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This electrical transmission tower has a problem

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Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#111

Post by bb88 »

vlovich123 wrote: post #103
bb88 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe whoever setup the dominoes behind the first one shares the blame as well... There was a famous story here a couple years ago here where a mountain biker lit some toilet paper on fire and caused half a hillside to go up in flames. Negligence, sure. Stupidity, no doubt. But it's also dry here in the summer, and that hasn't changed year after year. So sure, I guess, let it be the weather's fault or global warmin…

No. I think the point is can we change our forestry practices. Ignoring the root causes and blaming the first dominoe isn’t helpful because there will always be some dumb thing to set off a massive fire. We have been assigning blame - is that effective at stopping the fires? We do blameless post-martens as a best practice in engineering so that when we don’t have constant outages of critical internet infrastructure a…

> blameless post-martens as a best practice in engineering

First, those don't exist -- despite any evidence to the contrary.

Second, engineers don't have shareholders demanding stock buy backs.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#112

Post by dv_dt »

Animats wrote: post #59
cco wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like a great use case for a drone, you could get closer, the video can be taken by non-inspectors and then reviewed later/stored.

That's how it's done now.[1] But seeing wear on a hook is tough even with high resolution photos, because the wear is between hook and eye and doesn't show clearly until the setup is disassembled. [1] https://youtu.be/7-JTqwUyD5o

Did you look at the photos of the hook, it should be visible to a proper inspection. That marketing video of inspections is either picked for nice panning shots, or is simply inadequate operation to make it look like they can inspect faster than they should to be effective.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#113

Post by sgustard »

causality0 wrote: post #21

"Paying money to violate the law" is a fundamentally broken method of law enforcement. Do away with them. Justice should not be a line item in a spreadsheet. Maybe it's only twenty minutes in the county jail but every single infraction should fall personally on the individual who made the decision. Start hauling board members into court in orange jumpsuits and see how quickly these "unavoidable" fuckups stop happenin…

The most useful outcome to society would be for every 100-year-old piece of PG&E infrastructure to be replaced, at whatever cost to the company is necessary.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#115

Post by akira2501 »

kempbellt wrote: post #90
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…

>Of course they can. A failure is an unplanned shutdown A pedantically accurate retort, but ignores the real point. Shutting down these lines for "inspection" is not feasible. These lines are the backbone of a grid that millions of people and services rely on 24/7/365, and there is zero redundancy. They are responsible for delivering power to hospitals, traffic lights, schools, airports, grocery stores, homes, busine…

> Telling people "We need to turn off your power for a couple days every couple months for inspections" is going to create a lot of backlash, no matter how good the reason.

They were happy to tell people "We need to turn off your power for a couple of days because of wind." Granted, in this particular case, they weren't talking about the 115kV line that ultimately caused the fire.

To me, this just further highlights their "run it till it breaks" philosophy. This becomes a little more obvious when you read their plans for fixing this mess, and it involves a dual-circuit transmissions system. So, you can literally shut half of it down without completely stopping power.

It's also not impossible to serve one neighborhood with two power lines, in fact it's quite common.

> Also, the lines in question aren't like closing a two lane road in a small neighborhood

It is a single 115kV line. That's exactly like what it is. For the rest of the state your analogy falls apart because there is a significant amount of redundancy and additional capacity that can be used to route power. For example, lookup "Path 46" and the "Pacific DC Intertie." Which is interesting in it's own right because it can be run in two different modes, one for nearly double the power capacity in certain conditions.

> The problem is, these systems are old, too many people rely on them, and there is no redundancy.

The California regulator has been asleep at the switch here, and they do share some culpability, but again.. it's not impossible to design around this constraint. You're going to pay twice as much for aluminum and nearly twice as much for everything else, but it's not impossible to solve. Just no one wanted to and no one was going to make them.

> Also, their profit margin for one year is not a fair argument towards them being at fault.

They are a state granted monopoly. I think it's entirely fair.

> Economics at scale is not a black-and-white, napkin math, solvable problem.

Sure, but you can start on the napkin and see if you're even in the ballpark. I think if you put even $100 million down on a napkin, you'd be surprised at what can fit in your ballpark.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#116

Post by himinlomax »

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…

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!"

