This is definitely a failure on PG&E's part, but I'm still not sure how much sense it makes to assign them blame for this fire. The environment they're operating in is somewhat ridiculous - the forest is so dry and overgrown that pretty much any flame source will start a fire large enough to burn a huge area; this specific tower failure is basically just the thing that revealed a much larger issue.
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).
> 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.
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.
No the root of the problem is that there's too much forest that hasn't burned. Blaming PG&E is missing the actual problem.
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.
> California's mismanagement with it's forest is the same issue.
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.
Yeah, lots of issues came together for the perfect storm.
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?
I think one of the key points in that Twitter thread is that the distributed responsibility disincentives anyone from pushing to tackle difficult problems (because no professional or personal liability is involved) and the centralization of profits ensures that the dysfunctional administrative structure stays in place.
You get much larger fires when they go undetected for significant periods of time. Lightning strikes can happen anywhere, but most ignition sources are close enough to people for early responses. Power lines are therefore unusually bad as they regularly start fires in forests a significant distance from people making both detection and response more difficult.
If power companies what to run lines through these areas they need to take responsibility for what’s going to happen.
> California's mismanagement with its forest is the same issue.
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?
Here are some articles explaining California's role in forest mismanagement.[0][1][2]
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.
> 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.
I’ll grant your final comment on #3 but on the others I disagree.
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.
What about all the federally owned land in California suffering from the same “mismanagement?”
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.
Read the articles I posted. you can call it what you want, but "credentialed people" have been desperately calling for prescribed burns for years only to run up against local regulations. specifically: "local air boards around the state, and a lack of consistency can create problems for burn projects"
Whats even nuts is many types of trees only propagate with fire. Fires are required to open the cones and let the seeds out.
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.
Humans have known to regulate forest fuels for 1000's of years. This modern stubbornness is hubris based on ignorance of the real technology that has been developed, over tens of thousands of years, in forest management.
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.
The twitter thread makes this exact point. The camp fire would likely have happened with or without this maintenance error on PG&E's part. This is because a tree fell on a different power line and started the Camp B fire, and this was determined not to be the result of a preventable error. Just that fact alone suggests that the main component of the problem is not PG&E's neglect.
That's not the question here. Rather, it's about which causes contributed to the problem—blaming everything on the most proximate cause is convenient but doesn't reflect the situation.
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 :).
There are quite likely many other towers with the same vulnerability, the same potential breakage. Those will cause other fires when they break. There are multiple reasons why they should address those very old towers that haven't had maintenance, because they'll cause other fires.
There are laws about negligence and inspection for utilities. There should be laws about forest management, I suppose, but the law is what determines culpability, not the cofactor analysis of the actual problem root.
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.
> but the law is what determines culpability, not the cofactor analysis of the actual problem root.
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.
I think we should talk about how to design systems such that preventable deaths happen less often (supposing the costs to prevent them are appropriately scaled). I think hitting PG&E with arbitrarily large fines in this situation will not ultimately have much beneficial effect on the rate of preventable deaths. I think that their negligence happened to be the spark, but if not something else would have caused it. Like a tree falling on a line, a lightning strike, or a gender reveal party. Even if the fine led to perfect compliance on their part (it wouldn't/won't), that would not substantially reduce the rate of preventable deaths. This is because their negligence is not the central cause that most significantly raises the probability of large fires.
The fires are a direct result of human-caused climate change. I’ve lived in Washington all my life and 2015 was the first year we got smoked out during the summer. Since then it’s persisted year after year.
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 ...
>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.
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
The vast majority of forest land in California is owned by the federal government and is National Forest land. California can't just go and run controlled burns in those federally controlled forests. That would need to be done in cooperation or under the direction of the US Forest Service and should be funded by the US Forest Service since they own the land.
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 the feds were the problem, why aren't other states such as Texas or Colorado which have similar geographical features to California experiencing the same perpetual fire seasons over and over?
Sure - you can have that discussion. What the Democrats are doing is blaming climate change and Trump's climate change policy. Surely you agree that that is just dishonest.
The only solution to the wildfire problem offered by Trump is that California should do a better job raking up leaves/pine needles and should remove more dead fuel from forests. I think that is much more intellectually dishonest, especially given that Trump is in control of the US Forest Service, which is the agency that would be in charge of raking the leaves and removing the dead trees...
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.
I see Trump as largely out of the discussion; for instance during the Carr Fire he said they needed more water (besides the stupidity of using water, Carr Powerhouse is a major transfer point for the California water system).
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.
Yes. Climate change should be met with mitigation (to avoid further climate change) and realistic adaptations of forest management.
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.
>the baseline expected rate of fires is higher due to climate change,
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.
What do you mean by “political disinformation?” Some news outlets you don’t like published the story? How much “moral clarity” does the outlet need to have before you’ll consider the article?
The sentiment of the post is what confuses me. The idea that California wildfires are caused by forest mismanagement is being covered by many reputable news sources. The sibling posts contain four such links. Some of those sites may have ideological leanings such that they focus more on that mismanagement than climate change, but the other sources have ideological leanings so they focus more on climate change than forest mismanagement. Regardless, we’re not talking about some Russian Facebook bot here.
Hence my question: do you need the New York Times to say it before you’ll believe it’s not “political disinformation?”
When the leading lights of one major US political party are loudly denying the science of climate change, and in service of that denial are claiming that the current fires in Oregon and California are the result of mismanagement by the other major party and not due even partially to climate change, then yes, as a non-expert I would like to see some responsible sources backing up a statement that appears to support the former position.
Which bryan0 and zbrozek helpfully provided. I still call it disinformation coming from the President, but these sources do help make clear what CA's shared culpability here is. And no, I don't need it to be the NYT.
I think it was reasonable to ask for the backup, and the fact it was given makes me think at least some people agree. I absolutely give people here the benefit of the doubt about their good intentions, but there is a context right now of national political figures working against science, often by repeating lies that might sound reasonable to some at first.
I hope that helps clear up the question of sentiment.
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?
Under this approach, we would have to burn all of our natural forests down to the ground because of climate change. It will soon be too dry for any forest to be in it’s natural state. Plus I don’t see how this is strictly a California problem, federal funds are required to manage federal lands. Especially since the current federal administration is fueling the onset of climate change like no other. I’ve witnessed the billions spent by PG&E in trimming trees away from these poles, but they should have spent a little more and gone the distance to just bury these lines underground. PG&E is a failed experiment. They have shown when confronted with the challenge of what’s best for the public and what’s best for the shareholders, they always choose the latter
That's not how natural dynamic systems work. There is a level of stability (some optimal level of forest) that the natural system wants to have, and it will naturally burn away excess if the people were not present. Much of the fires this year were caused by lightening (nature).
> 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 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.
