PG&E power line suspected in Dixie fire was set to be buried underground | Hacker News Reader

PG&E power line suspected in Dixie fire was set to be buried underground

latimes.com

32 pointsspzx85 comments

It's far harder for me to personally find PG&E morally culpable when they were working at the fastest pace allowed by legal mechanisms to transition to a safer fully-buried infrastructure.

They're planning to bury 10k miles of electric lines, at a price tag of $15-$30B (they have 5.5m customer accounts).

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/07/22/pge-power-l...

Who pays the bill eventually? I would wish the people directly benefit from the power line should pay for it. (The article seems paywalled.)

The customers are going to pay. The company will notionally take out the bonds, but the dollars will have to come from the customers...

I don't know about California, but what I hear from my local utility in WA is that absent specific circumstances that make basic above ground wiring infeasible, undergrounding has to be paid for by the customers served, it can't be paid by general revenues as is the case for repair and maintenance.

We're mostly seeing service disruptions from downed lines and not wildfires though. Fire safety requirements might be grounds for general funds to pay for undergrounding, but you'd really need to check with the state regulations.

Why are there no request proposals from YC for new or novel firefighting tech?

Are wildfires not an engineering problem?

California is YC's backyard. PG and friends all have their lives in Nor Cal where most of these recent fires have been taking place.

I am perplexed by the silence of YC and other bay area stars like Google, Apple and the bay area tech giants that seem oddly silent on the matter.

Would it take Google or Apple's campus burning down before they took the threat seriously?

The bay area campuses are not in danger from the fires, except for smoke.

And there is otherwise not much money to be made in firefighting tech.

That's about it.

So they are ok with their vacation homes and the other half of the state burning down as long as their campuses are ok?

Not much money to be made by saving lives, health, and billions of dollars in infrastructure damage?

> So they are ok with their vacation homes and the other half of the state burning down as long as their campuses are ok?

Apparently!

> Not much money to be made by saving lives and billions of dollars in infrastructure damage?

No, there's not. Where would the money come from? The public? Good luck with that.

>Not much money to be made by saving lives, health, and billions of dollars in infrastructure damage?

I think you are confusing the money that can be lost due to damage from a fire being a large number compared to the amount of money available to spend on fire fighting itself. A private company in business to make money does not care about the money saved from things not being damaged. Insurance companies have an interest in that.

The only way for fire tech to make money would be to come up with an extremely vile scheme to ensure people used their services. Fire tech could extort insurance companies/private owners a percentage of their property's value in order to save their home from the fires. You'd then see door to door sales people using phrases like "it'd be a shame if something were to happen to this lovely home of yours". Some distopian level of society where your house is actively worked to prevent it from burning, but you neighbors house is now a pile of burning embers because they weren't a member while the team working your house stands there and watches.

If the space race can be disrupted then so too can this one.

Space was government only until very recently.

There is money to be made in lifting things out of the gravity well. It's an obvious pile of cash to go after. Comparing the two is a bit disingenious.

No money to be made by saving lives, infrastructure, and air quality?

You asked the question that I've already provided my line of thinking on, so why don't you share you're line of thinking on where that money is to be made?

There's money to be made of course. Tech could be used to help with home defense first, then neighborhoods, then could be scaled from there.

If you actually had a solution in hand for even small scale fires that was effective and could scale you easily make this profitable. I'd be the first customer. I live in a fire prone area.

Fear sells.

That's great that you've identified the very obvious service, but you've failed to identify the source of income. Who's going to pay for this service? Insurance companies? Bwahahahahah. Not a chance. Individual homeowners? They don't even pay for insurance. Renters? Nope. What about commercial? Those are also all renters, so why would they pay for something when they could piggyback off of any of the other tennants paying for the service? Landlords? Hell, they won't pay to for the most basic of service unless forced.

So you're panacea of if they build it, they will come isn't as realistic as you are hoping.

Edit: Also, you'd better have one hell of a legal team to draft up some BS ToS to protect from when ultimately your firefighting efforts fail. One lost property, and your valuation drops to 0.

Amazon and SpaceX were not profitable when started and remained unprofitable for many years.

