201–210 of 479 posts
Excellent Twitter thread, I'm glad I went down that rabbit hole. I wish it was in blog format though, it's kind of jarring working through little blurbs.
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I feel like an easy solution to this could have been an additional safety wire. The safety wire will catch the insulator and thereby give maintenance crew a few days to arrive before the tower fails for good. There is also a general maintenance problem that could be solved by installing inspection cameras directly onto every tower. Those cameras may have to be replaced more frequently than the actual tower components…
I also found it bizarre that your average go-kart track (not to mention aviation) has the presence of mind to safety wire everything but a multi billion dollar utility company didn't
I doubt people back then were expecting this to be left unmaintained for 97 years.
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Why is it people will argue that there should be fewer regulations to allow companies more freedom to operate but when those companies, unsurprisingly, put money ahead of safety, it’s then the government’s fault for not regulating those companies? At some point companies need to take responsibility and be held accountable for their (in)actions. I know this is an unpopular opinion for HN, given its venture funding roo…
I don’t think you understood my comment. PG&E is as regulated as you can possibly get without literally being part of government. When PG&E wants to spend $100M on maintenance, it has to ask government for permission, and CPUC needs to approve this expense. My point here is not to argue that with less regulation, PG&E would do better job when it comes to maintenance — I don’t know if it would. However, considering ho…
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Imagine an alleged arsonist going to court, and his defense was "not guilty your honor, I didn't put all that fuel in one place, I just flicked a tiny lighter!"
This is a poor analogy. Besides the distinction that arson is intentional rather than negligent, arsonists burn things that would not have burned otherwise. While PG&E's negligence sparked the fire, the brush in the area would have burned at some point in the near future regardless of their actions. The Twitter thread mentions the fire that started in the area around the same time because a tree fell, or some other i…
Excellent Twitter thread, I'm glad I went down that rabbit hole. I wish it was in blog format though, it's kind of jarring working through little blurbs.
Try this: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1306359385656946688.html
(Yes I have uBlock Origin on my desktop, but I'm not on my desktop)
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…
This tower looks weird.
Overhead three-phase transmission is super common in the EU and I've never seen anything like this "transposition tower" that swaps the wires around in the air and I don't really see why it would make much sense to do so mid-line. Wouldn't it be easier to swap the wires around at the start or end of a line, or inside a substation?
Also, as far as I can tell (from sometimes photographing these things with telephotos), the insulators seem to generally be bolted to the mast instead of being hooked in, so this entire failure mode of hooks wearing out (or dislodging?) doesn't exist. (Okay, now you have to worry about changing loads on bolts, fair enough).
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Try this: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1306359385656946688.html
Is there an alternative unroller without ads? Seems like a fun project to build (Yes I have uBlock Origin on my desktop, but I'm not on my desktop)
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The reason it "some sparks" caused such huge destruction is because PG&E was also not maintaining the brush underneath their towers. All they were doing was literally fanning the flames by flying over it with a helicopter.
> literally fanning the flames by flying over it with a helicopter. That's a hilarious image, but I doubt that literally happened
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1000 fires would actually be probably better than 10 because they help keep flammable material at bay and reduce the size of the fires.
Is there data from California about lightning as a fire cause? I read in Canada about 50% of all forest fires are started by lightning.
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 e…
If you build something to last 100 years, you leave little incentives for maintenance and all but guarantee a catastrophic failure a century from now.
If you build something to last 10 weeks, you're creating a lot of waste - wasted labor, money, energy and natural resources, involved in producing and shipping replacement parts, as well as performing the maintenance job. You're also making everything that depends on your construction more fragile - the system is always a couple weeks from catastrophic failure, so it won't survive a localized crisis - like a natural disaster, pandemic, economic problems, maintenance company going bankrupt, etc.
So what's the correct trade-off function[0] here? How can we minimize waste and maximize reliability, while ensuring necessary maintenance happens on time?
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[0] - f: specifics of project -> trade-off