This electrical transmission tower has a problem • Hacker News Board

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#391

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 4:17 PM UTC

edge17 wrote: post #388

yesdocs wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under this approach, we would have to burn all of our natural forests down to the ground because of climate change. It will soon be too dry for any forest to be in it’s natural state. Plus I don’t see how this is strictly a California problem, federal funds are required to manage federal lands. Especially since the current federal administration is fueling the onset of climate change like no other. I’ve witnessed the…

That's not how natural dynamic systems work. There is a level of stability (some optimal level of forest) that the natural system wants to have, and it will naturally burn away excess if the people were not present. Much of the fires this year were caused by lightening (nature). > Plus I don’t see how this is strictly a California problem Indeed it is not just a California problem. Believe it or not, there are other…

> The US Southeast burns nearly 2x the acreage as California on an annual basis.

The US Southeast has a land area of 580,000mi², California is 163,000mi². So, just to be even as a proportion of land area, the former would need to burn 3.5 times the acreage of the latter on an annual basis. Unless your claim is that California’s problem is that its controlled burns are too extensive, I'm not sure what your point is.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#392

Post by gdubs » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 4:18 PM UTC

jdsully wrote: post #365

gdubs wrote: post #359

I own roughly 40 acres of Douglas Fir forest in Northwest Oregon, and let me tell you — there’s no black and white answer to this. This is a long post, so buckle up. Start with invasive shrubs like blackberries. They spread wildly and require a ton of work to maintain. (And before people say “use goats”, know they are not a magic bullet.) Limbing trees, where you remove branches under 10’, can help prevent “ladder fi…

These forests managed themselves for thousands of years without us - including periods of invasive species (through geological rather than human means of transmission). I find it funny us humans seem to want to take responsibility for everything. That said I wouldn't want my house burned down from a forest fire either.

Well, while it might make a nice children’s book, there were no firefighting animals prior to humans. So, sure, the forests managed to maintain themselves because no one was around to stop the fires, which kept things in check. Animals would flee, but in general these fires would have been more frequent and as a consequence, less vicious.

But in the past few thousand years, they were actively managed. Native American Indians burned countless acres annually to maintain a particular ecosystem. Oregon, known now for its Douglas Fir trees, was largely an oak savanna. Oaks are fire resistant and provide food for big game. The annual fires kept other vegetation in check.

Humans have an outsized effect on the planet; I fail to see the humor in why we should recognize our impact, and our moral and ethical responsibilities to the web of life we’re both a part of and depend on.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#393

Post by jackhack » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 4:22 PM UTC

jschwartzi wrote: post #356

pixl97 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? There is such a thing as a multi domain fault. He never said this wasn't PG&E's fault, just that out of 100% they don't bear all the fault. I mean, California is in the middle of burning down from a lighting complex at this moment. Suing mother nature isn't going to do much good if you want to put the blame on her for that fire. As long as people live in the Wildland Urban Interface, and we live in a climate tha…

The fires are a direct result of human-caused climate change. I’ve lived in Washington all my life and 2015 was the first year we got smoked out during the summer. Since then it’s persisted year after year. We’ve completely screwed up our planet.

it's human-caused, all right. Just not in the way you are implying.

The number of recent antifa firebugs being caught either actively setting fires or scouting along roads, matches in hand, might have some relation to this, don't you think? Ignoring the actual arrests, it's not a stretch to think the types that set urban fires might also do the same on a rural area.

Look at a map of the fires. Isn't it interesting that most of these fires happen in close proximity to state highways and secondary roads and not in unpopulated rural areas?

Not willing to admit the obvious? Then, let's go baack to your claim that it's due to climate. You should be able to describe the specific climate changes have occurred in the past 5 years to cause this dramatic increase in fires where the occurrence was rare, before. That should be an easy data point for you to call out. Or if that's too challenging, what specific climate variable must change to increase fire. Speculate, if you like. Educate us all.

But I think Ockham's Razor applies here.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#394

Post by zbrozek » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 4:24 PM UTC

ComputerGuru wrote: post #376

bryan0 wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are some articles explaining California's role in forest mismanagement.[0][1][2] I think what's interesting, and a real problem, is that all reasons about causes of the fires is seen as a political stance, when the factual causes of the fires should be not a political issue. All of these things are true. They're not political statements: 1. CA mismanaged its forests by not doing proper controlled burns 2. Climat…

What about all the federally owned land in California suffering from the same “mismanagement?” It’s also not clear to me that - regardless of the party in question - it is fair to call it mismanagement unless credentialed people had pointed out the risk of not allowing controlled burns and the government insisted on doing them anyway because of different priorities, aka mismanagement.

It's not news. Fire management folks have been preaching controlled burns for decades.

https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-...

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#395

Post by wrycoder » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 4:25 PM UTC

mdavidn wrote: post #297

resonantjacket5 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No the root of the problem is that there's too much forest that hasn't burned. Blaming PG&E is missing the actual problem. For instance the Beirut explosion was the fault from the welders causing the explosion. Yes, but the larger and more important issue is why are there so many explosives in the first place? California's mismanagement with it's forest is the same issue. These forests should be periodically burned t…

No, the problem is that PG&E was relying on a century-old part of unknown metallurgy to suspend a 115 kV conductor.

Worse. They ignored the easily inspectable fact that the part was worn halfway through.

There must be many more like this. Have the been replaced?