Our collective heart is in the right place. I have my own plans to do something about it but I am not in the same position as say Elon Musk for example. Not yet anyway ;)

I am in tech however. And I believe passionately that tech can solve this problem. Even if it is just a symptom of global climate change.

I think we must start solving these problems fast and with novel approaches. The same old tired routine isn't working. We've kicked the can enough down the road with government and fire prevention. New ideas and methods are needed and needed fast.

Everything that needs to be done can be mostly be done cheap and now... And people don't do it.

We've had very good idea of how houses burn for 30+ years and we keep designing things that are built to burn.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-to-burn/

Expecting billionaires to solve this problem seems crazy. This is for countries to solve and the state to work on. As with all things that are a collective responsibility, getting anything to happen js very very hard.

So private tech industry can solve the Space race but not wildfire?

Fires are a symptom, making a hard problem even more difficult. Having climate change managed by the whims of the ultra rich seems a risky move.

I guess we will find out if private industry can solve it.

I'm given to understand leasing/outfitting 747s to drop fire retardant can be fairly profitable:

https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/environment/...

The company that developed the 747 tanker went bankrupt, and the company that acquired it built two more then also went bankrupt, and all three aircraft have been retired. I can't see how you got from those facts to "fairly profitable".

Retirement is news to me; I've seen one in action within the last year. Where can I read about the developments you're talking about?

A major cause of the problem is that we put out the fires in the first place. The forest is supposed to burn. Left to its own devices it will burn periodically in small low intensity fires. If we put those out, fuel will build up until you get the massive wildfires we have now.

It's a start at least.

But from the best and brightest in the world? People who put rovers on Mars but don't want to put a fire out that could destroy half of their state?

Sure - but that doesn’t help us now, as fuel has built up in many areas to the point fires are apocalyptic. The time to go that route would have been in the 50’s or latest 70’s.

That’s why you need forest rangers, isn’t it? (... I’m not really sure what this job is called in English.) If you don’t allow fires to clean out fallen, rotten or decrepit trees, you can have people that just walk the forest and clear them by hand. That doesn’t mean there won’t still be fires, of course, but they won’t be fatally bad unless you happen to be there at the time.

Then again, I’m thinking of a pine forest in a temperate climate, in which a fire of this kind doesn’t really harm the mature trees much. I think some other types just burn out instead and have a succession of ecosystems that restores the resulting patch from the literal (extremely fertile) ashes over the course of several decades. I’ve no idea where a California forest ranks on this scale, and while a forest may be completely fine with letting many square kilometres be completely razed and then heal over the course of a couple of centuries, as long as it happens rarely enough, humans will be understandably miffed.

I think you're seriously underestimating the sheer size of US National forests in California and the rest of the West coast. Wild fires have already burned well over a million acres in California and Oregon this year alone. How many people would it take to maintain an area that size? Now consider that a million acres is something like 3% of the area covered by national forests just in those two states.

I can tell you from first-hand experience that clearing and maintaining a forest is extremely hard work. I have about 4 acres of forest on my property and 3 years in I still haven't fully cleared all of the dead trees and branches. Granted it's not my full time job, but I would estimate that a single person is capable of maintaining tens to maybe hundreds of acres per year. That implies that preventing fires via full suppression + fuels reduction would require hundreds of thousands of seasonal workers to be effective.

I’m aware that North American forests are absolutely immense compared to everything I’ve ever seen. And yes, forest-keeping is hard labor (duh).

But there’s partly a question of involvement here: if you don’t meddle in the forest and don’t care to make it friendly to humans, it will (barring climate shifts that I’m in no way qualified to talk about) mostly take care of itself. It’s when you start allowing people inside and/or putting out small fires that you start having problems. So if you don’t have the necessary manpower, maybe don’t do that? Either take responsibility or leave it alone. You will still need firebreaks and people to walk them separating the two parts, though.

(Although given how much forest there is in the US compared in Europe, it would be foolish to expect to get by with a comparable amount of people, and a hundred thousand rangers, while undeniably very expensive and a lot of effort, does not fundamentally look like an unreasonable figure.)

It's called the Wildland Urban Interface, and unfortunately we've already built millions of houses here. Now we are paying the true cost of our foolishness.

