99PI's coverage of forest fire policy and design was really provocative:<p><a href="https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-to-burn/" rel="nofollow">https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-to-burn/</a><p>1. Our entire approach to fighting forest fires may just be making them worse.<p>2. Smart and simple design decisions can save houses.<p>A house can be thirty feet from an entire forest on fire and never burn down.<p>We learned this through hardcore experiments in Canada where they built homes to test and lit forests on fire nearby.<p>One of the immediate takeaways was to change roofing materials to resist embers, but there are other options for materials and landscaping that could make homes basically impervious.<p>The problem is probabilities. Fires are common, constant. They are exceedingly rare in any one location though. So fire resistant design is no one's urgent problem, fires are always something that seems like it will happen to somebody else.
"The legislation also didn’t change how California applies “inverse condemnation,” a legal doctrine under which the state’s utilities can be held liable for any economic damages tied to their equipment, even if they follow all of the state’s safety rules. That’s left the utilities exposed to open-ended liabilities."<p>This seems like a very inefficient way of allocating risk. California is naturally fire prone and has become more so over recent years due to drought. Anyone operating an electricity distribution network is therefore operating assets that are inherently fire and explosion prone - even if operated and maintained correctly - there is no way to move that much energy over those distances without it occasionally being released in an undesirable way - in a place where the consequences of that are severe.<p>Simple logic dictates that you only expose companies and individuals to economic risks that are within management control, otherwise you just end up with an economic role that is necessary but impossible to fill.<p>Even if state standards for safety were updated to reduce the chances of a transformer explosion, circuit breaker arc, or fault in forested areas you'd never get the risk down to zero nor would you remove all the other sources of ignition.
The silliest thing about this is that anthropogenic forest fires have been the norm in CA for thousands of years. If they aren't started on purpose by a human they will eventually be started by a human accident (or the rare lightening strike). The ecosystem evolved with humans this way. The notion of liability here is absurd.<p><a href="http://www.californiachaparral.com/enativeamericans.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.californiachaparral.com/enativeamericans.html</a><p><a href="https://phys.org/news/2017-01-anthropogenic-forest-impacted-earth-climate.html" rel="nofollow">https://phys.org/news/2017-01-anthropogenic-forest-impacted-...</a>
I sure hope the liability laws are not such that PG&E gets wiped out. I don’t think it makes much sense to assign most of the causal weight to a spark when it would do nothing without all that tinder. There would have been another spark, eventually.<p>If you don’t want to sometimes worry about forest fires, don’t build your house in the woods. It isn’t that complicated.
Utilities are weird, I could easily be wrong/offbase but going after them legally always feels vaguely like cutting off your nose to spite your face. The threat of inverse condemnation just feels like short term thinking of how you interact with your utility.<p>Forget return on equity and shareholder returns, if you really hold a utility liable like that, not only would PG&E probably go away, I don't know how you'd get another utility to step in. I seriously think you'd need some giant Cal co-op, or you're going to have to charge seriously high prices to make it worth the risk, or go gridless, which sounds cool but infeasible at that kind of scale if you had to do it in a couple years.
People are discussing this event as if it were a “pole” servicing some house. The downed line that is suspected here is a high voltage transmission line serving a hydroelectric power station. It’s major infrastructure and there are only a handful of such lines in the state.
I didn't see what equipment actually might have started the fire? That would be more interesting.<p>Ultimately you've got awful forestry management practices that are really to blame for this annual mess.
The article states that there is roughly $15 billion in damages from this fire. PG&E’s assets and wildfire insurance are worth ~$5B.<p>That said, if it were proven that PG&E were directly liable for this fire, how would that play out?
The video of the article mentions that PG&G might also be responsible of the napa fires in 2016. This is crazy. Are there any liabilities for their executives in the case of such damage done because of negligibility?<p>If PG&E did not make efforts to maintain their equipment better after napa, and this is the cause of Malibu, that becomes almost 3rd degree murder, right?
If PG&E was negligent, they should be held accountable. On the other hand, if this happened despite all reasonable safety precautions, it seems like scapegoating. I generally despise the concept of limited liability as it applies to every corporation in every kind of business, but this particular case seems to be exactly the kind of situation that justifies it. Unless one prefers that this kind of infrastructure be run only by the government itself (not an unreasonable belief), some kind of liability shield is necessary. Otherwise no sane business person would take that risk. Do you want the power infrastructure run by insane people?
