
PG&E Sparked at Least 1,500 California Fires, Now Faces Collapse - laurex
https://www.wsj.com/articles/pg-e-sparked-at-least-1-500-california-fires-now-the-utility-faces-collapse-11547410768
======
rgbrenner
In 2017, PG&E was fined for a fire in 2015. In 2017, they were implicated in
17 wildfires that killed dozens. All on her watch. The CEO does nothing to
address the risk. Now she resigns, and:

 _PG &E is planning to award her a perhaps less-than-golden parachute that
could range from $2.36 million to $4.46 million, depending on how her
departure is categorized_

Step 1: devastate the company you're in charge of.

Step 2: collect millions.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-14/pg-e-s-
fo...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-14/pg-e-s-former-ceo-
to-walk-away-with-millions-after-wildfires)

~~~
blevin
Knew someone who worked at PG&E. Her department's task was to support
calculation of whether it was financially optimal to obey the law or risk
paying fines, across PG&E's service footprint.

~~~
adharmad
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.

~~~
drharby
Great scene - sad, but great

------
cwkoss
Privatization of public services cannot work unless the private companies have
liability for their actions. This is the necessary consequence of their
negligence.

~~~
woah
> California law compels utilities to pay for damages from wildfires if their
> equipment caused the blazes — even if the utilities weren’t negligent
> through, say, inadequate maintenance.

This would have happened whether or not PG&E was private. People want a
scapegoat and PG&E is California's.

~~~
labster
Nope, not a scapegoat. PG&E has a long history of negligence, poor planning,
and straight up lying to consumers. I don't feel the same way about SoCal
Edison, whom I only switched away from last month. They have their problems,
sure, but it's nowhere near the level of malicious incompetence coming from
PG&E for the past 20 years.

There are tons of news stories on PG&E if you look, many unrelated to the
fires. They spent millions to lie to voters when Yolo County considered
switching to SMUD. They routinely backdated maintenance reports to the
government. They've had explosions in gas lines, and then there's the Diablo
Canyon mess.

~~~
ip26
Non-Californian; from here, it looks like it would have burned sooner or
later, thanks to changing climate & history of forest management practices.
Whether lightning strike, hobo camp, stupid teenager, OHV, train, it was a
tinderbox waiting to go. Is that an inaccurate perception?

~~~
prewett
I am living in California (but also consider myself non-Californian) near one
of the areas that burned, and regardless of PG&E's incompetence, empirically
the area was a tinderbox. The Carr fire was caused by a spark from a flat tire
of an RV which caused the rim to create sparks against the road. Despite the
forest service actively burning underbrush regularly, the fire was the largest
in California history until the Mendocino fire unseated it a few weeks later.
If sparks from a wheel rim can touch off a blaze, there isn't much margin for
error.

~~~
j-c-hewitt
In situations like this I think we would have to ask that considering that CA
in general has high fire risk compared to other regions of the country, are
the right people and entities bearing the risk and shouldering the costs of
development there appropriately? I should think a lot of people have a vested
interest in blaming PG&E, but if a completely ordinary event like a spark from
a flat tire can cause a massive fire in the area that impacts a lot of human
settlement directly, then someone is not assessing the risk of building and
living there appropriately.

~~~
pixl97
>then someone is not assessing the risk of building and living there
appropriately.

This is the answer no one wants to hear.

For example almost 10 years ago Paradise almost burned. There was a grand jury
review afterwards(that you can find online if you're willing to search some)
that pointed out that the place was a tinderbox deathtrap and major changes
needed to be implemented for safety.

The problem is populations in these places, along with most humans in general,
like trees and shade and the idyllic beauty of nature. People would rather
have a pine tree and bushes around their house, rather than a 100 foot cleared
defensive parameter.

~~~
jonnycoder
You are also leaving out environmentalists who fight against thinning and
cutting down trees — source, the Angora fire in South Lake Tahoe, Canyon Creek
complex in eastern Oregon, and many others. Playing politics and not
acknowledging environmental lobby will not do anyone any good. If you know any
actual foresters in the USFS, they will tell you as well because they are suid
by environmentalists for stuff as simple as salvage logging.