Most houses will need 100 to 200 feet of cleared vegetation around them. Instead we love the look of large pine trees and brush right against our homes. The term is 'built to burn'

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-to-burn/

Google and Apple campuses are far from the WUI. Their biggest concern would be toxic air pollution levels. So if these folks were operating purely out of self interest they’d be working on better air purification tech (both personal devices and building-wide systems.)

And some of the most important tech is stuff that’s fairly iterative. It’s things like better modeling fire behavior, enabling pilots to fly in mountainous terrain in the dark, detecting fires earlier, etc.

Are their vacation homes and the places they like to spend time with their families away from the office close to the wildfires?

I don't understand. Do you mean to say they are ok with half of the state burning down as long as their offices are unaffected?

Air quality will affect the output of their workforce. They can probably measure it in dollars.

Better offense is needed. Yes it's good to understand fire dynamics but not very useful when nothing can be done about it.

I was hoping we'd figure out a better way by now than throwing more firefighting humans at the problem.

Don’t rely on a “they” to solve a problem you’re passionate about. If you feel passionate about it, you should solve it!

Agree with you. I'm doing my part. Also raising awareness is part of that. Thank you.

It's good to approach the topic in terms of solution-thinking, but it more or less looks like a lot of the problems involved are political:

https://lhc.ca.gov/report/fire-mountain-rethinking-forest-ma...

For the executive summary, look here:

https://lhc.ca.gov/sites/lhc.ca.gov/files/Reports/242/Execut...

California is big, the state itself controls a fraction of land, so there's a coordination problem with private and federal parties. Prescribed burns can actually be a tough sell. Resources are an issue in every corner. Known positive policies don't proceed apace because these are unsolved political problems.

Yes I agree with you here.

Solution is not government as with the Space race. It will be won by private industry. I'm perplexed that more bay areas thought leaders haven't jumped on this problem given how close it is to their back yards.

That's not exactly the point the existing reports linked lead me to...

It's plausible that you could see some private solutions to accomplishing known goals, and see those sold to the government. But that leaves the resourcing problem, which is why some known policies aren't already being implemented in the first place.

Could private landowners invest in this themselves? Maybe, but it has the same incentive/risk-management problems that are the reason most people rely on public fire departments.

You could sell solutions to consumers at first.

The solution is one that would scale up to big fires but handle the small ones first.

If I had a solution to put out a 20 acre brush fire near my house in under an hour I would not be waiting for the fire trucks to arrive

PG has moved to the UK.

> PG and friends all have their lives in Nor Cal where most of these recent fires have been taking place.

Thiel and Page have bought New Zealand residency, so maybe thr billionaires have sorted a solution? It does rain an awful lot down here.

Well for sentimental reasons I guess then ;) They love to solve problems and use California as a testing ground for the latest photo sharing app.

But where are the DIY fire fighting apps and devices? Where are the startups that promise 10,000 drones that can put out a 50,000 acre fire in under 2 hours?

cat videos are more profitable.

> Are wildfires not an engineering problem?

No, they're 90% a political problem.

It's politics that dictates whether we have a workable schedule of controlled burns.

It's politics that dictates whether electrical cables get buried.

It's politics that dictates whether you can build new homes in wildfire-prone areas.

It's politics that dictates whether those new homes get electricity without paying the costs of burying the supply cables needed.

It's politics that dictate how many firefighters we're willing to pay for, and what equipment they have.

And it's politics that dictates whether idiots can get their hands on explosives for gender reveal parties.

Oh, there are some contributions that could be made with engineering - lower cost ways of burying cables, for example - but I doubt the adtech companies have any special expertise there.

Was the Space industry 90% a political problem before SpaceX and friends disrupted it?

If I'm standing in a puddle of gasoline smoking a cigarette, do you order your engineers to build me an e-cigarette with freefall detection?

If you are an immovable and exhaustible natural resource that I need to live.

Then Yes.

This. I can't tell if no one understand this or if they're just being willfully obtuse. I think saying I want to do X because of Science or Religion or Justice or whatever confers such an impetus that we ignore how it confuses means and ends. Saying the ends justifies the means is cynical but it makes more sense then saying the means justifies the ends which seems to be common way of thinking for all parties.

I think one should use their imagination more.