Not sure what point you're making, but my point is there are individual smaller states in the US that do more prescribed burns by acreage than California. To name a few, Florida, Arkansas, South Carolina [1]
> my point is there are individual smaller states in the US that do more prescribed burns by acreage than California
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
Yeah, I know President Trump likes to say the problem is California not “raking forests”, and his cult-like followers just echo his propaganda with some light editing of wording and interjection of random tangential factoids to give it a veneer of rationality, but the bottom line is that, like most of the West and unlike the US outside of the West, California land management, and even moreso California forest management, is predominantly a federal issue, from which the state is excluded from much of due to the Supremacy Clause.
The natural systems are out of wack, my point is that the way the earth is heating up, we would eventually need to burn every forest to compensate for the growing temperatures. This stance is ridiculous. I’m old enough to remember when we didn’t have such ravaging fires, and lightning happened all the time. Better yet, scientists can look at past patterns and they too have proved that climate change is real. Ask a firefighter who’s been around for more then 30 years, they will tell you. The belief that Trump is even remotely correct on this issue is to believe complete foolishness. Alas, here we are.
Forest management is in conflict with home ownership and building code in the forests, and it's sufficiently complicated that what's happening is the only way forward. What support is there to say private land ownership within forests: federal, state, and BLM land? If there were no private land ownership, there'd be no political resistance to controlled burns, there'd be no demand to put out fires immediately. The instant humans started to build in these areas, their rights directly lead to the changes in natural state of the forests.
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.
I don't feel like your analogy makes sense here. The fact that there were explosives stored in the Beirut Port for years is exactly the same kind of institutional failure as PG&E failing to maintain their equipment for decades.
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?"
My take on this is that PG&E way/is behaving negligently and the investigation that resulted from the fire uncovered that. They are literally the cause of the fire in the sense that their actions are what produced the initial flame.
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."
> 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.
Because the majority of fault lies at California/Federal government whoever is in charge of clearing the forests regularly not PG&E.
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.
If PG&E is maintaining power transmissions lines that are surrounded by a known gigantic reservior of combustible material then they are still responsible for when their equipment ignites that material.
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.
That is part of it, the other part is the homes of paradise did not take 'best practices' into account for their homes. (or town, that one narrow road out seems like a deadly bottleneck) There were many news articles at the time talking about how homeowners couldn't prune back the woods far enough from their house, couldn't use less flammable materials in their home construction, etc.
The only way to get developers and builders to build more resiliently is more strong regulation. As it stands, developers have zero incentive to cut into their profit to build a fire resistant structure since they immediately sell it and it doesn’t matter what happens after that, at least to them. In fact, If they are a follower of the perverted philosophy of the past couple decades, if have shareholders it would be their duty to maximize profits by not spending extra.
A wildfire that regularly clears out only the underbush is what was the place historically (and the ecosystems have adapted to this), human prevention of these fires plus climate change has led to fires consuming way more material than they should.
> Yes, but the larger and more important issue is why are there so many explosives in the first place?
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.
I think the point is PG&E should be blamed for negligence but not for the fire[1]. They could follow all regulation to the letter and there will still be a non-negligible chance that their infra will cause a fire simply because existing regulation is not suitable for the environment their infra stands at.
[1] Although I think the thread is rather vague as to the damages assigned to PG&E no?
That's usually not how laws works though. If you act irresponsibly, break laws, don't perform due dilligence and so on, you are also responsible and get blame for the consequences.
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.
Well, they clearly did not establish the fire load in the immediate area of the weld, as is common safety practise in the industry. You wouldn't want to weld near an active gas line either, you want to ensure it's not filled with gas.
It is a simple fact that lightning does start fires, especially in places like the American west, where lightning is not always accompanied with much, or any, rainfall at ground level. The severity of any fire is determined by how it develops in the hours and days that follow its ignition, long after the storm has moved on or dissipated.
That's not disputed. But starting a fire in completely dry conditions is worse than starting one that potentially coincides with rainfall, all other things being equal.
The LNU and SCU lightning complex fires have burned about 750,000 acres. The August complex(also started by lighting) has already burned 796,000 acres.
Actually yes, since they have a huge incentive to Run to Failure. Chaos monkeys would provide a consistent source of failures to make them do their maintenance.
While I appreciate the merits of chaos engineering, this comment lacks an understanding of the impact of these incidents, particularly in rural areas with a history of forest mismanagement.
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:
You can do simulations, either run it in forward or reverse. Pick a random town, burn it down, run the flame front backwards and find the paths and lines that caused it. Then look at the probable failure rates of those lines.
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.
OK. I like the increased utilization of simulations idea.
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.
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.
I suspect that the best results may come from simpler modeling, such as modeling the system with a physical model,like modeling aerodynamics in a wind tunnel, or boat hulls in a wave tank.
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.
No, GP is saying you need to start doing controlled fires on a regular basis, to reduce the accumulation of flammable material. Power grid is not related to that.
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.
This is a ridiculous argument. Why don't we forcefully tear down all of PG&E's infra every few years. They'll be forced to rebuild it with the latest safety standards... smh
It lacks context, but the idea itself is not ridiculous. That's pretty much how original Australians dealt with fuel buildup. Move and burn often. Given specific ecosystem, in a very literal sense, 1000 fires are better than 10 in the same area over the same time period.
I lived in Africa. The parks used to run controlled burns, every year or two, of the savanna grass.
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.
> water mains that transfer water to the city from upstate are well over a century old. ... They just wait for them to fail, then replace the small part that failed.
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)
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.
Thanks for that. I’d completely forgotten about it. Hopefully, it wasn’t planned by the same folks that planned East Side Access. I have three friends that have retired, while working on it, and it’s many, many years behind schedule. Each of them had planned to be still working for the MTA, when it was done.
No, the point is I think that they could reduce the risk further, they are currently maintaining their network, the question is what benefit would be gained by increasing the cost of their maintenance, or whether they would be absorbing the risk from someone else's lack of maintenance (e.g clearing forest debris/making fire breaks). Remember, power lines are not the only source of fires, lightning being a much more frequent cause and power grid maintenance isn't going to alter that risk
>You’re conceding that if PG&E were a competent and responsible company they could significantly reduce the rate of fires.
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.
Suppose the government left barrels of leaky oil around, then you cause a small fire, which escalates into a huge fire as a result. It's fair to say that you caused the fire. It's probably also fair to say that the bulk of damages are due to government negligence. The debate is where we fall on that spectrum. I would think the power company should be punished as if it caused fires on an average managed forest but there's going to be nuance.
Point is there's two parties with some degree of negligence.
But that’s not the full analogy. The full analogy would be that the government left oil barrels around the whole state, and you went around the state starting hundreds of small fires, and if you had not done that, there would still have been a few fires from other sources, but there would be far fewer fires overall.
Take driving as an analogy - there's a non-zero risk of having a crash, but it's significantly higher if you don't follow the rules (drunk, speeding, broken car). This feels like PG&E was betting it wouldn't happen to them.
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.
An even better analogy is Jenga. California's uncontrolled fuel load was going to result in massive fires at some point. Yes, PG&E could have reduced the chance of it being them, which would be great for PG&E, but would make no difference to California.