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#396

Post by jartelt » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 4:27 PM UTC

macspoofing wrote: post #379

jartelt wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of forest land in California is owned by the federal government and is National Forest land. California can't just go and run controlled burns in those federally controlled forests. That would need to be done in cooperation or under the direction of the US Forest Service and should be funded by the US Forest Service since they own the land. If the federal government wants better forest management in…

Sure - you can have that discussion. What the Democrats are doing is blaming climate change and Trump's climate change policy. Surely you agree that that is just dishonest.

The only solution to the wildfire problem offered by Trump is that California should do a better job raking up leaves/pine needles and should remove more dead fuel from forests. I think that is much more intellectually dishonest, especially given that Trump is in control of the US Forest Service, which is the agency that would be in charge of raking the leaves and removing the dead trees...

If Trump drastically increases the budget to the USFS and starts a new and improved forest management program, I will gladly applaud the effort. Sadly, I doubt that will happen.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#397

Post by tikhonj » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 4:31 PM UTC

jvanderbot wrote: post #368

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The twitter thread makes this exact point. The camp fire would likely have happened with or without this maintenance error on PG&E's part. This is because a tree fell on a different power line and started the Camp B fire, and this was determined not to be the result of a preventable error. Just that fact alone suggests that the main component of the problem is not PG&E's neglect.

Do you believe we should not penalize preventable deaths just because non-preventable deaths also happen?

That's not the question here. Rather, it's about which causes contributed to the problem—blaming everything on the most proximate cause is convenient but doesn't reflect the situation.

An extreme analogy: if a car is built in a way that a fender-bender causes a fire[1], how much of that is on the person who cause the fender-bender? Fender-benders are preventable by better driving, but the consequences were massively exaggerated because the car was unsafe.

The PG&E example isn't this clear but if the severity of the fires is substantially caused by poor forest management—an empirical question to which I do not know the answer—then it's clear that PG&E should not shoulder the entire blame. We're still left with the thorny question of how much blame they deserve (certainly not none), but the rhetoric I see around it is using the company as a scapegoat to let the CA and federal government avoid taking any responsibility at all.

[1]: I don't know if the Ford Pinto was actually this bad, but this is a hypothetical example anyway :).

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#398

Post by LeifCarrotson » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 4:33 PM UTC

akira2501 wrote: post #39

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. Of course they can. A failure is an unplanned shutdown, and I doubt that leads to better outcomes than a planned shutdown. Also this thread demonstrates that PG&E replaced _other_ parts of the same tower. > I'm of the opinion that humans should not be living in areas that burn regularly. I'm of the opinion that climate change makes this a moving target, and this is simply one of t…

I wish this attitude towards planned and unplanned shutdowns was more common.

I'm not an infrastructure professional, I'm in automation and manufacturing, but all too often I come across equipment that must never be shut down and must be functional 100% of the time, but which has been run long past its service life. Windows 98 or XP computers on their 9th resurrection due to parts from eBay, castings full of helicoils, electrical cabinets with wires strung across like cobwebs... If the business was successful before the machine was built, downtime now costs tens of thousands of dollars per hour, and the whole machine cost 500,000 dollars 100,000 hours ago, maybe someone should start thinking about building a replacement (or, better, a pair of replacements) and phasing this one out?

I know the front office likes to write off machine depreciation as a tax deduction. With a 10 year useful life on a $500k machine, you get $50k in tax deductions. In the 11th year, you get no tax deduction, but the machine is still making money.

I feel strongly that there ought to be some kind of financial penalty for operating a machine that's depreciated beyond its claimed useful life - not a direct tax penalty, but some kind of non-cash-expense liability that subtracts from the big positive number on the front page of the quarterly financials which the CEO uses to claim they deserve a bonus.

PG&E's more regulated than just painting them as a for-profit business with $550M in the black would suggest. They have maintenance and capital expenditures that they need to make. But those regulated books didn't show the single-point-of-failure risks and long-past-useful-life liabilities, and they should!

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#399

Post by dcanelhas » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 4:38 PM UTC

mannykannot wrote: post #263

dcanelhas wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lightning may coincide with rainfall, I've heard. If this is true one might presume less severe fires as a result.

It is a simple fact that lightning does start fires, especially in places like the American west, where lightning is not always accompanied with much, or any, rainfall at ground level. The severity of any fire is determined by how it develops in the hours and days that follow its ignition, long after the storm has moved on or dissipated.

That's not disputed. But starting a fire in completely dry conditions is worse than starting one that potentially coincides with rainfall, all other things being equal.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#400

Post by edge17 » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 4:40 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #391

edge17 wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how natural dynamic systems work. There is a level of stability (some optimal level of forest) that the natural system wants to have, and it will naturally burn away excess if the people were not present. Much of the fires this year were caused by lightening (nature). > Plus I don’t see how this is strictly a California problem Indeed it is not just a California problem. Believe it or not, there are other…

> The US Southeast burns nearly 2x the acreage as California on an annual basis. The US Southeast has a land area of 580,000mi², California is 163,000mi². So, just to be even as a proportion of land area, the former would need to burn 3.5 times the acreage of the latter on an annual basis. Unless your claim is that California’s problem is that its controlled burns are too extensive , I'm not sure what your point is.

Not sure what point you're making, but my point is there are individual smaller states in the US that do more prescribed burns by acreage than California. To name a few, Florida, Arkansas, South Carolina [1]

[1] https://assets.climatecentral.org/pdfs/May2019_Report_TheBur...