This electrical transmission tower has a problem • Hacker News Board

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#431

Post by NotSammyHagar » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 9:11 PM UTC

tikhonj wrote: post #397

jvanderbot wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are quite likely many other towers with the same vulnerability, the same potential breakage. Those will cause other fires when they break. There are multiple reasons why they should address those very old towers that haven't had maintenance, because they'll cause other fires.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#432

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 9:16 PM UTC

bryan0 wrote: post #366

biztos wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> California's mismanagement with its forest is the same issue. I agree that the forests should be managed differently, but if this being "California's mismanagement" is an actual thing as opposed to political disinformation, I'd love to see a couple links to back it up. Some quick googling suggests that it's mostly a Federal problem, which has very different implications especially right now. Am I wrong?

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…

> All of these things are true.

That's highly debatable.

> They're not political statements:

At least the first is a political judgement.

> 1. CA mismanaged its forests by not doing proper controlled burns

The vast.majority of the first within the State are not subject to state management; 3% of the forest land is controlled by the state or administrative subdivisions. 57% of forest land in the state (and 47.7% of total land area of the state) is directly controlled by the federal government and some of the rest by federally-but-not-state supervised tribal governments. In between there is some private land which the state has less control over than the state-owned land but more than the federally-controlled land from which it is excluded from management. So even if there was mismanagement by the state, there's very limited potential impact.

> 2. Climate change making conditions ripe for fires

This is true.

> 3. PG&E was negligent in maintaining its infrastructure

This understates the case; PG&E was between grossly reckless and actively malicious in maintaining it's infrastructure.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#433

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 9:16 PM 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…

[deleted]

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#434

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 9:17 PM UTC

NotSammyHagar wrote: post #430

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…

And #4 almost 50% of the land is under federal control and thus California state govt has very limited influence and ability to ask for burning that.

> And #4 almost 50% of the land is under federal control

Over 50% of forest land in the state, but almost 50% of the total land area of the state.

This is fairly common in the West and wildly different from the situation outside of the West.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#435

Post by patcon » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 9:18 PM UTC

legulere wrote: post #168

tshaddox wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

1000 fires would actually be probably better than 10 because they help keep flammable material at bay and reduce the size of the fires.

Support for 1,000 fires being better than 10: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/26/a-trailblazing...

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#436

Post by jdsully » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 9:26 PM UTC

gdubs wrote: post #392

jdsully wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But you said it yourself, if we had not "managed" the forest we would likely have been in a better situation today with less severe fires. Humans have a huge bias to action, and aversion to change which isn't always for the best.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#437

Post by thatguy0900 » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 9:26 PM UTC

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #398

akira2501 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 helicoil…

Incentivising companies to throw away equipment that still works sounds like a terrible environmental policy

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#438

Post by gdubs » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 9:50 PM UTC

jdsully wrote: post #436

gdubs wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But you said it yourself, if we had not "managed" the forest we would likely have been in a better situation today with less severe fires. Humans have a huge bias to action, and aversion to change which isn't always for the best.

There’s two different types of “management” being discussed. One being the modern approach of fire suppression. The other, the one taken by native Americans, involved annual burns which did not make the situation worse and in fact kept things in check.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#439

Post by tornato7 » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 9:52 PM UTC

ShinTakuya wrote: post #107

benjaminjackman wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reminds me of Let's Encrypt issuing 90 day certs instead of 1+ year so that you're forced to find a better automated solution and not have a panic when your cert expires in 5 years

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#440

Post by cogman10 » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 9:56 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #402

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…

> California's mismanagement with it's forest is the same issue. The majority (57%) of forest land in California is managed by the federal government even before considering the part managed by tribal governments, which are also out of state control though subject to federal oversight. Only 3% is directly under state control. 47.7% of the total land in California is federally owned (not uncommon in the West, where mo…

Yeah, lots of issues came together for the perfect storm.

Personally, I do think that PG&E should have seen a harsher punishment. If some pyro had went in and started the same fire, they'd have been in jail for life. PG&E does this shit and they got a slap on the wrist.

But, your point is very valid. This place was a tinderbox. They were one lightning strike, on cigarette butt, one illegal bonfire away from going up in flames spectacularly.

The federal government has blame for not maintaining land.

Beyond that, they have blame for not aggressively addressing climate change (which has contributed to the level of dryness).

All of this points to a common societal issue. Rather than spend money to fix things, we wait until everything blows up before asking questions.

This shit scares me. How much more of our world is teetering on the edge of catastrophe?