If SpaceX had this line of thinking a decade ago then Space tech would not be where it is today.

"A drone seen flying over the fire in the hours after it started is rumored to have been operated by PG&E or one of its contractors, Ramsey said. The sighting grounded firefighting aircraft for the evening, he said."

Incorrect calculus, scramble the local military with a kill order for the drone, clear the skies of unauthorized craft.

This sounds like a good way of starting more fires.

Radio frequency jamming would be enough to kill/incapaciate most drones. It doesn't require the use of sidewinder missiles.

Edit: however, if you're going to this level, I'd rather them just triangulate the signal from the controller and go pick up the offenders. I'm for people being able to responibly be allowed to operate drones, but if you're actively intefering with an active fire response, you're not being responsible.

Could we not equip the fire fighting aerial equipment with radio jamming equipment specifically targeting drone frequencies? If your drone is within the cone of their jamming, you're in the wrong to begin with, so tough cookies.

My concern here is that every fire somehow becomes a cash cow for pg&e. It’s not clear, to me at least, aside from this article which may be premature given the arson suspect, that burying lines will solve the fire problem. So PG&E gets a ton of money, somewhat undeservedly IMO, and the state will still have fires but less resources to fight them with. I hope I’m wrong. It just seems like the worse pg&e does, the more funding they get. Perverse incentives are a real issue in economics.

Yeah, if it's not a power line then something else will start the fires. The problem isn't the initial spark, it's the hundreds of square miles of tinder-dry wildland. Not sure it's a perverse incentive, but it's probably not a productive use of money.

But it's human nature to look for the problems that we are capable of solving, and we know how to bury powerlines. We don't know how to reverse the effects of climate change.

I don’t believe the PUC will allow PG&E to have a guaranteed rate of return on undergrounding. My understanding is that ratepayers are the ones who are going to be funding this project, not the shareholders.

So yeah PG&E gets to avoid liability and also sell more electricity (there’d be no more PSPS events). But they won’t be able to charge higher transmission rates beyond the cost of undergrounding.

> My understanding is that ratepayers are the ones who are going to be funding this project, not the shareholders.

I think that's the deal, though. Utility investors buy utilities knowing their rates are regulated and there's limited growth in exchange for stability. When the cost of providing electric changes, whether it's because wholesale prices increase or a new cost emerges (burying power lines), ratepayers are on the hook. The key is allocating the costs correctly. Burying major transmission lines (if this is even needed) should be shared, but local lines need to be paid for by local communities. Owning a cabin is fine, I just have no interest in subsidizing its power because it's in a fire risk area.

It’s a cost plus model.

Isn't this fire known to be caused by intentional arson?

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/11/us/former-college-instructor-...

No, this wacko was setting fires in a fire. The events involving the power line happened a month ago. Fire has been going on for a while.

The existance of this particular wacko suggests the followup question: maybe the original fire was arson too?

There is as much evidence that this fire was started by arson as there is it was started by a laser beam from Xenu, i.e. none. On the other hand, we have this solid first-hand information about a fire that started between a tree and a power line. Why the need to have alternate theories without supporting evidence?

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21011683/pge-dixie-fi...

That's a bit of rationale that could be said of most things running rampant on the internet. However, this is the state we are in where you can argue fact until you are blue in the face, and the listener will not budge from their views.

Except Xenu hasn't been arrested for starting fires.

This guy has.

Fires start for a variety of reasons in CA.

- Manure pile fires

- Garbage trucks unloading smoldering debris

- Lightning strikes

- Off-road motor vehicles and equipment

- Gender reveals gone wrong

- Improper camp fires

- Failing electrical infrastructure

- Arson

I don’t know why of all the possible causes we’d jump to arson.

Don’t forget

- hot sunny day + discarded clear glass bottle starts fire

- idiots shooting at rocks in the middle of nowhere and causing sparks

(Yes, those have really happened)

> A vegetation management inspection took place Jan. 14 but did not flag the tree that’s believed to have fallen on the line as needing work, he said.

> PG&E had also inspected the two poles between which the tree was found leaning May 13 and found nothing that required corrective action, Noonan said.

I used to work at a theatre as a teenager. We used to have these sign in sheets for bathroom inspection. Nobody really ensured the bathroom was in perfect shape. Basically just ensured there wasn't an obvious pile of vomit in plain sight.