The fuel load decays over time, so a long enough wait period and the next fire is independent of the last fire. Thus, fewer PG&E fires just means less fires rather than there being some independent amount of fire that’s always going to happen.
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.
This is mostly incorrect, and a really bad take at understanding fires in semi-arid climates.
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.
Amusingly, mostly incorrect in this case translates to true. The point is it’s not a linear increase with time. Yes, controlled burns can make a serious difference, their also a significant risk on their own as unlike wetter climates you get a lot of fuel at the same time.
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.
>>I think for a utility the risk should be very very close to zero
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.
If 65 cents is the actual cost then it should be the price. You can't be charging people 20 cents or whatever, but then they also have to pay to have their homes rebuilt every few decades, pay for insurance, and pay for firefighters.
I think blaming rural power users is a dangerous idea for a couple reasons.
> 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.
Rural people love their subsidies. We should encourage people to live in denser areas, not all cities, but towns. How many rural people do you think are involve in food production? It's only around 10%.
> Rural people love their subsidies. We should encourage people to live in denser areas, not all cities, but towns. How many rural people do you think are involve in food production? It's only around 10%.
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...
I'm not saying we mess with these people, I'm saying we charge market rate, or closer to it, for electricity. Maybe setup a program they can apply for to get a subsidy. That will make the process much clearer and everyone can track how much is being subsidized.
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.
I understand the constraints and I'm not blaming them for everything, creating this dangerous situation is also a great issue, but I think this was handled very badly on their part as well.
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.
While I am a huge supporter of free market and capitalism, due to the massive regulations on utilities it is no longer a free market, at least for power generation and delivery.
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
Hm...it's unclear whether you read the stream. They had reason to believe that the C-hook would fail after 97-100 years, yet weren't even checking the C-hooks on towers that were 100 years old. That seems willfully negligent.
I think the point is that PG&E negligently caused sparks. But many things can negligently cause sparks, including dozens of human and natural causes. Even among power operators, sparks seem to not be too rare (for example, the tree that fell on the line).
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...
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.
I suspect that man was lying... It is very very very hard to start a fire with a hammer, even deliberately...
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...
> I suspect that man was lying... It is very very very hard to start a fire with a hammer, even deliberately...
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.
I laugh at the image of a statistical ensemble of people claiming to to bees with a hammer while instead setting them on fire with gasoline, with one of them actually hammering bees with a hammer.
If the forest is so sensitive that hammer sparks set off a fire, maybe no humans belong in the forest - except for the humans proactively trying to manage burns.
The fire started in grassland, not in a forest. As it grew, it spread to forested areas. There is a lot of grassland out in California and it gets very flammable in the summer when it all dies out and dries up. Dead grass is basically well-aerated vertical kindling. It's so easy to light that when I was growing up outside of Sacramento, a common cause of local wildfires was cigarette butts flicked out a car window. When we mowed the lawn in the summer, we would keep the garden hose charged. Basically, it burns, burns easily, and burns quickly.
"why can some sparks in one place cause such huge destruction and can we do anything about that?"
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.
In addition, as the original twitter stream says, climate change promoted additional growth of vegetation, which added even more fuel for wildfire. It would be an interesting topic of research to see which one contributed more to the proliferation of wildfire we are observing in the west coast.
A couple whose trailer they were towing with an RV had a flat tire and sparks from the rim scraping on the pavement touched off the enormous and deadly Carr Fire of 2018.
> 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.
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.
> Maybe whoever setup the dominoes behind the first one shares the blame as well...
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.
No. I think the point is can we change our forestry practices. Ignoring the root causes and blaming the first dominoe isn’t helpful because there will always be some dumb thing to set off a massive fire. We have been assigning blame - is that effective at stopping the fires?
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?
Fires can start from natural causes too. It's ignorant to say that this sort of disaster can be prevented by fixing behaviour, and it's a special form of hubris to think that you can "unstupid" everyone. This is the worst plan you can have. Relying on all individuals not doing something stupid for a long time is a lost cause, just look at the state of covid in the US. There are people literally throwing parties or sending their kids to school while they know that they have covid.
Many things can crash cars but if you crash one you're liable.
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.
I love the car comparison because I think the comparison to car manufacturers' stance pre-"Unsafe At Any Speed" seems quite fitting. In fact car manufacturers at least had drivers to blame, whereas PG&E can really only blame themselves or "acts of god"
The reason it "some sparks" caused such huge destruction is because PG&E was also not maintaining the brush underneath their towers. All they were doing was literally fanning the flames by flying over it with a helicopter.
We're all thinking about C-hooks because that's what failed here. What if the foundation had failed? Or any one of a million other things. I'm not saying that PG&E are clear by any means, just that it's really easy to point fingers after an incident. Be very wary of hindsight bias.
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.
> We're all thinking about C-hooks because that's what failed here. What if the foundation had failed? Or any one of a million other things. I'm not saying that PG&E are clear by any means, just that it's really easy to point fingers after an incident. Be very wary of hindsight bias.
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.
Right, I should clarify. PG&E absolutely should have known about, and prevented, the specific situation that caused this fire, and the fact they didn't do so is a huge problem. However, the surrounding area is such a high fire risk that a fire almost certainly would have occurred even without this failure (which the thread mentions: https://twitter.com/TubeTimeUS/status/1306377626487894017), and so the specific cause of the fire seems almost irrelevant to me. Even if PG&E did spend billions more on maintenance, and fix their inspection procedures, I don't see how this area would ever be safe, and so focusing on the power company as the source of the issue seems misguided to me.
Climate change shouldn't be used as a get out of jail card free card for catastrophic events like this.
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.
Assigning them unlimited liability for catastrophic wildfires leads to the unintended consequence of making it risky for them to run power at all during high fire danger conditions, so they turn off power in these areas.
They've been willfully negligent and reckless to the infrastructure they own to service their customers.
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.
Where I live in rural Missouri, we have "rural electric cooperatives." They are customer-owned utilities set up in the 1930s. From my experience and that of everyone I've talked to in the region, the coops are incredibly reliable, take safety and maintenance very seriously, and provide service at very reasonable rates.
It seems clear to me that for-profit business is the wrong model for an infrastructure monopoly like power delivery networks.
PGEs for profit status is kind of derailing tangent in these discussions. There are many successful ownership models for running a utility safely and reliably.
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.
They've been willfully negligent and reckless to the infrastructure they own to service their customers.
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.
That's fine then, have them turn it off during periods of high fire danger. Massive wildfires also interrupt electrical service.
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.
That’s an argument you could make in any kind of liability lawsuit. It falls flat because the lawsuit isn’t worth filing in the average case, so nobody ends up being held to account for anything.
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)?
Whatever the appropriate monetary penalty is, it feels like jail time for executives and management within PG&E, who are ultimately responsible for the apparent culture of negligence within PG&E, is appropriate as well.
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.
