Fire grew large enough to escape its geographical bowl, it was passed over and consumed by the Camp Fire. Based upon fire indicators and patterns within Camp B Fire and recordings from the fire watch cameras, Cal Fire investigators determines that the Camp B Fire had little, or no, effect on the Camp Fire.
> Here's the second, more insidious cause: climate change. extreme weather->more vegetation->increased fuel load as well as hotter/drier weather. While solving climate change is a good long term goal (although something that the human race is notoriously bad at), we need to improve our forestry management practices. And keep better records! And hold people accountable!
> If you think of PG&E (the organization) as an emergent intelligence, it was set up to optimize only one metric (profit) and utterly failed to take into account another metric (risk). I'm sure there are people who study this sort of thing who could examine PG&E and point out exactly what caused this organizational failure. Again I want to emphasize that taking PG&E and making it state-owned and state-run is not a magic bullet. I mean, c'mon, Chernobyl was state-run! It comes down to organization, accountability, and incentives. They're complex problems but they can be solved.
Source:
* Summary report from the Butte County DA.
https://www.buttecounty.net/Portals/30/CFReport/PGE-THE-CAMP...
There will always be sparks.
Blaming the spark is like blaming the welders for the Beirut bombing.
So now instead of PG&E being the cause, it's now Bob and his Powerwall that set half of CA on fire.
Power is just one piece of a multitude of failures that have lead us to this situation. Lots of houses where they are going to burn is one of the biggest issues, and due to how politics works, no one is going to address that.
Am I the only one who thinks this is highly unlikely? While every uncontrolled fire is one too much, the fires aren't that frequent that 2 independent fire causes would occur this close in both time and space. If the rate of firestart per year per square mile expressed as a probability would be P then the probability of 2 independent firestarts in the same area and same timeframe would be P^2, so if fires are relatively rare this should be an extremely rare event.
Either the tree fell first causing a fire, after which the hook lost tensile strength because of heat; or the hook failed first starting a fire somehow collapsing a tree.
Either way PG&E should be held responsible both for not cutting trees away a distance of the height of the trees away from the lines, and for failing to replace the worn hooks.
When things can last 40-100 years with little to no maintenance before catastrophic failure, there is _extraordinary_ incentive to defer maintenance until catastrophic failure occurs.
For every mayor / governor / utility director etc. who experiences the eventual failure, there are dozens of predecessors who benefitted from deferring preventative action. Every previous leader who punted on maintenance and saved money or increased profits and reaped immediate tangible rewards. The company stock went up. Or the town paid it's firefighters pensions, which turned out to be more expensive than planned.
"We ought to do more maintenance, but waiting another year or two will be okay," says everyone. "Next year, when we're not in such a bind, we'll catch up."
With respect, it’s obvious to anyone coming to USA from elsewhere in the world.
Observing America is a strange mix of “wow, these people were so early, they really invented most of this stuff” and “wow, they really haven’t updated it since”.
(The American banking system evokes the same bewilderment. Every system seems to run on a 1958 IBM mainframe where someone feeds my transactions on punch cards.)
At the time it was hard for me to imagine anything being that old, as (growing up in the US Midwest), things built in the 1920s were the oldest I’d ever seen and were considered ancient. I look back now and realize they were only one lifetime old (at the time).
Culturally, Americans have this idea that their stuff is shiny, new, and “the best.” But this is actually out of date, and in fact as a country we are entering a new phase where for the first time the majority of infrastructure is old and wearing out, and the critical mass of old stuff that needs to be fixed is much larger than the amount of new stuff that needs to be built.
Eisenhower started work on building the interstate system [1], but the components need to be maintained. Not just the surface roads and grades, but the bridges, engineered earth, and more. This costs money (and that money goes to the construction companies and workers who perform the work), but we have lost the national appetite for spending money on infrastructure, or really most things outside of the military, hence the relatively aimless goals of NASA (until Bridenstine, to whom I give a lot of credit for directing the aim of NASA, even if I might disagree slightly with his target).
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System
This is partly human nature. Short-term gains overshadow the distant consequences. I am confident that in 60-100 years China will have an even larger infrastructure crisis.
Simulations show (and logic says) that the frequency with which a piece of land has a fire depends on humidity, not amount of sparks. If the forest is dry enough any fire spreads unimpeded and even if you have less sparks you just get larger fires.
I hope they realize they can still play a role in fighting climate change with controlled burns, especially if they time a majority of their controlled burns during peak summer. This would let the smoke act as a reflector of radiation over quite a large area.
Anecdata, but Pepco in Maryland burned me once. When we first moved into our house motor loads (vacuum, disposal, etc.) caused all the lights in the house to dim. We called an electrician and he said the problem was the transformer in the green box outside our house and to call Pepco to fix it. We did and Pepco dragged their feet forever. Weeks later they said they inspected it and it was fine. Fast forward 2 years when our house has a massive power surge which fries 2 computers (just the PSUs) and bursts some bulbs. We call an electrician and he says the transformer outside failed and to call Pepco. We did and Pepco had someone out in, no joke, in 20 minutes to fix it. As a nice side effect, motor loads no longer cause the lights to dim. We filed a claim with Pepco for damages, citing the previous incident 2 years ago as evidence they knew the transformer was failing but they denied the claim with no explanation.
I don't know how it works in the US but in the UK you'd put in a claim with your insurance company, and tell them that you'd told Pepco about the problem sometime ago and Pepco hadn't fixed it. Your insurance company has lots of lawyers and knows how to extract money from power companies.
