This electrical transmission tower has a problem • Hacker News Board

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#251

Post by mensetmanusman » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 11:03 AM UTC

noselasd wrote: post #194

skytreader wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is PG&E should be blamed for negligence but not for the fire[1]. They could follow all regulation to the letter and there will still be a non-negligible chance that their infra will cause a fire simply because existing regulation is not suitable for the environment their infra stands at. [1] Although I think the thread is rather vague as to the damages assigned to PG&E no?

That's usually not how laws works though. If you act irresponsibly, break laws, don't perform due dilligence and so on, you are also responsible and get blame for the consequences. If you act in good fait, follow all regulations, act responsible, the law might see it as an accident where you don't get blame.

With this logic, one would blame welders for the Beirut bombing, because they weren’t wearing side shields on their safety glasses.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#252

Post by mensetmanusman » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 11:06 AM UTC

chmod775 wrote: post #200

londons_explore wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that man was lying... It is very very very hard to start a fire with a hammer, even deliberately... Yet if you had a wasps nest, you'd totally be tempted to douse it with a bit of gasoline, believing you could put it out before it spread to anything else... Except you couldn't... And when the investigators came round, you'd totally tell them about the stake but not the petrol...

> I suspect that man was lying... It is very very very hard to start a fire with a hammer, even deliberately... Out of the millions of people who use a hammer to strike metal on metal every day, one of them will manage start a fire eventually. Even the unlikeliest events are actually pretty likely at scale. Sure, two thirds of them may just be lying, but unless you can prove they are (which really shouldn't be that h…

I laugh at the image of a statistical ensemble of people hammering bees with hammers, with one of them causing a fire.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#253

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 11:10 AM UTC

The root problem is that an aboveground power distribution network was used when an underground one would have been the right solution. This is not cheap to fix and so lotteries with peoples lives and property are on the order of the day.

The US power infrastructure is dated and super fragile, fixing it would be super costly and would take a long time. The profit oriented nature of these companies is what stops this from being tackled, utilities should be run at cost with public safety as the first order of priority, not profits.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#254

Post by mensetmanusman » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 11:12 AM UTC

bhawks wrote: post #87

mrbabbage wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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),…

PGE also was responsible for contaminating the ground water in Hinkley California with millions of gallons of chromium in the the 1960s and then covering it up for 20 years. There is something seriously wrong with PGE and it's attitude towards it's infrastructure and public safety.

Not sure how important it is to bring up something from 60 years ago. All the workers from that time are likely dead.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#255

Post by fny » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 11:14 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #253

The root problem is that an aboveground power distribution network was used when an underground one would have been the right solution. This is not cheap to fix and so lotteries with peoples lives and property are on the order of the day. The US power infrastructure is dated and super fragile, fixing it would be super costly and would take a long time. The profit oriented nature of these companies is what stops this…

We seem to be in the mood to burn trillions of dollars, so I'm not sure what expensive means anymore.

Renovating US infrastructure seems more prescient than another trillion dollar funemployment program.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#256

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Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#257

Post by jillesvangurp » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 11:21 AM UTC

blunte wrote: post #220

Tangential, but Twitter is a very poor medium for delivering this kind of information. It's really a drag for the reader.

Yep this form of "journalism" always makes me wonder about why somebody would do this. Informing the public seems to be a secondary concern. At least that's my initial impression. Basically, this reads as clickbait aimed at some influencer circle jerk playing out across linkedin, quora, etc. where people with too much time and yet no attention span hang out to profile themselves to each others and do some ego boosting: "OMG look what I discovered and how brilliant that makes me look". I imagine somebody drooling over all the clicks they are getting and am already annoyed with myself that I'm perpetuating that bullshit by having clicked on the thing.

It looks like a minor non issue to me. But this being California, I imagine the kind of people in that before mentioned circle jerk might include lawyers, politicians, etc. that are looking to get in on the action (i.e. lawsuits, publicity, and other melodrama) that has nothing to do with the actual technical problem. The latter I imagine is a simple matter of this company getting off their ass and replacing the rusting parts in question.

In short, what's the agenda of the person that wrote this?

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#258

Post by cesaref » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 11:23 AM UTC

tshaddox wrote: post #155

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…

> 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. I don’t understand. You’re conceding that if PG&E were a competent and responsible company they could significantly r…

No, the point is I think that they could reduce the risk further, they are currently maintaining their network, the question is what benefit would be gained by increasing the cost of their maintenance, or whether they would be absorbing the risk from someone else's lack of maintenance (e.g clearing forest debris/making fire breaks). Remember, power lines are not the only source of fires, lightning being a much more frequent cause and power grid maintenance isn't going to alter that risk

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#259

Post by lordnacho » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 11:26 AM UTC

onetimemanytime wrote: post #184

harha wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take driving as an analogy - there's a non-zero risk of having a crash, but it's significantly higher if you don't follow the rules (drunk, speeding, broken car). This feels like PG&E was betting it wouldn't happen to them. I think for a utility the risk should be very very close to zero, you can really do a lot of planning around it and make sure that if you're running infrastructure in a dangerous area to take suff…

>> I think for a utility the risk should be very very close to zero They can lower the risk by a lot, but are you ready to pay 65 cents (or whatever) a KW ? PG&E, with all its faults, has been put in an impossible position: one fire (that is bound to happen no matter what because wires fail) can bankrupt them since it can burn hundreds of thousand of acres, thousands of homes, untold deaths and other property destruc…

If 65 cents is the actual cost then it should be the price. You can't be charging people 20 cents or whatever, but then they also have to pay to have their homes rebuilt every few decades, pay for insurance, and pay for firefighters.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#260

Post by Retric » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 11:28 AM UTC

Zanni wrote: post #185

harha wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take driving as an analogy - there's a non-zero risk of having a crash, but it's significantly higher if you don't follow the rules (drunk, speeding, broken car). This feels like PG&E was betting it wouldn't happen to them. I think for a utility the risk should be very very close to zero, you can really do a lot of planning around it and make sure that if you're running infrastructure in a dangerous area to take suff…

An even better analogy is Jenga. California's uncontrolled fuel load was going to result in massive fires at some point. Yes, PG&E could have reduced the chance of it being them, which would be great for PG&E, but would make no difference to California.

The fuel load decays over time, so a long enough wait period and the next fire is independent of the last fire. Thus, fewer PG&E fires just means less fires rather than there being some independent amount of fire that’s always going to happen.

If anything they need to have more responsibility in such areas not less responsibility. If they can’t detect a tree is at risk or not then either cut down more trees or use underground power lines in that area.