------
amluto
To what extent could PG&E mitigate these problems with improved safely
devices? There are various devices that can try to minimize arcing when there
is a fault, for example Petersen coils. [0]

California already has a distinct advantage here compared to the rest of the
country. In the other 49 states (to the best of my knowledge), it's legal for
the utilities to use a conductor that is grounded at multiple locations as a
neutral. This type of arrangement induces nasty currents through the ground
(which is, I think, why it's illegal in CA -- those currents can apparently be
quite harmful to livestock that are being milked with metallic equipment, not
to mention hazardous to people in swimming pools and such). But it also means
that, if another phase shorts to ground, then there is necessarily a large
amount of fault current available.

In CA, the distribution wires can't legally have any intentional current
flowing between themselves and ground, which means circuits that detect
residual current will work.

[0] [https://www.modernpowersystems.com/features/featurenew-
roles...](https://www.modernpowersystems.com/features/featurenew-roles-for-
the-recloser-in-the-modern-mv-network-4928052/)

~~~
lutorm
The US uses overhead wires everywhere, because it's cheaper to install than
underground wires. But then you're subject to damage from trees, wind, icing,
etc. Everyone pays in worse uptime, and apparently also in fire risk.

~~~
oh_sigh
No, not everywhere. Most of NYC uses underground wires. My neighborhood in
Colorado near Boulder built in the 60s uses underground wires as well.

~~~
mschuster91
Underground wiring is far more efficient in big cities, as the major cost part
is "miles of trench digged" and in a city the ratio of "customers per mile" is
waaaay higer than in rural areas, thus reducing "investment per customer".

In addition this wiring is at the maximum 110 kV, you do NOT want a 380 kV
feed in a major city. These things require a shitload of clearance, talk about
40m wide and 4m deep trenches!

------
cameldrv
I don't like PG&E, but if you have a gas leak in your house, and a guy walks
down the street in front smoking a cigarette and everything blows up, does the
smoker buy you a new house? The natural environment in parts of California has
reached an inherently unstable state, with no logging, no prescribed burns,
extensive suppression, global warming, draught, and limited brush clearing.

~~~
joe_the_user
_I don 't like PG&E, but if you have a gas leak in your house, and a guy walks
down the street in front smoking a cigarette and everything blows up, does the
smoker buy you a new house?_

"Most ironic analogy ever"? You know PG&E is a gas company? Not only that,
PG&E has killed people with gas line leaks?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion)

~~~
Aloha
this is a whataboutit response, and doesnt really engage with the users
comment.

~~~
joe_the_user
The users' comment was about multiple liability but his example strongly
implied the gas leaker and not the smoker should take the blames. PG&E is only
partly for all of the terrible things that have happened under their watch but
liable enough that they deserve harsh penalties. I think it is telling when
someone groping for a defense by analogy can't help but stumble onto an
analogy that says the opposite of what's intended. It can be symptom that
one's overall argument is quite thin.

~~~
cameldrv
As I said, I don't like PG&E. High rates, San Bruno, etc, etc. The problem is
that a lot of the forests in California are just going to burn, whether it's
tomorrow or in five years, because they are tinderboxes. Maybe any individual
ones will be caused by poorly maintained electrical lines, or a careless
campfire, or a cigarette or lightning, but given enough time, there will be a
spark. In much of California, wildfire is part of the natural cycle. A lot of
of California is dry, so downfall wood doesn't rot. The only way that energy
gets released is for it to burn. Because we use forest management practices
developed where downfall wood does rot, and because politicians don't like to
tell people that their cozy cabin in the woods needs to burn down, we've
backed ourselves into an ugly corner with way too much fuel on the forest
floor. You can blame PG&E, but if it wasn't them with the ignition source it
would have been someone else.

------
mroche
Is there any part of California that runs power underground rather than
overhead cables? I understand it’s a significant cost and effort (sometimes
infeasible) but at this point in time, just based on the past few years, I’m
surprised not to have heard of any large scale pushes for underground power.

~~~
iaabtpbtpnn
Nah, we just string the cables haphazardly wherever, through trees is just
fine, because of course it's always sunny and nice in California. It seriously
looks like third world infrastructure to someone from another part of the
country, where weather events happen often enough that the utility has to give
a shit.

~~~
dahdum
PG&E can’t afford to do that without raising capital. CPUC won’t approve rate
hikes to finance that capital. Legislators pass no new laws or regulations.

Then when it goes awry CPUC and legislators stand far back and decry PG&E for
negligence.

