Electrocuted birds are sparking wildfires

I did some work at a utility company a few years back where I had access to a database of every historical outage across the system along with such info as the diagnosed cause.

Thousands of outages were caused by “Wildlife (Squirrel)”—more than once it crossed my mind that this file was the last record of those squirrels’ lives on Earth!

Since no one has linked it yet, according to CyberSquirrel, most outages are caused by (or blamed on) squirrels, up to 2019: https://cybersquirrel1.com

As an actual EE who has designed mainboards, this smells of hyperbole to the N-th degree with a dose of misinformed. As another user said, you had a bunch of dead unmonitored CMOS cells, then lost power. Then realized that all your BIOS configuration parameters where lost and systems wouldn't boot from disk, likely because whatever chosen disk / raid controller configuration was wrong too then. We test mainboards to destruction with simulated faulty power supplies. The CMOS coin cell is so far down the failure chain, your mainboard has released the magic smoke several times over before the CMOS cell on the 3.3V rail with multiple protections is a single failure. I have exploded and burned CMOS coin cells before, but not before the board was a wreck. I'm talking catastrophic failure that it's a bigger concern to the system operators health, forget the board.

> The side effect was that it fried a bunch of cmos batteries in the servers.

That's...not how that works. You had a bunch of dead CMOS batteries, and then a power failure.

I'm of the opinion its only a matter of time before PG&E and other power companies are seized by the state. What a boon that would be for those under private electric, considering I suffer through no rolling outages at all from public electric in CA. Currently PG&E are paying $25 billion to bury 10,000 miles of line (1). Meanwhile in 2021 the state of california had a 75 billion dollar surplus (2), and in 2022 the state had a 100 billion dollar surplus (3). The state could bury those 40,000 miles with one year's worth of budgetary surplus and no increase to rate payers (how PG&E is coming up with their $25 billion).

1. https://www.kcra.com/article/moving-pge-power-lines-undergro...

2. https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2021/05/10/...

3. https://calmatters.org/politics/2022/06/california-budget-su...

Absolutely,

PGE's awfulness is almost surrealistic, cartoon villain level. Here in Nevada City, they cut a variety of historic trees along Broad street, towards the end of 2020. They had previously agreed to put lines underground and had taken matching money from the city for the project. But then used the excuse of the bankruptcy to renege on the plan. These trees were a tiny fraction of the trees that could fall on their lines and remain up, of course. And they put the lines underground this year, for shits and giggles as well.

Oh, we actually did an urban sit against the tree cutting and saved maybe one tree in the end. But hey.

Of course, all these shenanigans are nothing compared to the people they killed in Colma, Santa Rosa and elsewhere.

I don't know the details specific to this case, but its a hard problem. Wires from that long ago had different tech, and may have faced metal shortages from world events. I would not try to imply it was a malicious thing.

Europeans don't get it. They don't have a lot of overhead wires. Everything is buried because everything is so dense that its cost effective to do so.

Overhead wires are cheap to put up, and EXTREMELY expensive to replace. It's dangerous work. And it's slow. You can't just turn off people's power, so the lines are live while they do replacements. 40k miles is going to cost tens of billions of dollars and take... way longer than anyone is going to budget time for. It's probably just not possible.

Tree cutting usually refers to trimming branches so the canopy is not near the wire. It's far from a perfect solution. There's almost always regulatory requirements to do this.

Meanwhile the forests are all super dry and have years of extra brush at the bottom because the state has done a terrible job of forestry management. It's a tough situation.

There'd be a good portion of California that was very suited to home solar: remote, sparse, sunny, little shading. I wonder if they could incentivise some areas to do away with power cables by subsidising solar and home batteries? Or somehow minimise the powerlines required?

There is nothing wrong at all with the segments of the article you quoted. The main premise presented in the article is that electrocuted birds are a plausible cause of wildfires, in addition to human activity (the article specifically reports that human activity is the primary cause of wildfires).

