"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.
This electrical transmission tower has a problem
21–30 of 479 posts
Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem
#22PG&E is a public menace.
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.
Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem
#23[deleted]
Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem
#24https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1306359385656946688.html
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.
Grody behavior
Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem
#25The document cited several times in the thread appears to be "The Camp Fire Public Report" which can be found here https://www.buttecounty.net/Portals/30/CFReport/PGE-THE-CAMP...
Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem
#26> Since nobody apparently noticed the wear, it would be impossible to to prove any single person was negligent.
I call this sort of thing "three wise monkeys compliance."
Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem
#27https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance "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:…
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.
Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem
#28Interesting. 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.
Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem
#29[deleted]
Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem
#30https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance "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:…
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?