The fact we prevent forest fires from spreading is the reason they spread so bad. Eliminate the fuel and you wont have these fires.<p>Instead of living with nature we push nature off until it overwhelms our defenses.<p>Eventually humans will learn ?
We should think about investing in smoke/heat sensors that can broadcast an emergency signal that can be placed in the wilderness areas close to human habitation.
Just thinking through here, we need to determine the max radius of fire that can be confidently contained by the nearest fire department (taking into consideration some metrics such as time taken to reach the spot, how prone the area is for fire, wind speed averages, number/ability of the fire safety crew).
Place a pole at the edge of such radius with sensors at different height , inbuilt GPS, and ability to broadcast its status to a remote control room. The number of poles in an area can be based on the above metrics.<p>I understand that some wood fires that start naturally, actually are part of the natural cycle and is necessary. So remote areas could be spared, but still monitored to check its spread.<p>Maybe a combination of such sensors and satellite data can help catch a fire when it is still small enough to be contained.
I don't know much about the EE side of the world, but surely there is a way to design grid/transformer equipment such that the circuit can be interrupted immediately when a pole falls over or whatever.<p>Is this possible? Is it just a matter of spending the money to upgrade the infrastructure?
11/15 Wired article: 'How California needs to adapt'. <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/how-california-needs-to-adapt-to-survive-future-fires/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/story/how-california-needs-to-adapt-to...</a><p>"Last year, that conflagration came in the form of the Thomas Fire. But Montecito had been readying itself for decades.... They really focused on defensible space around homes, particularly the homes that were closest up against the wildland areas.... When the Thomas Fire hit, Montecito couldn’t rely on aircraft to drop water, but seven homes were lost—not 500."<p>Of course, a fire-related mudslide soon destroyed many homes there. So a related thought: some places should not be occupied.
<p><pre><code> The utility’s filing also may have marked the start of a
campaign to get bailed out by California’s lawmakers --
as it was after last year’s fires.
</code></pre>
Seems to me bailing out the same company twice for the same mistake would be the height of idiocy.<p>I mean, that's tantamount to saying you'll bail out the company every year forever. You've basically telling the CEO "Don't spend $1 billion of your money on inspections and preventative maintenance so your equipment stops causing fires! Instead, destroy $15 billion of value and we'll pay for it all at no cost to yourself!"<p>Of course the company would accept that if someone fool offered it to them. It's super-inefficient for that fool, but the company saves a billion dollars!
This situation is actually similar to the black Saturday bushfires in Australia - also caused by power lines. The utility eventually settled for half a billion dollars.
Meaningless if you look up the loss of life.<p>(Maybe somewhat different because every type of bushfire prevention strategy was in place / overwhelmed and I don't know what the situation is in California.)
If they were being negligent, they should absolutely have to pay a large percentage of the damages, maybe even 100%. Getting companies to be responsible for externalities is a no-brainer, even though it’s so often not enforced.
The wildfires in California are insane right now. I live in San Francisco and it's been extremely hard to breathe. All you see is folks with masks everywhere. It's just so sad to hear about all that's going down.
There have been several dozen people arrested for arson in the last couple of months just in the bay area alone. Are we certain someone didn't tamper with pg&e's equipment?
people - the last three hundred years of industrial development has been a patchwork of travesty and tragedy. Singling out "forest management" is sounding remarkably uneducated in particular, among a crowd that is notably otherwise.<p>Secondly, PG&E and many other regulated utilities, created holding companies to siphon out profits in the go-go 90s. the deregulation of California's electrical energy markets and subsequent ENRON debacle exposed the holding companies in the ensuing crisis discovery process.<p>Thirdly, PG&E is super-guilty of labor avoiding, subcontracting, penny-pinching and evasive behavior for decades. This includes tree-trimming; this includes inaccurate record keeping of the gas pipeline safety records; many other ordinary, daily management decisions we dont know about, but collectively create the situation as it is.<p>Do not cry for PG&E, or mimic PR company talking points. Thanks
i wonder whether external fire sprinklers - turn them on whenever there is a fire say in a mile or 2 radius - would decrease the chances of the house being fired up by the wind brought embers.
When your half mil house in the CA hills gets burnt down it's PG&E's fault for not trimming trees and they should pay you for it.<p>When a storm erodes the beach out from under your 3-mil beachfront house it's the town's fault for not building erosion controls and they should pay you for it.<p>When your dumpy trailer in a dumpy trailer park is tossed by a tornado you knew the risks and nobody should give you a cent.<p>See the double standard?