Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

This electrical transmission tower has a problem

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 479 posts

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#51

Post by dragonwriter »

mjevans wrote: post #45
throwaway189262 wrote: post #28

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 def…

There is plenty of blame to spread around. 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…

> 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.)

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#52

Post by [deleted] »

mrbabbage wrote: post #43
throwaway189262 wrote: post #28

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 def…

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),…

[deleted]

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#53

Post by aaronblohowiak »

throwaway189262 wrote: post #28

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 def…

>and the lines cannot be shut down

yes, they can.

>I doubt anyone was living near the lines when they were built 100 years ago.

Paradise, CA was on a railroad map ca 1900:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/stranger-in-paradise/

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#54

Post by gok »

jrockway wrote: post #15

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 b…

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.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#55

Post by dredmorbius »

peterwwillis wrote: post #19

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.

Threadreader helps (as others have noted):

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1306359385656946688.html

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#56

Post by joe_the_user »

WantonQuantum wrote: post #3

https://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:…

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.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#57

Post by DuskStar »

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.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#59

Post by Animats »

cco wrote: post #47
throwaway189262 wrote: post #28

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 def…

It feels like a great use case for a drone, you could get closer, the video can be taken by non-inspectors and then reviewed later/stored.

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.

[1] https://youtu.be/7-JTqwUyD5o

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#60

Post by 43920 »

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).

Post reply on HN