The cost of bailing out owners of burnt down homes in Paradise, CA worth $0 for $700k is rolled into every San Francisco PG&E bill.
PGE costs have gone up because the state's Public Utilities Commission and many of our leaders in Sacramento are in bed with PGE. PGE has been vastly underinvesting in infrastructure development and maintenance for the last 50 years, which is at least partially the PUC's fault by letting them take profits instead of forcing them to either lower rates or reinvest. The Camp Fire shined a light on the neglect, now they have to play catch up on 50 years of deferred maintenance in many quite remote areas.
Local Sacramento ABC Station actually does some decent investigative report on this. If you are interested there is a fair amount of content to go through, as they started the investigation in 2022, the series is called Fire Power Money.
But: the settlement's law traded on the exact empathy you do right now.
Here's where we disagree: what evidence do you need to see to be convinced that nobody should be living in your community? Harsh words right? It's the exact opposite of the empathy you are trying to get through, that I appreciate.
I think smart people struggle with climate science, viewing it as strictly a set of facts, when in fact it is deeply political: it is telling us where we can and cannot live, which is as powerful as violence-protected borders.
We have pretty unequivocal evidence that tells us on the time scales of realizing real estate returns, some communities will be "worth" "$0."
Do you think we should have insurance of last resort in California? Insurers read the same scientific studies and don't protect people's homes from wildfires. It is basically immaterial in the long term which human activity causes the wildfire - as you say, the settlement is in the rear view mirror - it could have been a gender reveal party that started the flame, and then, what would you do, make that person personally liable for billions of dollars? It would be bailout all the same, poorly administered, because it is simply impossible to not "absolutely shaft" someone who says their home is worth $700k when it is actually worth $0.
It costs $42m to just bail out 20 homes in Palos Verdes, a community with very politically powerful people. It's a slow motion crisis in California.
Do you think we should bail out all the home owners in San Francisco, who bought their homes at $40,000, pay tiny Prop 13 dynastically protected rates and therefore pay little taxes to their own community, and have things nominally worth $1.4m, when an earthquake hits? That's not your community, and suddenly, oh man, that sounds expensive, man, you don't have bottomless empathy for that community. Should nobody be living in San Francisco because of the earthquake risk? Tough question.
So what if I spin some narrative that someone somewhere is responsible or liable? It is impossible for any entity to pay off all those people, including the government - it couldn't even compensate the 10x fewer victims of Camp Fire.
The solution to me is simple: don't buy a house, and if you do, don't make it your only means of savings. I can escape a wildfire, and I think I can escape an earthquake, but my life will not be ruined, as long as I do not own an overpriced home. You are talking about leaders in bed with PG&E or whatever, conspiracies, and right in front of you, you are surrounded, in your community, by people who believe their real estate gives market returns risk free.
Buying off the guy doing research into hexavalent chromium wasn't cheap either. Nor was keeping Willie Brown on their payroll.
Whether those people rebuild in Paradise, CA or move somewhere else with the money they received from the settlement is an entirely different proposition. This is not "subsidizing people in the country side". PG&E fucked up and now they have to pay. PG&E is choosing to pass the cost to its customers rather than eating into its profits, which is a decision that California allowed them to make.
EDIT: You and the GP I originally replied to seem to be making the argument that after PG&E burned all these people's homes down they should have been allowed to just tell them to get bent so your utility bill wouldn't go up in the city? What happens when it's /your/ home that gets burnt down? "Sorry bucko, but your house is worth $0 as it's just now a smoldering ruin. No soup for you. - Thanks PG&E"
What PGE did was terrible, but also there's a lot to blame on CA directly too.
But I will say that Paradise was in a bad state prior to the fire, simply nobody knew how bad. While a wildfire like that wasn't guaranteed, they were just one bad lightning strike away from the same disaster.
Funding FEMA, forest management services, and wildfire fighters something that isn't always prioritized and it should be.
It was a 100 year old C hook that caused the fire. Which failed in high winds. Which drove the fire. It was PG&E's responsibility to know "how bad" this was. They literally lost track of their own transmission lines.
Fundamentally the problem can be solved with management and engineering. It's entirely PG&E's fault. This was adjudicated and settled.
(plus see tristors answer as to it being passed on and not coming from profits)
Then PG&E takes the money, leaves 100 year old equipment in place, which inevitably breaks, and burns down an entire forest along with their homes.
You genuinely think these people are being "subsidized" by all this? That it's their fault the PG&E top brass didn't earn a bonus that year?