They should be fined the cost of the fire multiplied by the increased risk of fire that they caused. So (cost of camp fire) * ((chance of fire happening due to unmaintained c-hook) / ((chance of fire happening from unmaintained c-hook)+(chance of fire happening from all other sources)
Right, and it also outlines how records were not kept up-to-date. I would be interested to know what has happened since then. What type of records are being kept now? it seems likely that with today's technology we can use something to keep an eye on these things without sending people in as often too. Perhaps we can use cameras or drones.
There is a project from my former professor (?) and electrical company: use drones + cameras with specific filters to capture variation of temperature, wear and debris in towers.
PG&E did request to be able to clear brush up to 15 feet away from the power lines which I believe Gov. Newsom granted a CEQA exemption to them to do[1]. Prior to that, they were only allowed to clear four feet.[2]
That doesn't change the broken equipment but some of the blame can be placed on environmental regulations that cause this.
What I am not sure of is whether environmental regulatory approval decreases funding and/or increases costs/time of repairing power lines. The power line upgrades do have to be reviewed and approved by environmental regulators. Here is an example[3].
You don’t have to speculate about trees causing fires in the area: the thread eventually mentions a second fire, Camp B, caused by a tree falling on a line. It was subsumed by the first Camp fire. It may have caused just as much trouble if it was the only fire.
I don't mean to come over as arrogant, snotty or something here, but speaking of proper engineering and maintenance in the context of high-voltage transmission lines in the USA instantly makes one burst out in laughter when comparing that to how they are built in Germany.
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.
Pge has a history of diverting maintenance to profits. That has been proven.
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.
It's instructive to consider the alternative. Many US towns expand in a dendritic pattern by branching cul-de-sacs off of interconnecting roads. By contrast pre-Westphalian cities were always built within convex hulls for defensive purposes. These shapes were imitated by early grid-planned US towns built by capitalist pioneers, but after the introduction of the automobile those towns were soon surrounded by irregular additions.
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.
..."excusable" cause (like a tree falling on a line...
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.
Yes, they have blame. Yes, they diverted profits from maintenance. Yes, they could have made less money and done more maintenance and (slightly?) reduced the likelihood of a fire. The issue is that the incentives are not aligned.
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.
Imagine an alleged arsonist going to court, and his defense was "not guilty your honor, I didn't put all that fuel in one place, I just flicked a tiny lighter!"
This is a poor analogy. Besides the distinction that arson is intentional rather than negligent, arsonists burn things that would not have burned otherwise. While PG&E's negligence sparked the fire, the brush in the area would have burned at some point in the near future regardless of their actions. The Twitter thread mentions the fire that started in the area around the same time because a tree fell, or some other inciting event could have happened. While PG&E should be held accountable for failing to uphold legal standards of inspection, the Camp Fire or a similar one was likely even without negligence, so to compare PG&E to arsonists is misleading.
Negligent vs intentional is orthogonal to responsible. You could be responsible but just negligent, like an idiot lighting up a cigar at a gas station. You could intentionally light a fire but not responsible, such as if someone tricked you into doing it or you were poisoned with hallucinogenic drugs, or just plain crazy.
None of these corner-cases do anything for your arsonist analogy. Whatever else one thinks of the utility, it is not plausible that either it or its employees intended to start a fire.
Surely seeing an organisation being so careless in its maintenance of an extremely dangerous asset is criminal, regardless of whether or not a fire was started. “I own giant death cables in the sky but skimp on their upkeep costs” is already worth punishing or holding someone accountable for.
> 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)
Or, say, a massive lightning storm such as the ones that sparked many of the wildfires this year.
Take the fire out of the picture and PG&E have total responsibility for maintaining this infrastructure and keeping it safe. They can't blame it on the geography of the area.
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.
This is a failing of engineering reliable systems:
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.
Clearly it broke. Was fixed, sort of but not actually, and failed.
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.
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).
Swapping the wires around at the start or end of the line doesn't swap them frequently enough. It's actually quite like a twisted pair in an ethernet cable: you swap the order frequently to average out the different position-dependent electrical characteristics to get a uniform characteristic.
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.
TIL. Germans of course have their Verdrillschemata to place Verdrillmasten properly, but it seems they're quite rare. There's a Wikipedia article with an example transmission line, but it notes that all Verdrillmasten have been removed from that line over time.
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 lines themselves basically do not have twists anymore, it only happens at the special power poles (Verdrillmasten) and only statically (so no moving parts like in PGE/CA). They're more modern and safer but more expensive when you need to change infrastructure resulting in a different load on the 3-phase, so you have to rewire those towers.
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.
Wait, that doesn't sound right. It's a bit hard to tell with Google translate. But from what I see on the wikipedia article (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdrillmast) Germany is doing exactly the same thing as is done in the US - the US does not twist lines in midair. Only at poles.
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).
You don't see those hooks things in Europe because I doubt we have any high voltage lines that old left. I suspect this one survived that long because of the much drier California climate.
Honestly for what this cost in human loss of life and financial loss it would have made sense to clean the ground underneath the towers or perhaps install fire suppressor systems the entire length of the line. A few sprinklers at the bottom of each tower and a single water main to supply them can't possibly cost the same $16 billion that a wildfire costs. Even if you put a $100 Raspberry Pi with a temperature sensor, smoke sensor, and computer vision at the bottom of each tower to detect fires. 85 people would be alive right now.
My thoughts exactly, PG&E are to blame and should be punished but it seems like someone forgot to ask the 5 why's- why did the fire spread so fast ? why didn't people got a warning in time ?
CalFire’s budget is lower than it was in 1999 in inflation adjusted dollars. 8/10 CalFire workers are prison laborers. How convenient for the CA government to have cLiMatE chAnGe to blame.
I do remember reading that there was a lack of maintenance by PG&E but as you say it is a systemic governance failure and to single out one point of failure is scapegoating.
Here in Sonoma County [Tubbs fire, kincade fire, LNU Lightning fires] PG&E has had 2-3 contracted helicopters out pretty much every day doing line maintenance/checking.
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.
3 x brand new ROBINSON R-44 ~$1.5mil. 3x pilot salary, lets be generous ~$400K. $220/hour operating cost includes insurance and amortized overhaul, flying 5 hours a day = ~1200 hours per year, 3x $250K.
$2.7 million all in all. they make >$500mil a year, they can afford to try harder.
Like right now? The feather river canyon near Paradise is on fire as we speak from a lighting induced fire that has caused fatalities. The Camp fire burn out area is actual one of the boarders of the North Complex fire.
> 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.
So what you're saying is we need more regulations to cover these kinds of cases? Aren't you "regulations" people usually against regulations? Like, normally wouldn't I be arguing against someone screaming about how the free market can take care of these things and that the free market knows better than the government?
Or, once again, is it just an amazing coincidence that people have suddenly completely flipped their stance because it happened in California?
> So what you're saying is we need more regulations to cover these kinds of cases?
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.
