"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…
Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom are the top of the chain for PG&E. The The California Public Utilities Commission which is appointed by the Governor controls PG&E.
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 wil…
The issue isn't specifically what failed.
The issue is that the failure in this case was both predictable and ignored. PG&E willfully failed to inspect/maintain the equipment.
Accidents happen and you can't control for everything. But this is a very clear and obvious failure. The failure isn't specific to what failed in this case (The c-hook) but the failure of PG&E to do any due diligence.
> But many things can negligently cause sparks, including dozens of human and natural causes. My favourite: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-mendocino-compl... Someone tried to stop an angry yellowjacket nest by driving a concrete stake into the hole in the ground and their hammer thew off sparks and started a 459,123 acre fire-- the largest recorded in state history at the time.
If the forest is so sensitive that hammer sparks set off a fire, maybe no humans belong in the forest - except for the humans proactively trying to manage burns.
The fire started in grassland, not in a forest. As it grew, it spread to forested areas. There is a lot of grassland out in California and it gets very flammable in the summer when it all dies out and dries up. Dead grass is basically well-aerated vertical kindling. It's so easy to light that when I was growing up outside of Sacramento, a common cause of local wildfires was cigarette butts flicked out a car window. When we mowed the lawn in the summer, we would keep the garden hose charged. Basically, it burns, burns easily, and burns quickly.
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…
You don’t have to speculate about trees causing fires in the area: the thread eventually mentions a second fire, Camp B, caused by a tree falling on a line. It was subsumed by the first Camp fire. It may have caused just as much trouble if it was the only fire.
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…
> But many things can negligently cause sparks, including dozens of human and natural causes. My favourite: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-mendocino-compl... Someone tried to stop an angry yellowjacket nest by driving a concrete stake into the hole in the ground and their hammer thew off sparks and started a 459,123 acre fire-- the largest recorded in state history at the time.
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...
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…
I do remember reading that there was a lack of maintenance by PG&E but as you say it is a systemic governance failure and to single out one point of failure is scapegoating.
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…
I suppose you think that nuclear power plants should be operated under the same "run to failure" maintenance policy?
Assigning them unlimited liability for catastrophic wildfires leads to the unintended consequence of making it risky for them to run power at all during high fire danger conditions, so they turn off power in these areas.
They've been willfully negligent and reckless to the infrastructure they own to service their customers. In this case we're not even talking about tree trimming, we have a 100 year old tower. It's obvious it will fail soon, there should be an internal maintenance program to replace/update it. There are no such programs, PGE operates in a way that there would never be such a program. PGE should be held liable for pred…
Where I live in rural Missouri, we have "rural electric cooperatives." They are customer-owned utilities set up in the 1930s. From my experience and that of everyone I've talked to in the region, the coops are incredibly reliable, take safety and maintenance very seriously, and provide service at very reasonable rates.
It seems clear to me that for-profit business is the wrong model for an infrastructure monopoly like power delivery networks.
If California doesn't like PG&E making $550M profit, and would like PG&E spend more on maintenance, it should set lower profit target, and allow PG&E spend more money on maintenance. PG&E operates based on decisions of California Public Utilities Commission, which decides, among other things, how much money PG&E is allowed to make, and how much it is allowed to spend on maintenance. Here's what it looks like: https:/…
Why is it people will argue that there should be fewer regulations to allow companies more freedom to operate but when those companies, unsurprisingly, put money ahead of safety, it’s then the government’s fault for not regulating those companies? At some point companies need to take responsibility and be held accountable for their (in)actions. I know this is an unpopular opinion for HN, given its venture funding roo…
I don’t think you understood my comment. PG&E is as regulated as you can possibly get without literally being part of government. When PG&E wants to spend $100M on maintenance, it has to ask government for permission, and CPUC needs to approve this expense.
My point here is not to argue that with less regulation, PG&E would do better job when it comes to maintenance — I don’t know if it would. However, considering how deeply regulated it actually is, and how much the regulator controls everything it does, some blame must also be placed on the regulator’s side.