This electrical transmission tower has a problem • Hacker News Board

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#101

Post by joe_the_user » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:13 AM UTC

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…

"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.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#102

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:14 AM UTC

bb88 wrote: post #92

tuna-piano wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> 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 warmin…

[deleted]

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#103

Post by vlovich123 » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:15 AM UTC

bb88 wrote: post #92

tuna-piano wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> 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 warmin…

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?

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#104

Post by renewiltord » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:16 AM UTC

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.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#105

Post by Wistar » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:19 AM UTC

tuna-piano wrote: post #65

nanodeath wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carr_Fire

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#106

Post by andbberger » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:22 AM UTC

nanodeath wrote: post #63

43920 wrote: post #60

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 engine…

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.

And if you read all the way to end you'll learn that the Camp fire would have been started anyways.

No need to assign culpability strictly to either PG&E or calfire for systematic wildfire mismanagement. We can blame them both! Also climate change.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#107

Post by ShinTakuya » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:23 AM UTC

benjaminjackman wrote: post #20

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…

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.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#108

Post by alex_young » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:25 AM UTC

Climate change vs forest management.

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?

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#109

Post by Johnny555 » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:26 AM UTC

bhawks wrote: post #85

43920 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 caus…

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 cli…

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.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#110

Post by masklinn » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:28 AM UTC

dschuetz wrote: post #84

So, why is that insulator actually dangling?

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.