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#117

Post by ethanwillis »

tuna-piano wrote: post #65
nanodeath wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm...it's unclear whether you read the stream. They had reason to believe that the C-hook would fail after 97-100 years, yet weren't even checking the C-hooks on towers that were 100 years old. That seems willfully negligent.

I think the point is that PG&E negligently caused sparks. But many things can negligently cause sparks, including dozens of human and natural causes. Even among power operators, sparks seem to not be too rare (for example, the tree that fell on the line). So while PG&E can be blamed for that specific fire that doesn't really address the root cause of "why can some sparks in one place cause such huge destruction and c…

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.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#118

Post by shajznnckfke »

creato wrote: post #76
nanodeath wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm...it's unclear whether you read the stream. They had reason to believe that the C-hook would fail after 97-100 years, yet weren't even checking the C-hooks on towers that were 100 years old. That seems willfully negligent.

Yes, PGE did cause a fire through negligence. That's a problem. However, what is the appropriate penalty for this? In my opinion, it is the average cost of a fire, most of which are small and don't cause much damage. That this particular fire blew up into a big disaster was the result of many factors, only a few of which were actually in PGE's control.

That’s an argument you could make in any kind of liability lawsuit. It falls flat because the lawsuit isn’t worth filing in the average case, so nobody ends up being held to account for anything.

Example: a roller coaster has broken seat belts. Usually nothing bad will happen because physics keeps the rider in their seat. In one case, a rider falls to their death because they were leaning a particular way on a particular turn. Should the theme park not be punished because nobody was hurt in the average case? Or everyone who rode the roller coaster and wasn’t injured needs to sue for their piece of the pie (because the average damage is one death divided by the total number of riders)?

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#119

Post by Kwantuum »

bb88 wrote: post #92
tuna-piano wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is that PG&E negligently caused sparks. But many things can negligently cause sparks, including dozens of human and natural causes. Even among power operators, sparks seem to not be too rare (for example, the tree that fell on the line). So while PG&E can be blamed for that specific fire that doesn't really address the root cause of "why can some sparks in one place cause such huge destruction and c…

> Maybe whoever setup the dominoes behind the first one shares the blame as well... There was a famous story here a couple years ago here where a mountain biker lit some toilet paper on fire and caused half a hillside to go up in flames. Negligence, sure. Stupidity, no doubt. But it's also dry here in the summer, and that hasn't changed year after year. So sure, I guess, let it be the weather's fault or global warmin…

Fires can start from natural causes too. It's ignorant to say that this sort of disaster can be prevented by fixing behaviour, and it's a special form of hubris to think that you can "unstupid" everyone. This is the worst plan you can have. Relying on all individuals not doing something stupid for a long time is a lost cause, just look at the state of covid in the US. There are people literally throwing parties or sending their kids to school while they know that they have covid.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#120

Post by csours »

nanodeath wrote: post #63
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…

Hm...it's unclear whether you read the stream. They had reason to believe that the C-hook would fail after 97-100 years, yet weren't even checking the C-hooks on towers that were 100 years old. That seems willfully negligent.

We're all thinking about C-hooks because that's what failed here. What if the foundation had failed? Or any one of a million other things. I'm not saying that PG&E are clear by any means, just that it's really easy to point fingers after an incident. Be very wary of hindsight bias.

So very much of America's infrastructure is aging and used past planned capacity. How can you tell ahead of time which infrastructure will bite you the worst? Water control structures (dams, levees, locks) are a great place to look because of their potential for widespread, costly disasters.

If this C-hook had failed during a rainstorm, there would have been localized power loss for some time, and extra work for a repair crew.

Now, as it happens, California is naturally prone to wildfires; add to that climate change, poor vegetation control, people wanting to live next to trees[0] - it really is only a matter of time before people are killed. Just look at all the fires burning now. How many of them were caused by faulty C-hooks?

Take the example from Fight Club:

> "Narrator: A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."

The Narrator has provided us with a very vivid example: a fiery crash caused by a specific part. But what about all the other components? What about the other cars on the road? What about the guy that falls asleep while driving an affected vehicle and has a single car accident? There's a lot of noise in the real world.

0. For instance, I also live next to trees and love it (but not in California).

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