In my experience, we use the 5 Whys [1] as a technique to drill down to 'root causes'. However, along the way you'll identify a whole heap of compounding factors, each of which may change the degree of severity or indeed completely avert the issue.
In this particular instance, in isolation you can say that the hook failed and caused a fire, but it took several additional factors to make it as bad as it was:
1) Lack of maintenance (which in itself has a whole tree of causal factors)
2) Excess buildup of flammable material
3) Particuarly dry/hot weather conditions
4) Lack of firefighting resources due to other mitigating circumstances
5) Encroachment of living premises into dangerous areas
etc. etc.
I don't really know how the US courts might handle allocating liability, because I'm not located there, but I don't think there's one particular way to do it. I do however think that trying to retroactively allocate liability to this specific incident is probably the wrong way to look at it.
Instead I think the better apporach is to say that PG&E were delinquent in their responsibility of ensuring safe equipment, and regardless of the actual consequence they should be judged on that. For example, there are established processes to assess risk, and those risks include both a likelihood and consequence. All of that is then taken in combination to understand the total risk of something. The then have a legal obligation to ensure things are safe, and they broke that so punishment should be based on that. This would hold, whether the dereliction of duty was realised through a disaster or only identified from a near miss.
Similarly, you could assess that the government was delinquent in its duties to perform backburning, etc.
Alternatively it might be made this way because the cable angle is variable (depends on terrain topology) so a fixed-angle insulator would require every single tower to be customised when installed. A 100y mtbf seems pretty good by comparison, you’d reasonably assume the component would be replaced long before that.
The proximal problems pointed out here are: - CA power transmission infrastructure is under maintained. - CA has overgrown forests of which anything can be a catalyst for forest fires.
For whether the CA infrastructure was indeed under maintained, let's look at the costs and benefits:
The cost of maintaining the infrastructure more is that you'd have to inspect much more of the power infrastructure much more often. The twitter thread suggests that there were many orders of magnitude more quantity infrastructure like this, and this tower was under maintained by at least one order of magnitude. (To be honest, I'm not sure whether the tower lasting 100 years is evidence in favor of more preventative maintenance or less!)
Costs are made worse by the rising cost of infrastructure in the last many decades. Think about the cost of building a new subway in Manhattan and now think about replacing all the century-old high tension towers in CA.
The benefit of preventive maintenance is that you'd get fewer accidents, and perhaps less downtime caused by accidental failures. How much fewer fire accidents you'd get is uncertain -- the rest of the comments here do a good job of dissecting between the camp that says this could have permanently prevented all electrical-caused CA wildfires (maybe a few fires per decade?) and the camp that says this would have no long run impact on the number of disastrous fires because a lighting strike would have started the next fire.
Now it seems to me uncertain that the costs outweigh the benefits, but suppose it does, what's the best way to make PG&E do more maintenance?
Currently PG&E is profit-incentivized to not maintain infrastructure very much. The gov't could force them to establish a liability fund that they must contribute 50% of profits to until they have enough money in a trust fund to cover one bad wildfire. This policy would have direct cost effect on Californians -- after all PG&E is not a genie that you can legislate free money or performance from. PG&E would raise electricity rates by an amount equivalent to its current profit margin (not that much) and perform more fixing of infrastructure to meet the CA rule. This seems like probably a good route to take, as PG&E would then focus maintenance on liability reduction. The liability laws should be written carefully to incentivize PG&E to fix the right things. PG&E should only have a certain percentage liability per event, where the percentage correlates with "how many new wildfire did you cause / how fire-proof this region would have been if not for PG&E".
There are some other fixes too for the legislatively-minded. CA could just literally force PG&E to replace towers every 50 years, conduct 2x as many inspections etc. This would probably raise PG&E's costs which would get passed to CA utility payers. The disadvantage of this solution over the last paragraph is that the specific maintenance is by law, instead of at the discretion of PG&E's technicians. But if you think PG&E's management is poor to begin with, then that's not too bad.
But what if we just take more of it from executive's pay? Probably the executives will just leave and go elsewhere, in which case it becomes similar to the next solution: nationalizing PG&E. Now this could work. The engineers of HN in PG&E will have to tell me how much mismanagement is really going on inside PG&E compared to gov't owned utilities they've worked in in the past. The higher that ratio, the better the case for nationalization. The lower the ratio (e.g. if you feel the state of CA would run PG&E worse than today's management), then the less argument there is for nationalization.
Overall, the extra maintenance has to be funded by someone. Your pick of whether electricity prices go up, or whether fire-endangered towns need to make 2x property taxes, or whether CA residents have higher income tax rates.
I wonder how predictable this is in a materials science sense. And to top it off, you could have immediately outed PCG through it anonymously shortly after the fires really spread.
All perfectly legal.
A more ethical way (considering the human cost) would have been to out them early and then forced maintenance on them but I don't know if that would have been as profitable.
I suspect there are lots of these opportunities around. I wonder how you find them. Hmm.
A decent regime would involve spot checks, pick a tower at random, then review the footage and make sure we have a clear image of the C hook and the bracket it hangs from, AND they are both in good condition.
A similar situation is rebar in concrete pours. Who's to know if the inspection actually took place once it's buried beneath concrete? Again, a good regime would allow going back and looking at the footage.
I am curious if there is any research around the electrical component failure trends (probably from some nationally owned electrical companies). I would believe there is some correlation between tower failures and the peak wind strength/strong wind frequency, but if such correlation holds up meaningfully across different electrical companies in different areas, that could mean the wind might be more at fault than PG&E. PG&E was still criminally negligent, but as the thread said with a different angle (Camp Fire B), the fire might have been inevitable.