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This electrical transmission tower has a problem

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Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#441

Post by DoctorOetker »

First the broken hook is shown that started the fire, but then it is "conceded" that the fire would have happened anyway because of the fallen tree...

Am I the only one who thinks this is highly unlikely? While every uncontrolled fire is one too much, the fires aren't that frequent that 2 independent fire causes would occur this close in both time and space. If the rate of firestart per year per square mile expressed as a probability would be P then the probability of 2 independent firestarts in the same area and same timeframe would be P^2, so if fires are relatively rare this should be an extremely rare event.

Either the tree fell first causing a fire, after which the hook lost tensile strength because of heat; or the hook failed first starting a fire somehow collapsing a tree.

Either way PG&E should be held responsible both for not cutting trees away a distance of the height of the trees away from the lines, and for failing to replace the worn hooks.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#442

Post by andyv »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #218
viraptor wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It lacks context, but the idea itself is not ridiculous. That's pretty much how original Australians dealt with fuel buildup. Move and burn often. Given specific ecosystem, in a very literal sense, 1000 fires are better than 10 in the same area over the same time period.

I lived in Africa. The parks used to run controlled burns, every year or two, of the savanna grass. They tended to do this during the [very] wet season. But PG&E is still on the hook for taking better care of their infrastructure. It all comes down to dollars and [non]sense. Some actuary has determined that an occasional lawsuit and rotten press run is cheaper than maintaining the wires. Here in New York, many of the…

We went with that plan at my HOA for some of our water lines.

They replaced a corroded and failed section of pipe, repressurized the line and POP! went the next section... Two or three times as I recall.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#443

Post by 205guy »

DuskStar wrote: post #57

I've got a bit of a problem with articles like this one. I'll try and illustrate it with an analogy: Imagine some asshole puts an incendiary in an orphanage, and rigs it to go off when a nearby speed trap detects someone going more than 10mph over. Eventually, someone does, and the orphanage catches fire. Further, the group responsible for constructing and maintaining the orphanage hasn't looked at the place for 50 y…

I hate these extreme thought puzzles. They try to simplify the problem by analogy and try to highlight the issues of the original problem through severe imagery (incendiary in an orphanage, wtf), but all they do is mislead, because the choice of what is magnified is an opinion, and the lesson to be learned is shaped by bias.

In this example, we are meant to assume that the incendiary is the equivalent of fuel overload in mismanaged forests. But the analogy is bunk. No one is planting bombs (it's not a willful act), the policy of stopping fires was once considered good, and when it was no longer considered good, there were also issues of homes and property to protect. And then there is climate change that is ostensibly creating dryer and longer fire seasons, so the underlying factors have changed.

Yet the thought puzzle is designed to have obvious answers (aka bias) that the author wants us to apply in the real world. This is manipulation. Give us the real world problem and more information to think about it, we are smart enough.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#444

Post by scottlamb »

pnutjam wrote: post #429
scottlamb wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think blaming rural power users is a dangerous idea for a couple reasons. > Don't forget, at the current rate we're all subsidizing the rural power users. I'm sure this is true to some extent—just as it is for telecommunications and mail delivery—but this tower wasn't just for rural power users, was it? I think it was some sort of high-voltage long-distance transmission line. There's a region-wide electrical grid,…

Rural people love their subsidies. We should encourage people to live in denser areas, not all cities, but towns. How many rural people do you think are involve in food production? It's only around 10%.

> Rural people love their subsidies. We should encourage people to live in denser areas, not all cities, but towns. How many rural people do you think are involve in food production? It's only around 10%.

I have no idea. It's a hard question to answer. You are sure with no citation so I think you're wrong.

How do you define "rural" and how do you define a "town"? The US Census—which probably was directly or indirectly the source of your 10%—defines rural as not urban. Urban clusters must have a population of 2,500, [1] which already excludes a lot of what I'd call towns. And as a spot check, I don't see Grundy Center, IA on the list, despite meeting the population requirement (and not being included in a larger urban cluster AFAIK). Maybe it fails one of their other requirements. It is in their list of "incorporated places".

How do you define "involved in food production"? If I live with my family on a farm but picked "truck driver" as my occupation, am I involved in food production? If I am a teacher to farmers' kids, in a town of 500 people (see above), am I involved in food production? etc. Farmers don't exist in a vacuum. They need services like everyone else.

Even if you are right, "only about 10%" doesn't mean you won't cause pretty significant problems for everyone by messing with those folks...

