I think that's a bit of color on that, since those homes weren't worth $0 until PG&E caused a fire that burnt them down by neglecting required maintenance.
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.