~~~
bleriot
They could afford to pay out a regular dividend, illegally skipped safety
measures on pipelines, and “an independent audit from the State of California
issued a report stating that PG&E had illegally diverted over $100 million
from a fund used for safety operations, and instead used it for executive
compensation and bonuses”. Ratepayers and taxpayers should never have to pay
for deliberate executive negligence.

[https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-pge-safety-
investigat...](https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-pge-safety-
investigation-20181214-story.html)

------
tareqak
Same story from the Associated Press: Utility seeks bankruptcy protection over
California fires -
[https://apnews.com/5e70c4c99a044c4192d7ee52e38330f2](https://apnews.com/5e70c4c99a044c4192d7ee52e38330f2)
.

------
gerbal
A preview of some of the economic toll of climate change

~~~
sgc
PG&E has been obviously negligent to any casual observer for at least the last
40 years. But yes, there is more to come.

~~~
heyjudy
\- Found negligent in the San Bruno gas pipeline explosion

\- Found negligent in the pollution in SoCal Hinkley groundwater pollution

------
DoubleCribble
Ohhh, will Julia Roberts be in the movie adaptation of this _latest_ PG&E
debacle?[0] She was so good in the last one.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Brockovich_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Brockovich_\(film\))

~~~
nostrademons
A tweet from the real Erin Brockovich was the top Google Tweet result for
[pg&e] this morning:

[https://twitter.com/ErinBrockovich/status/108483037975907533...](https://twitter.com/ErinBrockovich/status/1084830379759075330)

------
Zhenya
[https://outline.com/5bxFLb](https://outline.com/5bxFLb)

Whole article

------
cbhl
Is municipal red tape at all a factor in PG&E's under-maintenance of its lines
and equipment? I feel like CEQA lawsuits and municipal planning codes and
committees are given as reasons why we don't have denser housing and more
fiber-to-the-home and dedicated bus lanes in the bay area (the Van Ness CEQA
report took something like six years to do). Do the engineers for AT&T and
Comcast and PG&E find similar frustrations with the process here?

~~~
mistrial9
nice try -- cost-cutting by using sub-contractors to do legally mandated
maintenance up and down northern California was well-documented. In addition,
PG&E was found guilty of of obfuscating and avoiding legally required
maintenance records for gas pipelines in the San Bruno case. Utterly
unacceptable and sadly predictable.

~~~
anonuser123456
"cost-cutting by using sub-contractors to do legally mandated maintenance up
and down northern California was well-documented."

Contractors are licensed by the state to operate in their respective trade.
Making the claim that contractors do sub par work is just as much an
indictment of the state for licensing them in the first place.

------
Aloha
Consider the following:

 _" PG&E didn’t anticipate how quickly the drought would overtake heavily
wooded areas north of San Francisco and outside Sacramento, said Stephen
Tankersley, who oversaw PG&E’s vegetation-management program between 1999 and
2015. “It’s hard to believe that anybody would have predicted that it would
have been like this,” said Mr. Tankersley, now a utilities consultant. “I’ve
never seen anything like it.”

Conditions on the ground worsened dramatically and quickly, said PG&E
spokeswoman Lynsey Paulo. She said the utility has reacted with speed and
urgency. “We are very aware of the risk and we are doing everything we can to
keep our customers and the communities we serve safe,” she said. “PG&E
considers wildfire risk as a top-tier enterprise risk. It is evident in our
actions.”

The utility removed 451,000 more trees from 2016 through 2018 than it had
originally forecast, she said, in an “amped up” effort to deal with massive
tree mortality."_

...

 _" The task was complicated because some dangerous trees were on private
land, forcing PG&E to negotiate with landowners, said Bob Fratini, a retired
PG&E vegetation-management manager. Residents sometimes pressured crews, he
said, to trim just enough to satisfy minimum requirements.

“Utilities should be given the right to remove any tree that could cause an
outage or a fire,” he said. California regulators recently gave utilities more
latitude in this area, saying they could shut off power to homes or businesses
that prevent tree crews from working. PG&E’s Ms. Paulo said that isn’t
necessary very often.

Sometimes, PG&E’s tree-clearing created new problems. After PG&E workers
removed two trees in January 2015 southeast of Sacramento, a gray pine was
exposed to wind and began leaning, according to a state investigation.

On a 102-degree day in September, the pine hit a 12,000-volt line and
electricity ignited it, dropping embers onto dry grass and sparking the Butte
Fire, which burned 70,868 acres and 921 buildings. Two people died."_

These two blocks of text to me make it sound more like what you'd
traditionally call an 'act of god', and not malfeasance (unlike San Bruno).
While its unfortunate people died, and that there were great losses, you when
you have people living in land that historically (over tens of thousands of
years) had regular burn cycles, then humans came along and kept putting the
fires out, I have less sympathy for those who take a loss - they should have
known it was a risk of living there.

Also, I work with power utilities, having to turn the power off in a windy
situation is an unwinnable situation, you either get complaints to the PUC, or
you get higher fire risk - both are expensive to an extent to deal with - and
without a historical record of fires in that area, its not really rational to
just turn the power off, to tens of thousands of customers, and its harder to
justify to your customers on its face - just as they are being excoriated now
a failure to exert enough caution, if they had exerted the caution and nothing
had happened, they would have been excoriated for exerting too much caution,
again - its an unwinnable situation.