Interesting. I'm kinda sympathetic to PG&E on this though. These big lines don't have much under them, inspection is by helicopter, and the lines cannot be shut down. I would not be surprised if "fix it when it breaks" is a nationwide phenomenon for high tension lines.
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?
If California doesn't like PG&E making $550M profit, and would like PG&E spend more on maintenance, it should set lower profit target, and allow PG&E spend more money on maintenance. PG&E operates based on decisions of California Public Utilities Commission, which decides, among other things, how much money PG&E is allowed to make, and how much it is allowed to spend on maintenance. Here's what it looks like: https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M102/K...
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.
Why is it people will argue that there should be fewer regulations to allow companies more freedom to operate but when those companies, unsurprisingly, put money ahead of safety, it’s then the government’s fault for not regulating those companies?
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.
I don’t think you understood my comment. PG&E is as regulated as you can possibly get without literally being part of government. When PG&E wants to spend $100M on maintenance, it has to ask government for permission, and CPUC needs to approve this expense.
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.
There's definitely an observable issue with Californian electricity supplies being significantly worse than in other parts of the world, which have more liberalised transmission operator firms.
Is it more liberalised in other parts of the world though? That’s not usually the case for Europe and China (the next two biggest global economies). Perhaps it might be true specifically with regards to electricity supply but I would be very surprised if that were the case knowing how the U.K. likes to regulate similar services which I have directly been employed by.
> PG&E would love to spend more money on maintenance
Yeah, their series of felony convictions for violating the law regarding maintenance, and obstructing investigations into those failures, tells a very different story.
IMO, this is the most important comment here (so far) in understanding the investment & maintenance decision making and constaints of PG&E.
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.
> PG&E operates based on decisions of California Public Utilities Commission...
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.
I wish this attitude towards planned and unplanned shutdowns was more common.
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!
That depends on how you look at it. In the case of this thread, is it better for the environment that PGE continues using 100 year old electricity towers and saves the resources (metals, fuel, labor) necessary to replace them? Or is it better that such massive fires are reduced in frequency?
I think it's hard to take the example of a poorly maintained electric tower in the middle of a poorly managed forest and extend that to all electronics a company uses. The comment I was replying to talks about windows computers, castings, and standard electrical panels.
>Of course they can. A failure is an unplanned shutdown
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
This is PG&E in California we are talking about? The one that already has rolling blackouts? California is just a failed state - an embarrassment for an economy so large it rivals most countries.
The Republicans have a little more blame for the deregulation driven blackouts of 2000.
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]
There is no defense for PG&E for the Camp Fire. This is an organization that is notorious for under-maintaining its assets. Its state of repair is so shoddy that it regularly turns off power for many days at a time ("public safety power shutoffs") to huge swathes of its service area. No other comparable utility does this - not San Diego Gas and Electric, not the Victoria Electricity Cooperative (Australian utility), no one, because they have entered the 21st century and don't need to resort to crude hacks like shutting off all power to prevent fires.
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.
PGE also was responsible for contaminating the ground water in Hinkley California with millions of gallons of chromium in the the 1960s and then covering it up for 20 years.
There is something seriously wrong with PGE and it's attitude towards it's infrastructure and public safety.
PG&E pled guilty to the charges brought against them, in part because there was clear evidence of their leadership intentionally neglecting their infrastructure for decades until it fell into such disrepair as to start a forest fire. They chose to remain quiet about their neglect until it became impossible to do so, sealing their fate. If they had demonstrated a history of decades of campaigning to get the problem solved, rather than silently neglecting it, they might not have been found guilty at all.
(This is from memory, so if I got any specifics wrong, see replies for corrections.)
> I'm of the opinion that humans should not be living in areas that burn regularly.
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.
It does. The west coast is fire and earthquake prone. The east, hurricanes. There's a giant swath of land in "flyover country", the Midwest, that doesn't have any particular disaster risk.
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
That's how it's done now.[1] But seeing wear on a hook is tough even with high resolution photos, because the wear is between hook and eye and doesn't show clearly until the setup is disassembled.
Did you look at the photos of the hook, it should be visible to a proper inspection. That marketing video of inspections is either picked for nice panning shots, or is simply inadequate operation to make it look like they can inspect faster than they should to be effective.
In the UK helicopters are used as drones simply aren’t fast enough to image an entire transmission line in a reasonable amount of time.
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.
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.
> Communities should not be allowed to form, and should be actively wound down if they are within dangerous areas with seasonal problems.
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.)
California mountain towns are not economically productive. I doubt they could even exist without the rest of the states taxes supporting their infrastructure.
Yes, this happened in an isolated mountain town. Let's set that aside for a moment.
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.
I mean, you have to be more careful when you’re in a more dangerous area. If you live on a remote farm you can hit golf balls from your back porch. If you live in a suburb, not so much. Is this unfair?
The big change is not that somehow PG&E is going to inspect every hook on every tower. It’s not like they can just climb the tower and check it out, as you say they inspect with helicopters and cameras. Probably many of these towers don’t have a clear means to even access them with heavy equipment.
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.
Or, you could be responsible and say 'hey, we have no documentation for this power line and it's 90 years old. Our knowledge of materials science say this should have worn out. Let's be proactive and replace things'.
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.
PGEs own linemen were concerned about wear on these towers. They sent samples from the field to labs for metallurgical analysis. PGEs own scientists estimated that the components would wear out in 100 years.
To be fair, first you would have build out a several hundred billion dollar state wide electrical grid, while allowing it to degrade in various ways over approximately a century.
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.
I'm sure what your point is. The worse the situation, the greater the responsibility. PG&E does not live up to the responsibility it should carry. If the towers are on average 68 years old that means they are supposed to put even more effort into maintenance than they already do.
So they better start maintaining them at a rate higher than 100-200 miles per year. They need to do 1000 miles per year to keep up with 100,000 miles of lines that have a 100 year life expectancy.
They’ve promised to spend $40 billion over the next five years on the grid, ~$8 billion of which is wildfire risk mitigation. It’s hard to say that will be in any way “sufficient”.
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;
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”.
I guess my takeaway from this is if you're a government building some sort of asset you're going to transfer to the private sector, overengineer it. Nobody is ever going to do maintenance, so your thing essentially has to last forever. Imagine that they made the hooks so they only lasted for 10 years -- we'd have 10 times as many billion-dollar fires. But some engineer in 1918 said "you know, let's make it a little bit bigger, it's only a few cents extra" and they probably saved some lives in the process.
(Yes, it failed, but you have to admit that it had a pretty good run! 97 years is not bad for a moving part!)
Paradoxically though if it failed every 1 year then pretty soon maintenance would have to be performed every few months or days or else there would be so many failures it would be really hard to ignore.
This is an interesting argument. Maybe 10 years as a lifespan would be better than 100 years since it'd force checks every year. With the 100 year lifespan, people will always assume it can be done next year instead of this year.
