PG&E-friendly wildfire bill being prepared by lawmakers in wake of lethal fires • Hacker News Board

Re: PG&E-friendly wildfire bill being prepared by lawmakers in wake of lethal fires

#81

Post by Blackstone4 » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 3:09 PM UTC

masonic wrote: post #63

Blackstone4 wrote: post #58

Note that PG&E is being held liable under current law for fires started at the site of it's equipment. Regardless of whether or not PG&E was at fault due to lack of maintenance. So when PG&E is found liable then the public and media often conflate it with being at fault. Two different things.

Note that SB 901, the recent PGE bailout over last year's fires (Coffee Park, etc.), is illegally being applied retroactively to this year's fires (see George Avalos' article in the Mercury). It doesn't even take effect (legally) until 2019.

Who is applying it illegal?

I feel like your statement is misleading. Regulators have come out and said they don't want PG&E to go bankrupt. PG&E and the regulators are probably both supportive of extending the existing legislation to cover 2018.

However I am not aware of PG&E or regulators having acted illegally. Publicly stating an opinion before taking action is not illegal.

Plus the bailouts are generally being used to fund PG&E's rebuild on fires where they weren't at fault (from a common sense perspective) but were found liable under California law (see my earlier statement).

People are angry and want someone to blame even tho this was a natural disaster. With current laws, PG&E is being painted as the bad guy and are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Re: PG&E-friendly wildfire bill being prepared by lawmakers in wake of lethal fires

#82

Post by sabareesh » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 3:23 PM UTC

tolk460 wrote: post #10

hydrox24 wrote: post #3

I want to know if backburning is a common practice in California, or in the USA at all. In Australia a big part of a Firey's job is running controlled burns in the (relatively) low fire risk season to keep the amount of flammable material around cities and property to a minimum. It is a continuation, in a way, of a much more ancient indiginous practice of regularly burning large swathes of bush. It is very much a par…

Im a wldland firefighter from the northern Rockies, just returned from a deployment to the Woolsey incident (LA and Ventura counties). Yes, prescribed burns are common in the off season for all fire districts. However, CalFire has some unique challenges [1] that most of the other states do not have to deal with when it comes to air quality and sufficient water conditions during their shrinking off season. https://www…

I have an idea why not just cut down trees for human use. No pollution ?

Re: PG&E-friendly wildfire bill being prepared by lawmakers in wake of lethal fires

#83

Post by yellowapple » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 4:50 PM UTC

briffle wrote: post #56

tathougies wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would someone in Oregon (where there is abundant water) or Louisiana purchase wildfire (specific) insurance? Home insurance includes wildfires, but let's limit ourselves to wildfire-specific insurance, which was the issue at hand.

apparently, you haven't been in oregon in a while.. We had hundreds of thousands of acres burn this summer..

Indeed. Wildfires aren't really about drought so much as they're about abundant kindling (e.g. smaller trees not already burnt). Wildfires are essential to keeping forests healthy, and by trying to stop them entirely we've only made them more frequent and destructive.

Re: PG&E-friendly wildfire bill being prepared by lawmakers in wake of lethal fires

#84

Post by ergothus » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 5:04 PM UTC

lacker wrote: post #2

It seems like an odd quirk of liability law that all of the fire damage is blamed on PG+E if the initial spark that started the fire was PG+E’s fault. Surely some blame lies elsewhere as well. I think homeowners need to be paying fire insurance costs proportional to fire risk to properly incentivize fire protection (and I say this as a California homeowner in a somewhat fire prone area). In the end, PG+E is regulated…

Liability law is at least consistent, even if I end up disagreeing with the result. When my (now ex-) wife was in law school, one if the sample cards they studied was an arsonist where the fire had met up with an unrelated one. The arsonist was found liable for all the subsequent damage from the combined fire rather than an approximation of his "contribution" despite the being no disagreement that some of the damage would have happened anyway.

In another case construction crews finding were found liable for a nearby mink farm's lost of income when the sounds freaked out the animals and they ruined their coats, because blowing stuff up, even done legally, is considered a high liability task.

At least those are my recollections of the decisions, it has been a while and I didn't study them myself.

Re: PG&E-friendly wildfire bill being prepared by lawmakers in wake of lethal fires

#85

Post by diggernet » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 5:15 PM UTC

bluejekyll wrote: post #26

tathougies wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fire insurance, like earthquake and flood insurance, does not work because of the scope of damages. Insurance works by pooling risk and taking income from low risk areas to pay for high risk ones. Due to the scope of wildfires, fire insurance is untenable. The solution to this fire is absolutely to blame pg and e and its custoners (yes this includes me). This is the logical conclusion. The only thing preventing us fr…

> The solution furthermore is to legislate to remove the barriers to competition that California has set up. While I think you’re generally on point, this misses the mark a bit. We don’t want more transmission lines running in CA, right? We don’t want lots of little companies increasing the risk of fire by managing lines independently and the one that’s losing then doesn’t have the means to maintain those lines. We m…

Anyone know how Texas handles this? I know that they have many competing power utilities and people can choose which one to sign up with, but how is transmission managed?

Re: PG&E-friendly wildfire bill being prepared by lawmakers in wake of lethal fires

#86

Post by nradov » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 5:25 PM UTC

tathougies wrote: post #15

lacker wrote: post #2

It seems like an odd quirk of liability law that all of the fire damage is blamed on PG+E if the initial spark that started the fire was PG+E’s fault. Surely some blame lies elsewhere as well. I think homeowners need to be paying fire insurance costs proportional to fire risk to properly incentivize fire protection (and I say this as a California homeowner in a somewhat fire prone area). In the end, PG+E is regulated…

Fire insurance, like earthquake and flood insurance, does not work because of the scope of damages. Insurance works by pooling risk and taking income from low risk areas to pay for high risk ones. Due to the scope of wildfires, fire insurance is untenable. The solution to this fire is absolutely to blame pg and e and its custoners (yes this includes me). This is the logical conclusion. The only thing preventing us fr…

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of insurance. It doesn't require shifting income from low risk to high risk areas. Rather paying for the risk in each area is spread out over time. It's completely possible to provide sustainable fire insurance by charging customers in each area based on actual risk, and then using reinsurance to spread the risk pool out among multiple insurers.