~~~
dylan604
>its an unwinnable situation

It becomes a bit of "boy who cried wolf" situation. In the mid-west/Tornado
alley, a similar situation occurs. Weather forecast tech has become reliable
enough to detect tornado conditions, and issue warning appropriately. However,
these conditions do not always lead to fully developed tornadoes even though
the warnings have already gone out. This leads to a lot of people ignoring the
warnings and even getting annoyed at the interruptions to regularly scheduled
programming.

------
crushcrashcrush
Why is something as vital as ENERGY managed by a private company with profit
motives?

Not trying to be NATIONALIZE EVERYTHING or whatever, but we decided its
worthwhile for water... why not power?

~~~
4thaccount
Energy used to be fully regulated for a long time. All in all, they did a good
job while getting a guaranteed return. Deregulation didn't really deregulate
everything (the industry is still super regulated), but it brought in
competition and more market based mechanisms. Stoft's power system economics
textbook covers this subject pretty well. Deregulation helps incentivize
innovation, but it isn't a slam dunk. We have a different system now that is
definitely better in some ways and worse off in others. I doubt wildfire
safety would have been radically different prior to deregulation.

------
taf2
I wonder if the cost of providing energy with so much liability will force
California to solar e.g. individual homes and businesses providing their own
power?

~~~
jedberg
That's actually part of the problem. Profits have been going down for years
because their most profitable consumers (rich people with big houses) have
been going solar. They don't adequately separate the cost of infrastructure
from the cost of energy, so they've had less for infra.

Also we just passed a law to make this even worse by requiring solar on new
homes.

------
joering2
$10,000 bet not a single Exec will go to jail.

------
stefan_
Every year, they cause a fire or other natural disaster, then threaten
bankruptcy, then get bailed out.

~~~
burtonator
Capitalism for the poor. Socialism for the rich.

If they continue to get bailed out I would prefer that we just have state run
power or something more heavily regulated and monitored.

~~~
metildaa
Socialize the losses and privatize the gains, but only for those who are
wealthy and in power. That is our current system in America, too big to fail.

------
smaili
On a somewhat similar note, president Trump recently threatened to cut off
funding for wildfires[0].

[0] [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/09/trump-threatens-to-cut-
off-f...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/09/trump-threatens-to-cut-off-federal-
funding-for-california-wildfire-relief.html)

~~~
devmunchies
How many times does California need help until it, as its own entity, fixes
the problem?

Hopefully this lights a fire under the regulators in Sacramento.

~~~
dylan604
How many times would Florida, Louisiana, etc need help until they fix the
hurricane problem? There's definitely situations that people create that makes
them much more susceptible to natural disasters, and I would go along with the
"fix the problem" approach if this is the point you are making.

~~~
shard972
Obviously they just need to establish a hurricane fighter force. I wonder why
nobody has ever considered this before /s

------
lordnacho
How are Californians going to be better off? When they go out of business,
some other entity will pick up the equipment and staff.

Probably a lot of institutional memory will carry over.

~~~
astrodust
They don't murder the employees when the company goes bankrupt, you know.

~~~
lordnacho
Which is the whole point of my remark.

Why do people think it's going to help them to have essentially the same co
running their power again?