Reminds me of Let's Encrypt issuing 90 day certs instead of 1+ year so that you're forced to find a better automated solution and not have a panic when your cert expires in 5 years
I wonder whether or not that's the global maximum. I still occasionally run into sites that never figured out how to use Let's Encrypt, so they don't encrypt at all.
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.
"over-engineering" something can't make it last forever, can't prevent it from eventually wearing out. If that's the plan, it just postpones the day when people suffer. As you say, these things were engineered for the long haul but the people harmed in Santa Rosa fire that the collapse of a pylon caused probably aren't impressed by shear lifetime.
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?
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.
-- 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.
> 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.
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.
The government didn't build this asset and transfer it. Great Western Power Company built it, which PG&E bought from a New York holding company in 1930.
I feel like an easy solution to this could have been an additional safety wire. The safety wire will catch the insulator and thereby give maintenance crew a few days to arrive before the tower fails for good. There is also a general maintenance problem that could be solved by installing inspection cameras directly onto every tower. Those cameras may have to be replaced more frequently than the actual tower components but I'm sure they would not only save on inspection costs but also allow them to respond to falling infrastructure much faster.
Of course PG&E has a cultural problem, not a technical problem. So I doubt they would do this at all.
I also found it bizarre that your average go-kart track (not to mention aviation) has the presence of mind to safety wire everything but a multi billion dollar utility company didn't
A century ago, when it was designed, they've probably correctly assumed there's no way a safety line, even unloaded, will survive longer than a hook in there. The hook was a robust solution that could easily last a decade or two.
I doubt people back then were expecting this to be left unmaintained for 97 years.
So the government has to spend more, look more inefficient, and then when a private corporation and runs it dangerously at minimum cost, it plays right into the "private companies are more efficient, we should privatise more" lobby.
"Paying money to violate the law" is a fundamentally broken method of law enforcement. Do away with them. Justice should not be a line item in a spreadsheet. Maybe it's only twenty minutes in the county jail but every single infraction should fall personally on the individual who made the decision. Start hauling board members into court in orange jumpsuits and see how quickly these "unavoidable" fuckups stop happening.
At the same time retribution should not be the goal of justice, it should be rehabilitation. I'm totally against incarcerating anyone not posing imminent threat to life for a multitude of reasons but my most selfish is that locking people up is incredibly expensive and I'd rather not spend my tax dollar on it if its not actually protecting me from anything.
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.
The cost of this fire was $85b. If this sort of event could be avoided or mitigated by disincentivising the behaviour that caused it (by putting the occasional exec in prison for negligence) I guess it's likely prison would be quite a bit cheaper overall.
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.
How do we decide who is “personally responsible”? Wells Fargo’s tellers were the ones personally responsible for the fraud, but that was due to unreasonable targets set by management.
That's where an org chart comes in. You find the people directly responsible, and walk up the chart until you reach the point you can't prove a person could be reasonably aware of what their sub^n-ordinates were doing. All people you collected up to that point should then be put in front of a judge.
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.
The most useful outcome to society would be for every 100-year-old piece of PG&E infrastructure to be replaced, at whatever cost to the company is necessary.
Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom are the top of the chain for PG&E. The The California Public Utilities Commission which is appointed by the Governor controls PG&E.
CPUC sets the regulations. PG&E finds the easiest way to maximize profits under those regulations. Sometimes those profits are maximized by by just dumping the hexavalent chromium rust inhibitor into the ground.[0] Other times by delaying maintenance on 100 year old towers.[1] Even executive personal profits can be maximized by diverting safety operations funds for executive bonuses. [2] Privatization of public utilities for the win!
I've got a bit of a problem with articles like this one. I'll try and illustrate it with an analogy:
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.
That fires would happen for other reasons is completely inconsequential to me in this case. This tower was criminally neglected even in basic maintenance. Such a tower should not exist in any place, and if only the consequence would be long power outages without forwarning.
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.
And to me, the fact that the fires would happen for other reasons is the most important thing in the case. Blame should fall on the people with the power to prevent an accident from happening, and PG&E did not have that power. (They instead had the power to prevent the accident from happening in one specific way, but it still would have happened in another way)
I don't claim that blame for the fires rests on PG&E. My point was rather, that the towers were in an unacceptable state of maintenance. Any kind of accident or disaster could happen any time from towers in that state. And a disaster did happen. That others greatly contributed greatly or even mainly to the disaster taking its scale, is a question for the precise liability and punishment split.
And what I'm saying is that if every tower in the forest was in a similar state of maintenance, or had a flamethrower pointing off the side that went off every week, the number of deaths would be lower.
> have. But as fires have demonstrated this year... fires are going to happen. Lightning, gender reveals, a broken muffler... Something will provide the spark.
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?
I do not believe that fires are being started at anywhere near the maximal rate allowed by forest conditions. I DO believe that having vastly more fires started (on the order of 100x or more) would reduce the overall deaths and ecological damage, though. (Having more fires more often makes each fire smaller and less intense, which massively decreases the risk to life) To the best of my knowledge, this belief is shared by most modern forestry experts.
I hate these extreme thought puzzles. They try to simplify the problem by analogy and try to highlight the issues of the original problem through severe imagery (incendiary in an orphanage, wtf), but all they do is mislead, because the choice of what is magnified is an opinion, and the lesson to be learned is shaped by bias.
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.
You're right that it does draw attention to other systemic problems that we need to address. Forest management in a changing climate needs to change and we're definitely socially negligent there.
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.
> driving too fast is an active choice, while lack of maintenance is an accident.
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.
Sure, but I'd put money on the majority of people speeding doing so intentionally, and while determining whether lack of maintenance was an accident isn't trivial (and depends on the definition of 'intentional') even in the PG&E case here they did not specifically and knowingly leave a broken part on the line.
> even in the PG&E case here they did not specifically and knowingly leave a broken part on the line.
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 don't understand your analogy. It was the tower that was abandoned for "50 years". The transmission tower has an inbuilt failure that triggers after 100 years (the failed hook = the incendiary) except it wasn't some asshole that added the incendiary, it was the group (PG&E) responsible for constructing and maintaining the tower. The tower hasn't been maintained by PG&E for around 100 years (close to your 50 years) so all the trees trapped near or under the transmission tower die in a wild fire. You have picked your analogy in such a way that it is extremely confusing. Even after reading "To me, PG&E is the driver here." it still felt extremely forced because the entire "twitter article" is about the failure of PG&E to maintain their infrastructure. That also includes cutting down trees near power lines.
Not sure if someone covered this already, but figured I would give my two cents since I worked in the industry. Usually the hardest part of electrical work is taking a circuit off-line long enough to fix an issue like this. The toughest projects were upgrading lines where customers are fed radially (one circuit). In more densely populated areas customers are fed by two or more lines, allowing the utility to schedule an outage and do repairs or upgrades. Utilities are judged on metrics that track outage time (I believe its called SAIDI), and they will do everything they can to use those lines until the end.
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?
> 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.