[1] https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g...

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#445

Post by himinlomax »

mannykannot wrote: post #294
himinlomax wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Negligent vs intentional is orthogonal to responsible. You could be responsible but just negligent, like an idiot lighting up a cigar at a gas station. You could intentionally light a fire but not responsible, such as if someone tricked you into doing it or you were poisoned with hallucinogenic drugs, or just plain crazy.

None of these corner-cases do anything for your arsonist analogy. Whatever else one thinks of the utility, it is not plausible that either it or its employees intended to start a fire.

Talk about missing the point ...

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#446

Post by daveswilson »

Placing blame is far less interesting, IMO, than considering this story in the context of our much-needed next-generation power grid.

One thing such a grid, and our management approach to it, has to do is not fail catastrophically, showering everything around it with sparks and cutting power to who knows how many customers. I assert that this is not a good thing regardless of whether a huge fire is started and people die as a result.

If you look at PG&E's outage map, it has a way of putting a smiley face on failure. You'll find it at https://m.pge.com/#outages, but of course you will have to look below the fold.

When you do that you will see the "CUSTOMERS AFFECTED" key. If less than 50 customers are affected by a power outage, PG&E calls that "green". There are always many green dots on their map in the Bay Area, whenever I've looked. That's another symptom of simply running things until they fail, and another indicator of the current state of our electrical infrastructure, and certainly an artifact of the culture at PG&E and the politics that allow it to exist.

As we reinvest in and modernize our grid, we need financial incentives for operators around reliability, and standards for both construction and monitoring that support their efforts to improve that. That could begin at the federal level, if we had a functioning federal government, in much the way the largely-successful things we did prior to 2016 have done (the NASA commercial crew program, what-used-to-be-the-CDC, NIST, etc.).

If we could put the right incentives in place and then take one more step - prioritize modernization of the grid in fire-prone areas - then we can look forward to a point in time when we're not shutting off people's power because the wind blows.

Sure, fires start for other reasons and we're living through them now. That's no excuse for keeping our profit motivations in the wrong place. Fewer fires is helpful and reliable power is helpful. Let's start paying businesses for reliability (and efficiency, and renewability while we're at it).

We're getting what we have because we're paying pretty much exclusively for the number of kilowatt hours delivered to where. A lot of things have changed since somebody came up with that. Seems we should blow that bit up, insert ways to measure additional things, and pay for performance.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#447

Post by 205guy »

guerby wrote: post #421

Page 38 of this document you have a nice graph of the ages of the conductors of France high voltage lines: https://assets.rte-france.com/prod/public/2020-07/Sch%C3%A9m... "RTE France" is the entity in charge of those lines. Plenty of lenghty docs for 10+ years plans: https://www.rte-france.com/analyses-tendances-et-prospective...

Thank you for posting this. At this level of organizations, it is enlightening to see how different countries handle similar situations.

Surprisingly, they also have lines that are 80-100 years old. I hadn't been following this story before, but upon first reading, I was shocked that infrastructure from 100 years ago was still in-place, original, and in operation. Now that seems normal.

My guess was that equipment would be replaced every 40-50 years, or at least renewed. The graph implies that the French policy is to replace after 45-70 years of service, but to allow older ones in limited cases. And they are saying the ones that are 70 years old need to be replaced in 5-10 years, so they allow up to 80 years.

I suppose that if the infrastructure is tested and maintained, and still cheap enough to maintain safely, there is no reason to replace it. As this story shows, you have to know your equipment and it's state of maintenance, and of course actively manage it safely and efficiently.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#448

Post by anigbrowl »

cogman10 wrote: post #440
dragonwriter wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think one of the key points in that Twitter thread is that the distributed responsibility disincentives anyone from pushing to tackle difficult problems (because no professional or personal liability is involved) and the centralization of profits ensures that the dysfunctional administrative structure stays in place.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#450

Post by yesdocs »

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 natural systems are out of wack, my point is that the way the earth is heating up, we would eventually need to burn every forest to compensate for the growing temperatures. This stance is ridiculous. I’m old enough to remember when we didn’t have such ravaging fires, and lightning happened all the time. Better yet, scientists can look at past patterns and they too have proved that climate change is real. Ask a firefighter who’s been around for more then 30 years, they will tell you. The belief that Trump is even remotely correct on this issue is to believe complete foolishness. Alas, here we are.
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