I'm not entirely trying to say that there's been foul play here, but I guess I'm trying to point out that it's not very good evidence that nothing was wrong and it seems clear that something was wrong (given the fire).

Is there a more advanced version of “normalization of deviance” that is specific to normalizing signing off paperwork without doing the tasks?

Normalization of not giving a crap?

Also possibly relevant:

"College professor held in wildland arson spree near California’s massive Dixie Fire"[0]

[0]: https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article253403045.html

For a more visual idea of what happened, here is a user-contributed "street view" close to the very spot that PG&E mentions in their filing. You can see what the relationship is between this terrain, the forest, and the power lines.

https://www.google.com/maps/@39.83185,-121.4410804,3a,75y,50...

Personally I feel like burying this is a waste of money. The entire Feather River Project generates less than 1% of California's peak power demands, and it doesn't generate it in the late summer when we actually need it. California replaces this amount of generating capacity with new rooftop solar every 10 months at current pace, or with individual utility-scale PV plants that are being completed regularly. It's not worth the fires. We can afford to turn it off.

Agree with this.

State should be investing heavily in solar for everyone.

The future of firefighting should be heavily invested in.

Have there been YC proposals for novel firefighting tech?

If not then why not? Obviously a field ripe for disruption.

Because often the best fire fighting technique with wild fires is not to.

Not every problem has a technological solution. Not everything should or needs to be disrupted.

The two approaches are not mutually exclusive.

Yes to better forest management. Of course we have to do that.

The state will burn down without intervention. That is painstakingly clear.

What makes it ripe for disruption? My understanding is that the most effective response to wildfires is simply to not build flammable structures too close to forests.

The forests will die without intervention. Unless you want California to become 100% desert lands.

Sequoias on the Western Sierra slopes are the last in the world. And from the looks of it they don't have much time. Would you like us to clear the 3000 year old trees too?

Temps are rising. We are engineers who talk of terraforming mars.

Why can we not talk of doing the same thing in our own back yard?

> The forests will die without intervention

That's a bold statement.

We live in bold times. Doesn't look like the old guard is working.

Kind of like what happened with Space. It needed to be disrupted.

Those pylons are really short, why aren't the lines way above the trees?

Cost

That photo shows a transmission line (230 kV according to OpenInfraMap[1]). The line that started the fire was a 12kV distribution line[2].

I think this is one of the poles on this distribution line:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/39%C2%B052'31.2%22N+121%C2...

The fire was started somewhere uphill from that pole.

[1] https://openinframap.org/#17.9/39.83185/-121.44108

[2] https://s1.q4cdn.com/880135780/files/doc_downloads/wildfire_...

Bucks Creek 1101 follows Storrie Rd on the north/west side of the Feather, right? There doesn't seem to be a way to deep link to the map, but this PG&E map shows that line:

https://www.pge.com/b2b/distribution-resource-planning/integ...

I'm trying to reckon the spot based on the recent court order. The transcript says the troubleman could see the problem from Cresta Dam, it was uphill from him (as is everything from that point), it was on the other side of the river (the north/west side, if he was on the CA-70 side), and he had to cross the river and drive a rough road to get there (consistent with Pulga Rd) and there was a "Road Closed" sign somewhere in Butte County, which is consistent with this photo:

https://www.google.com/maps/@39.8285968,-121.4181878,3a,75y,...

I don't know if there is an available photo that will get us closer to events.

Here's street view from the Cresta Dam:

https://www.google.com/maps/@39.8762603,-121.3726288,3a,50.4...

You can see the Bucks Creek 1101 line in the background crossing the river and then going uphill.

I agree. Burying existing lines at $2M per mile seems like outdated thinking now that $2M buys you around 3MW of solar. Or, around 6MWh of battery storage if the Tesla Megapack is to be believed. Plus, this is capacity that doesn't require nearly as much maintenance.

Just thinking out loud, but I wonder the best answer isn't just to forget about these older transmission lines altogether. Build smaller mini-grids and use the existing hydro infrastructure for on-site carbon capture.

A small system risks isolation. Texas demonstrated the vulnerabilities there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com