This gets complicated because if the utility wants to build a new line they have to acquire land and nobody is ever happy about that for good reason, and no one wants to pay more in the short term. Look at the keystone pipeline, as there are huge political/social implications for transport of raw energy across large tracts of land.
Excellent Twitter thread, I'm glad I went down that rabbit hole. I wish it was in blog format though, it's kind of jarring working through little blurbs.
Read the first few tweets, then bailed. If the author can't be bothered to format and present their work properly, I'm going to assume it's not worth spending my time on. Putting words on the Internet isn't hard.
"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."
Is this sort of process similar to what occurred in Europe during the decline of the Roman Empire when aqueducts and similar public infrastructure fell into disrepair? Did the people who witnessed that occurring notice the intergenerational trend, or did they think everything was business as normal? Is there any hope for reversing this decline in infrastructure if everybody close to the matter considers it normal?
I'm not sure the term has ever been extended to multi-generational problems, though it very well could be.
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.
The thing is, the concept seems to imply a decaying awareness of what's necessary. I don't think the concept is applicable here -
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.
I think this normalisation also applies to the other factors of this disaster. I dont think it is enough to focus on the immediate cause of the fire (it could have started through other causes, if the tower werent faulty), but how can people build so close to a forest which is mantained in a way which allows for such big fires?
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.
I own roughly 40 acres of Douglas Fir forest in Northwest Oregon, and let me tell you — there’s no black and white answer to this. This is a long post, so buckle up.
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.
These forests managed themselves for thousands of years without us - including periods of invasive species (through geological rather than human means of transmission). I find it funny us humans seem to want to take responsibility for everything.
That said I wouldn't want my house burned down from a forest fire either.
Well, while it might make a nice children’s book, there were no firefighting animals prior to humans. So, sure, the forests managed to maintain themselves because no one was around to stop the fires, which kept things in check. Animals would flee, but in general these fires would have been more frequent and as a consequence, less vicious.
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.
But you said it yourself, if we had not "managed" the forest we would likely have been in a better situation today with less severe fires. Humans have a huge bias to action, and aversion to change which isn't always for the best.
There’s two different types of “management” being discussed. One being the modern approach of fire suppression. The other, the one taken by native Americans, involved annual burns which did not make the situation worse and in fact kept things in check.
It's the changing conditions that make it tricky and "unnatural" in the short term. Long-term, of course everything will be fine. Life survived a lot radical changes and following mass extinctions. But as far as I can tell, usually the dominant species after the event were not the same as the ones before the events.
This is a good use of twitter to apply engineering and figure out issues.
The problem is that PG&E’s incentives are significantly misaligned to not be successful:
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!
It's amazing to me that PG&E is allowed to use "We don't have any records" as an excuse for negligence. That's part of the same defense they tried to pull in Hinkley, CA where they were dumping hexavalent chromium into the ground and tried to destroy any records of it happening.[0]
It would be great if the author had just made a blog post and tweeted it. This sort of seems like useful information, which will suck to lose when this tweet inevitably disappears and isn't updated later with new information.
Tweets make excellent momentary entertainment. Let's stop using them for anything else.
Yep this form of "journalism" always makes me wonder about why somebody would do this. Informing the public seems to be a secondary concern. At least that's my initial impression. Basically, this reads as clickbait aimed at some influencer circle jerk playing out across linkedin, quora, etc. where people with too much time and yet no attention span hang out to profile themselves to each others and do some ego boosting: "OMG look what I discovered and how brilliant that makes me look". I imagine somebody drooling over all the clicks they are getting and am already annoyed with myself that I'm perpetuating that bullshit by having clicked on the thing.
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?
I found this series of tweets a very succinct way of describing the failure. Ultimately the key evidence is contained in the images and we only need a few additional words to provide the context. A tweet storm built around a handful of key images serves as a poor-man's infographic.
Maybe I just had low-expectations when I clicked through and I was pleasantly surprised that it represented a useful failure analysis.
agree. i hate when really interesting info is tweeted out. this belongs in a blog post hosted somewhere less ephemeral. the way it was pre-web 2.0.
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.
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?
I feel that we are getting better at recognizing that complex failures can have multiple contributing causes. In this case: superficial maintenance, negligent management, ineffective regulation, forest management, climate change, housing planning, demand for living near trees...
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.
i think about this issue a lot. humans as tribal story tellers always require a meta narrative to put events into an understandable format. even if there is no story arc, no protagonist and no villian. as our world becomes more complex, with intractable dependencies between automated complex systems, our world becomes less understandable. more and more there are fewer and fewer "man in the loop" events. our infrastructure is on autopilot and we are at the mercy of its autonomous interactions. there is no one to blame for catastrophes or accidents.
it's like the line from the old RAW book: "there is no governor anywhere."
Thank you for posting this. At this level of organizations, it is enlightening to see how different countries handle similar situations.
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.
Like the thread points out though, maintenance is just one piece of the puzzle. There were multiple points of failure here, not just the hook.
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.
I have no idea what you're talking about. Unless you count "power lines active during dry conditions" which is unavoidable, the only meaningful failure here is repeated lack of maintenance. The design was fine, and it was installed fine; it lasted a hundred years! Lack of maintenance will kill anything eventually, all by itself.
> the only meaningful failure here is repeated lack of 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
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
The power line failure just lit the fuse of the existing powder keg. Had the power line not failed, an equivalent fire could have eventually come from a cigarette butt of a hiker, lightning bolt, etc. The PG&E maintenance/record keeping fails are egregious, but the article also mentions climate change and forest management as things we need to address as well; it's not enough to eliminate one ignition source - we need to also prevent the powder keg from forming (or at least getting so big).
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.
It's impossible to design a system that won't need maintenance. There is nothing wrong with designing something that needs some parts replaced every 50 years, and that's the only design factor that was involved.
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.
Good point (about the dysfunction of how maintenance costs get considered), but maintenance of that one hook is nothing. And lack of maintenance of the whole system risks more such fires. I'm assuming it's $4 million fine plus requiring the missing maintenance program to be implemented.
The root problem is that an aboveground power distribution network was used when an underground one would have been the right solution. This is not cheap to fix and so lotteries with peoples lives and property are on the order of the day.
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.
There's a comment in the thread suggesting something I'd never thought of before, but which sounds like a great idea, although I'm not too good with economic thinking:
"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."
I believe that Brazil gives a good case study on the subject. The whole sector used to be state-owned and electricity used to be more expensive and outages a very regular thing.
Currently, some parts of the country have private generation and transmission with targets sets for the number of planned shutdowns, outages and inspection set by the regulatory agency.
The private companies are light-years ahead on any metric that you can think of. The parts of the sector that are still public-owned are legendary on their wastefulness and lack of accountability.
It can go the other way as well. Originally power companies like PG&E were also streetcar companies. They found that power generation was profitable, but main line transmission wasn’t. But if you’re going to do the work of building a main line into a city... why not run a streetcar underneath it and sell fares? That combination turned out to be profitable, and to be a great win for the cities.