Of course some customers might not like having to pay market rates for fire insurance.

Re: PG&E-friendly wildfire bill being prepared by lawmakers in wake of lethal fires

#87

Post by jeremysalwen » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 5:35 PM UTC

tathougies wrote: post #49

r00fus wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the Federal government for cutting the funding for existing CA fire programs? Funding was cut last year and boom we have back to back years of fires.

This is a strawman. I do not like the current administration, but attempting to blame everything on them is intellectually lazy. The fires in California are not caused due to bad budget cuts over the past few years, but rather the mistaken environmentalist policy of not allowing controlled burns for the last 100 years and extinguishing natural fires out of needless heroics to save species that are now in ever more ne…

The "10 am" policy, and the opposition to controlled burns are not coming from environmentalists (Just try googling "endagered species fire"... https://www.mass.gov/news/fire-prescribed-for-habitat-manage... ... many endangered species rely on fire, and we have known this for 50 years).

It's property owners who are opposed to prescribed burns, because there is a risk of prescribed burns getting out of control. From wikipedia: "In 1978, the Forest Service abandoned the 10:00 am policy in favor of a new policy that encouraged the use of wildland fire by prescription.[1][13]

Three events between 1978 and 1988 precipitated a major fire use policy review in 1989: the Ouzel fire in Rocky Mountain National Park, the Yellowstone fires of 1988 in and around Yellowstone National Park, and the Canyon Creek fire in the Bob Marshall Wilderness on the Lewis and Clark National Forest. In all three cases, monitored fires burned until they threatened developed areas."

those events caused a backlash against controlled burns, because obviously it's hard to sell the public that some destruction of property now is better than more of it later.

Re: PG&E-friendly wildfire bill being prepared by lawmakers in wake of lethal fires

#88

Post by gamblor956 » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 6:44 PM UTC

ergothus wrote: post #84

lacker wrote: post #2

It seems like an odd quirk of liability law that all of the fire damage is blamed on PG+E if the initial spark that started the fire was PG+E’s fault. Surely some blame lies elsewhere as well. I think homeowners need to be paying fire insurance costs proportional to fire risk to properly incentivize fire protection (and I say this as a California homeowner in a somewhat fire prone area). In the end, PG+E is regulated…

Liability law is at least consistent, even if I end up disagreeing with the result. When my (now ex-) wife was in law school, one if the sample cards they studied was an arsonist where the fire had met up with an unrelated one. The arsonist was found liable for all the subsequent damage from the combined fire rather than an approximation of his "contribution" despite the being no disagreement that some of the damage…

Interesting. In law school, I learned that the exact opposite way--the arsonist wasn't responsible for any damage, because the bigger fire would have consumed the target house anyway. (Edit: I believe the proper term is "superseding cause". Note that with all things involving case law, this is highly jurisdictionally dependent. For example, in California, intentional acts can be superseding causes but not unintentional/negligent acts or acts of god.)

With the mink case, the issue wasn't that blowing stuff up is a high-liability task. The issue was that it was a nuisance. Nuisance activities can be legal, and even first-in-time (like say, cow farms predating housing developments). Very nutshell version, but basically the issue with nuisance law is that the activity's effects transcend the boundaries of one's property and so the doer can be held liable for those effects.

Re: PG&E-friendly wildfire bill being prepared by lawmakers in wake of lethal fires

#89

Post by ergothus » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 7:29 PM UTC

gamblor956 wrote: post #88

ergothus wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Liability law is at least consistent, even if I end up disagreeing with the result. When my (now ex-) wife was in law school, one if the sample cards they studied was an arsonist where the fire had met up with an unrelated one. The arsonist was found liable for all the subsequent damage from the combined fire rather than an approximation of his "contribution" despite the being no disagreement that some of the damage…

Interesting. In law school, I learned that the exact opposite way--the arsonist wasn't responsible for any damage, because the bigger fire would have consumed the target house anyway. (Edit: I believe the proper term is "superseding cause". Note that with all things involving case law, this is highly jurisdictionally dependent. For example, in California, intentional acts can be superseding causes but not unintention…

I'll trust your memories over mine, particularly as you've studied this and I had dinner-table conversations.

Re: PG&E-friendly wildfire bill being prepared by lawmakers in wake of lethal fires

#90

Post by masonic » Thu, Nov 22, 2018, 3:55 AM UTC

LanceH wrote: post #76

kozikow wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I think homeowners need to be paying fire insurance costs proportional to fire risk" Wildfires are already covered by property re/insurance. The problem is that risk is badly priced, as modeling for wildfires is currently very underdeveloped compared to hurricanes or earthquakes. There has been no wildfire event of a similar magnitude of property losses in recent history. Shameless plug: At tensorflight we are act…

A house is insured. PG&E is insured. My house burns down, my insurance pays for it. Then they sue PG&E to recover that payout. As far as who is at fault: a fire needs a fuel, oxygen and a spark. It can be argued that a spark is going to happen somewhere, and mitigating it is more about not having the fuel so that it can chain and spread.

  PG&E is insured.

Do we know this? Many large public and quasi-public entities are self-insuring.