The authors' methodology to find online reports was valid. They used alerts to collect online published reports of electrocuted birds, and then manually checked each report to discard any that were speculative or lacked hard evidence. After this, the authors found 44 reports of electrocuted birds causing wildfires. At most, your strongest critique is that the methods could have been more comprehensive to find additional reports. That is technically correct, but it doesn't invalidate the main premise that wildfires caused by birds do happen, and are not one-off phenomena (via the 44 reports from the described method).

>"and then they quote a guy who "has studied" it in Spain but wasn't involved with this."

It is responsible and encouraged behavior to quote someone who wasn't involved with the study. This avoids bias where the only interviewed people are affiliated with the study, and are more likely to talk it up. Interviewing uninvolved experts in the field opens the door to possible critiques.

>"Then they quote two other studies from four years ago."

Four years isn't inherently long ago enough to be irrelevant. This is especially true when the premise is that electrocuted birds have been a significant cause of wildfires, not just one-off occurrences.

In the paragraph immediately following the one you quote:

The scientists then discounted any speculative reports, only keeping those with evidence of a bird as the cause. These could include a photograph of a burned bird carcass at the fire’s ignition site, or a statement made by an expert, such as a firefighter, detailing the presumed cause of the fire. Finally, they checked to see whether any particular environment was especially susceptible to these fires.

From TFA.

It is climate change rapidly drying out areas that previously were not as dry. So you have decades of excess carbon in timber that the land can no longer sustain. You don't have to get into scenarios involving wolves, Castilla, and arson.

Same as the birds, it so simple: the stochastic cause of the fire is irrelevant. It could be a spark from a line, a electrocuted small animal, a squatting vagrant making dinner, or even lupine hating Spaniards... but that happened before all the time, and it didn't result in the most massive and intense wildfires in human history.

As long as Americans consider themselves entitled to city-like services wherever they can clear land to build a house, there’s going to be a problem.

Most modern rural Americans are not active participants in agriculture, which was the case back when the federal government originally subsidized rural electrification. It’s a lifestyle decision for a large portion of the current rural population, and one that those of us who accepted smaller houses or apartments with little to no land generously subsidize with our similar electric rates and low fuel taxes.

I know that there are problems with burying high-tension lines (they give off heat, basically) but around here most of the normal "household power lines" are buried and it greatly reduces snow load problems, downed branches, and critters eating them.

How’d they figure this out? Eyewitnesses?

Maybe because we're getting drier and warmer than ever. Maybe because of more encroachment on the UWI leading to more chances of an incident. Maybe it always has been a problem but the cause has not been documented so causation was not associated.

Might be that birds have been getting electrocuted throughout that period, but the areas being dry enough to support/spread fire have grown?

Hmm I wonder if the climate is changing or something?

It might also be the sagging lines methinks.

PG&E is not "pretty much bankrupt" over this .. in fact, during the Enron power scandal, public court documents uncovered a decades-old transfer of cash out of the PG&E books (highly regulated) into new holding companies that were purchasing income-generating assets around the US, like under-valued power generation in the deep South for example. This was expressly forbidden in every regulatory ruling and yet upper management at the time found a way to do it "legally". It has continued in patterns like that for more than thirty years. The recent court-induced liability for death, and criminal conviction of PG&E, are only now changing systems in place for decades.

You have been "had" -- source: attorney consulting on the Enron proceedings at the time of the blackouts

Let's not forget that California has multiple power companies. PG&E may be the largest one, but it doesn't serve the biggest city.

Map of which parts of the state are served by which utility company: https://cecgis-caenergy.opendata.arcgis.com/documents/electr...

Too much.

One option is to bury all those lines. This is possible in theory, but not in practice. If you did this, then you also have to worry about all the future issues with power lines you can't see or maybe even find anymore.

I was hoping Olga might net a mention. She does.

They are, but a bird spreading it's wings near one of those insulators could reduce the 'spark gap' below save limits.

> Birds of prey—particularly those with large wings such as buzzards and eagles—are especially vulnerable to electrocution at power poles, says Graham Martin, an ornithologist at the University of Birmingham. “When landing or taking off from the perch, they are likely to touch two wires simultaneously.”

And a bird does not need to bridge a "hot" wire to an actual ground. There are plenty of "hot" to "hot" combinations of wires which are also lethal - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-phase_electric_power