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).
This is how it works in Sweden. I pay two separate bills each month, one for the amount of electricity I've used, and another for using the electrical infrastructure. We have a ton of options to choose from regarding who generates our electricity and seems to keep the competition healthy.
Twitter has started doing a weird thing where if you visit the beginning of a thread directly, it will cut off the replies after just 6 tweets. To read further, you have to click "Show this thread" which directs to the same tweet but with a different URL format: https://twitter.com/i/status/1306359385656946688 This shows the full thread and then rewrites the URL in the address bar back to the original URL.
Placing blame is far less interesting, IMO, than considering this story in the context of our much-needed next-generation power grid.
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.
> i like this used car analogy. basically, they bought a used car and ran it without oil changes until the engine seized.
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.
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.
This case of breaking metal on an open hook reminds me very much of a warning on a climbing carabiner: make sure it is clipped fully and the gate is shut, otherwise the nose might break off.
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.
The breakage was caused by the metal-on-metal contact wearing its way through the hook over a period of almost a century.
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.
Excellent Thread, and it is very nice to see on hacker news what my whole company is about!
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..
I'm amazed how a nation as rich as the US allows things to fall apart as much as it does but maybe one of the reasons it is so rich is because of the lack of money used on fixing things? Last time it was dangerous bridges called out. What's next?
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.
Next? Dams. There are about 84,000 dams in the USA, and most of them are approaching their projected end-of-life - a hundred years or so (most of them are of the earthen type, not the concrete kind.) And ... civil engineers are going into retirement and their workforce is not getting refilled, about a 20% reduction.
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.
Only 847 of those dams are tailings dams, used for industrial processing. More than 0, but less than 84,000. Of those, none are listed as concrete (730 Earth, 61 Unknown, 43 Other, 13 Rockfill).
It's far from obvious to me that an AI would be able to inspect a complex system like this for (potentially unanticipated) failures more effectively than a knowledgeable, experienced human.
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.
I doubt it would have picked up this failure.
That said, I think dones + AI can reduce the cost of routine maintenance, the savings of which shoud be used for infrequent detailed inspections that would pick up a defect like this.
More likely the savings will just be pocketed
I believe so. People can probably set up some physical models and simulate the wear against various elements, and possibly detect similar wear in the reality. Even without AI, human inspectors can remotely monitor the tower using drones and check more checkboxes than one.
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.
Yes. I saw them doing just this in South Korea in 2015. The guys doing it were pretty chill, said I could not take pictures of their drone but they told me a bit about how it worked. Computer vision was part of it, human inspection was too. They said it was much safer than a manned helicopter, and faster.
> 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.
If California had more microgrids, batteries, and demand response, they could more effectively power down their lines for fire safety and maintenance. The decision makers have been quick to add a ton of solar, but they need to add these other components for added resilience in what is an extremely fire prone region.
At the same time, what is the failure rate of batteries leading to fire? Logic follows the incidences of battery induced fire should be highest when under load, such as when primary power is off due to wind storms.
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.
First the broken hook is shown that started the fire, but then it is "conceded" that the fire would have happened anyway because of the fallen tree...
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.
How much are you willing to pay for electricity? Up to now it's been relatively cheap... Might be time for the hand-crank lantern and battery-operated rasberry pi. Go off-grid and vote. Run for office if you're serious.
This is interesting but not really surprising. Most folks don't realize, because we don't stop and think about it, but the US has unbelievable amounts of infrastructure in this sort of condition.
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."
> “Most folks don't realize, because we don't stop and think about it, but the US has unbelievable amounts of infrastructure in this sort of condition.“
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.)
That’s exactly right. I had a similar (but different) experience when I first stayed in Europe: I lived in a building that was built in the 1300’s and had changed very little since. I was astonished that anything that old could (a) still be around, (b) still be an ordinary use building. Surely the building should be a historical monument! But in fact most of the city was similarly old and there wasn’t really anything special about the building I lived in.
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.
Your last paragraph is particularly insightful and I think it's something we all need to grok and come to terms with. Political landscape needs to shift to get past all the lip service and actually make real progress.
Great comment, completely agreed. This is one of the first things I noticed after moving to the US. Everything is run down, except lobbies of Fortune 500 corporations.
We have so much infrastructure that was built, and now we lack politicians who have any interest in communicating the need to maintain it.
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).
A contributing cause is the sheer amount of infrastructure in North America. Since the advent of suburban settlements, the amount of infrastructure has been growing at an unprecedented rate. One day all of it will reach end-of-life. The local governments haven't maintained it. They haven't been saving up to replace it. When it becomes an emergency, all of them will turn to their national government for help.
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.
Let's be clear, the fires are not fault of PG&E. Once the forest has not burned for long eonough and is dry enough any spark is going to cause large scale fire. It just happens that PG&E tends to cause a lot of sparks.
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 have been reading about what this means for California, and it’s a really tricky problem of managing to create lots of little fires that make lots of people annoyed.
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.
I would wager a lot of power companies run their equipment to failure.
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.
> 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.
Despite all the effort that went into investigating the cause of this fire, remember that someone started an even bigger fire this year by doing a gender reveal party. So it really is irrelevant how careful everyone is; something will set everything ablaze eventually.
this is a multi source problem. pgp failure is one facet. lack of land maintenance is the other . if the land were maintained the fire would have happened and been less catastrophic
Wow this is great thanks ! How do they distribute liability to the various failure modes? I think it’s dishonest (and problematic) to put all liability on PGE
I don't think there's one way. This isn't a codified law, for exmaple, it's just a model of failure analysis.
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.
I assume it’s because the cable it insulates needs to sway in the wind, otherwise you’ll get shearing on the cable itself as it sways between completely fixed points?
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.
What's the right policy solution to this? Genuinely asking.
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.
Wind, ice, squirrels, birds, snakes and trees are going to cause power lines to fail and create sparks so while perfectly maintained power lines will fail less often failures will still occur. If the world is a tinderbox from now on there is a choice to be made between energized overhead power lines and no risk of fire.
Those are other factors that cause sparks from power lines that are independent of maintenance. sparks are going to occur whether the towers are replaced with brand new ones every 10 years or if they leave them until there starts to be problems and then they go look to see what needs replacing.
Interesting. If you had taken a good materials engineer with you, run the analysis, and then shorted PCG using an analysis of when this would fail, you would have done very very well indeed.
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.
There should be more use of body cameras in these inspection situations where it's hard to get at the inspected item, and it's all too easy to say "she'll be right" (a colloquial expression in my country that roughly translates to "it will be OK").
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 think there might be one point that deserves more attention: the wind that is getting stronger over time. It is entirely possible that the C-hook was holding up relatively well until the wind reached certain threshold, and the wind could have gotten to go over the threshold more frequently lately. This could be another side effect of the climate change in addition to the increased vegetation mentioned in the thread.
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.
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).