This electrical transmission tower has a problem • Hacker News Board

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#401

Post by coryfklein » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 4:45 PM UTC

resonantjacket5 wrote: post #217

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…

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…

If PG&E is maintaining power transmissions lines that are surrounded by a known gigantic reservior of combustible material then they are still responsible for when their equipment ignites that material.

That doesn't remove the onus on land management to engage in best forestry practices, but PG&E still has a significant burden of responsibility.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#402

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 4:51 PM UTC

resonantjacket5 wrote: post #217

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…

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 most federal land is; outside of 12 Western states, the Federal government owns only 4% of the land in the rest of the country.)

Western land management problems are, generally, problems of federal administration, not state government.

EDIT: But, it's important to note I am not saying the fires involving PG&E equipment are a federal problem rather than a PG&E problem. While the current federal administration and their cheerleaders likes to blame forest management and seems blind to the fact that, if true, that would be a federal issue, PG&E’s deliberate, knowing cutting of maintenance corners, curtailing inspections and cutting inspector training, knowingly leaving specific faulty equipment in place years after it was identified as faulty and dangerous, and covering up that it did all those things, are well documented. While they accepted a plea bargain to 84 counts of manslaughter, the facts documented in the investigation would seem to more than support conviction of 2nd degree murder (of the “abandoned and malignant heart” type), based on other cases where that has been applied in CA based on willful disregard of safety factors.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#403

Post by anonAndOn » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 4:55 PM UTC

It's amazing to me that PG&E is allowed to use "We don't have any records" as an excuse for negligence. That's part of the same defense they tried to pull in Hinkley, CA where they were dumping hexavalent chromium into the ground and tried to destroy any records of it happening.[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_groundwater_contaminat...

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#404

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 4:56 PM UTC

edge17 wrote: post #400

dragonwriter wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

> my point is there are individual smaller states in the US that do more prescribed burns by acreage than California

Then you should have said that.

And, to the extent you believe that's a problem, you should probably address the entity that controls most forest land in California (and directly owns and excludes from state control almost half of the total land of the state.) Their executive HQ can be contacted at:

  The White House
  1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
  Washington, DC 20500

Yeah, I know President Trump likes to say the problem is California not “raking forests”, and his cult-like followers just echo his propaganda with some light editing of wording and interjection of random tangential factoids to give it a veneer of rationality, but the bottom line is that, like most of the West and unlike the US outside of the West, California land management, and even moreso California forest management, is predominantly a federal issue, from which the state is excluded from much of due to the Supremacy Clause.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#405

Post by ljm » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

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…

Take the fire out of the picture and PG&E have total responsibility for maintaining this infrastructure and keeping it safe. They can't blame it on the geography of the area.

Put the fire back in and, yes, they still have significant responsibility. The same way that someone setting off a firework or lighting up a barbecue in the brush or holding a gender reveal party is held responsible. They don't get off easier because they're a big business and it's tough for them. Their CEO and shareholders can live with a smaller return to properly take care of their equipment.

It has nothing to do with stopping all fires, or making them responsible for reducing them. It's holding them to account for causing one.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#406

Post by DuskStar » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:12 PM UTC

_ph_ wrote: post #390

DuskStar wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And to me, the fact that the fires would happen for other reasons is the most important thing in the case . Blame should fall on the people with the power to prevent an accident from happening, and PG&E did not have that power. (They instead had the power to prevent the accident from happening in one specific way , but it still would have happened in another way)

I don't claim that blame for the fires rests on PG&E. My point was rather, that the towers were in an unacceptable state of maintenance. Any kind of accident or disaster could happen any time from towers in that state. And a disaster did happen. That others greatly contributed greatly or even mainly to the disaster taking its scale, is a question for the precise liability and punishment split.

And what I'm saying is that if every tower in the forest was in a similar state of maintenance, or had a flamethrower pointing off the side that went off every week, the number of deaths would be lower.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#407

Post by content_sesh » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:15 PM UTC

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.

Whatever the appropriate monetary penalty is, it feels like jail time for executives and management within PG&E, who are ultimately responsible for the apparent culture of negligence within PG&E, is appropriate as well.

In terms of _average_ cost vs. actual costs, according to my non-lawyer reading of the Wikipedia article on the eggshell skull rule, it doesn't matter that these particular conditions made the fire significantly more costly than average. They have to answer for the damages from the fire they caused, not to the "average" or even "foreseeable" damages from such a fire.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#408

Post by bryan0 » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:22 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.

Read the articles I posted. you can call it what you want, but "credentialed people" have been desperately calling for prescribed burns for years only to run up against local regulations. specifically: "local air boards around the state, and a lack of consistency can create problems for burn projects"

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#409

Post by LargoLasskhyfv » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:32 PM UTC

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…

I don't mean to come over as arrogant, snotty or something here, but speaking of proper engineering and maintenance in the context of high-voltage transmission lines in the USA instantly makes one burst out in laughter when comparing that to how they are built in Germany.

While we had some fuck-ups too, we have way larger pyhsical safety margins, as in more space between the wires, more space between the wires and ground, more space between wires and vegetation (which is cut back when growing into that space), while usually we don't even have weather which makes it dry like tinder.

Honestly, this all looks like toys to us. Inconceivable.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#410

Post by prennert » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:37 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.

It's the changing conditions that make it tricky and "unnatural" in the short term. Long-term, of course everything will be fine. Life survived a lot radical changes and following mass extinctions. But as far as I can tell, usually the dominant species after the event were not the same as the ones before the events.