Meanwhile everyone in Sacramento can buy federally subsidized flood insurance. The federal government also built the levees surrounding the county. The entire downtown core had to be jacked up several feet due to persistent flooding. Should everyone in Sacramento move too? Should we end the insurance subsidy?
Wait till you read the facts behind this $41m bailout for 20 homes in one of the richest burbs of LA: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-10-29/feds-to-...
You could argue that nobody should be living in a place guaranteed to be destroyed, whether by landslides or wildfires, but the government tried that in Palos Verdes and got sued, lost, and now is bailing out those homeowners to get out of services obligations all the same.
Suffice it to say, you have bought into a very well marketed point of view. There was a lot of ceremony to enact procedural blame on PG&E, but it obscures all the far simpler solutions, that are far more just. People in San Francisco are paying higher rates, no? So PG&E may have been responsible for something somewhere, but the liability is being borne functionally by taxpayers, via a compulsory payment for energy, to balance the books on assholes living in places at risk of wildfires with overinflated asset values. Ultimately, the government here has decided that you should get government-guaranteed-risk-free market rate returns on owner occupied real estate.
Yes. As I recall it, the fire was caused by downed lines that were energized during a dry spell, and the reason the lines were downed was due to negligence around maintaining the C-Hooks holding their high voltage transmission lines. PG&E knew that they needed to be replaced every so often, had a policy that dictated when they needed to be replaced, and then ignored that policy which ultimately allowed a C-Hook to fail and the energized line to start the fire. In fact, PG&E had commissioned a study as far back as 1987 to look into this issue and confirmed that these hooks had a limited lifespan.
They had clear knowledge of the issue. They had a responsibility to maintain the system to prevent the issue. They set policies around how that maintenance should be conducted. Then they willfully ignored their own policies, which lead to the issue they were responsible to prevent. That's textbook negligence.
So, yes, PG&E /did/ cause the fire. They were negligent in doing so. They are liable for the damages.
Or another way to put it, how much liability would you give the RV drivers in these two scenarios?
https://www.kktv.com/2024/07/23/rv-with-blown-tire-sparks-se...
There are so many smart people on this forum. How hard is it to understand the spelled-out-in-the-law relationship between your compulsory payment for electricity rising and the cost of the settlements?
You can't avoid legal ramifications by saying _something_ was bound to happen
Legally, maybe you are right. I honestly don't know. It doesn't seem right to me though.
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/new-images-of-pge-...
> Hong estimates that his home would have been worth about $3.6 million two years ago
Yeah, this person who was able to afford a $3.6M home sure sounds like "our most vulnerable" people. He needs a bailout for making a poor decision on buying that house in a place prone to landslides. Not the hungry kids in our schools whose parents can't afford/won't provide healthy meals.
We got money for millionaires but not hungry kids and people with chronic medical needs.
> "We’re committed to staying,” Reeves, 81, said. “We’re pretty financially committed now.”
> They are weeks into a major renovation after a fissure forced apart rooms in their home.
Their home is constantly being torn apart by the ground and yet they're committed to staying. Insanity.
It is. Insane all ratepayers are shouldering all the cost to rebuild rich people's mansions.
But sure, keep telling me their new mansion on quicksand needs a bailout and they're far more needful than hungry malnourished kids.
> now they're a teacher or something who owns a multi-million dollar home while living on 80k a year or something.
TBH, if their home is now worth millions, they should retire and move someplace cheaper. The market is telling them that land is worth way more than a lifetime of their earnings. They should capitalize on that. They're still far weather people that he vast majority of Americans, and probably the top 0.001% of people on Earth. That they failed to cash their lotto ticket in time before their mansion on the quicksand fell apart leaves me zero sympathy.
I wish I could fail at cashing in my $3.6M lotto ticket I bought for relative pennies. At least I would have been given the chance, no?
You could certainly argue that some sort of fire was inevitable, and that the fire would have been much less damaging if people hadn’t built their houses in such bad places.
But the law doesn’t really care about that. You can’t avoid liability by arguing what would have happened or what should have happened. If your negligence causes a fire and that fire destroys a house, you’re liable for it regardless.
California has contribitory negligence. If the court determined it was negligent to build or keep a house in these places and that contributed to the loss, it must determine the share of loss attributable to each party and reduce the award. In some states, a party must have be less than half at fault to receive compensation, but California doesn't have a minimum, if you are 99% at fault and the other party is 1%, you can get 1% of your loss compensated.