1. Our entire approach to fighting forest fires may just be making them worse.
2. Smart and simple design decisions can save houses.
A house can be thirty feet from an entire forest on fire and never burn down.
We learned this through hardcore experiments in Canada where they built homes to test and lit forests on fire nearby.
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.
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.
My best friend in high school lost his house to a fire in the mountains of CO. The house was made out of clays and other highly fire resistant materials, to the point it was designated the safe house for the fire crew of the area... when the four mile canyon fire swept through it was so hot it even melted all the metals like copper and steel. There was nothing left.
I'm sure there are lots of ways to build houses to resist fire more, and we should be doing that, but "basically impervious" is an overstatement.
I have no real concept of the sorts of heats involved in fires like the one described above. But even if the clay isn’t melting, it’s fun to know that ceramics aren’t magical non-melting, non-burning things—they just require unusually much, typically impractically much, heat to achieve it.
Fire resistance would be orthogonal to structural stability, I expect. If the steel beams melt, and they're what's holding up the clay, clay/structure can certainly collapse, even if you can still say nothing burned, as such.
Even in stone/brick houses, they normally still have wooden roof beams. Typically embers set things like guttering and dry leaves in guttering on fire, and that then spreads through vents in the rafters into the rest of the building.
A fire suppression water spray to keep the roof wet would probably save most brick buildings. Most fires burn out within half an hour or so, so one wouldn't even need too big a supply of water.
I'm very sorry to hear that, that's got to be a devastating experience to watch someone you know go through that.
Basically impervious was an overstatement for emphasis, you're right. I was trying to draw a stark contrast with the sometimes thoughtless status quo, but I should have been more precise.
And to be fair that crown fire study was just looking at thermal ignition, which isn't the whole picture. The strategies to prevent spread through embers are more complex and sometimes not possible in all areas -- vegetation control, standoff zones, irrigation...
Still, as I think we both agree, much more can and should be done.
> A house can be thirty feet from an entire forest on fire and never burn down.
In zero wind. The fires in Santa Rosa were driven by 60 mph (100 kph) winds. Even 30 mph winds will pick up the top 15 meters of a burning Ponderosa Pine and carry it 400 meters away and start a new fire.
After the Santa Rosa fires I saw newspaper photos of melted barbeque grills. A fire hot enough to melt cast iron is going to light or melt any roofing material I can think of.
No one is claiming you can fireproof a house; did you even look at the link?
With some simple actions you can change the odds of 100% of homes burning down to 10-50%. This isn’t made up, these are facts proven by evidence and experiment.
Your comment is like saying no one should bother building basements in tornado country because a strong F5 will kill you anyway. The vast majority of tornadoes aren’t strong F5s so taking some precautions absolutely will save lives and property.
The biggest ones are:
- fire-resistant roofing; the vast majority of homes that burn in these evens are set on fire by embers long before the fire line even gets close, which makes firefighting efforts basically pointless
- fire-resistant siding; if a fire is near this makes it much less likely that the siding will catch from brief contact or by being heated to its ignition point. If the side walls catch the house is a goner.
- keep tree tops 30-60 ft away from structures. Fires often leap from treetop to treetop, then from there to the structure.
> Your comment is like saying no one should bother building basements in tornado country because a strong F5 will kill you anyway. The vast majority of tornadoes aren’t strong F5s so taking some precautions absolutely will save lives and property.
No, my comment is like saying clearing 30 feet around your house is an absolute no-brainer, of course do it, but don't expect that alone to miraculously save you from a fire.
Saying this as someone who's mountain cabin survived the Detweiler fire, largely because of vegetation control.
>No, my comment is like saying clearing 30 feet around your house is an absolute no-brainer, of course do it
Ok, but that's not what you said. You just ignored it completely like you were disregarding it. If it was such a no-brainer everyone would have done that in California, which was clearly not the case and it's why we're having this discussion now.
It's like someone posting stats about seatbelts saving lives in response to tons of vehicle deaths where people weren't wearing seatbelts. Then you come along and point out that if you drive off a 500 ft cliff a seatbelt won't save your life and some of the deaths were caused by driving off of a cliff.
Either the implication is that the safety mechanism would not have helped, or you are offering a useless observation that it's not making them impervious.
> or you are offering a useless observation that it's not making them impervious.
Considering that the original post literally used the phrase "could make homes basically impervious", I don't consider this a useless observation. I found it quite informative.
Quoting the original poster:
> but there are other options for materials and landscaping that could make homes basically impervious
> basically impervious
That (for a layman like me) can easily be interpreted as fire proofing.
I think it's a matter of interpretation. "A house can be thirty feet from an entire forest on fire and never burn down" is not equivalent to "A house thirty feet from an entire forest on fire will never burn down."
It's a bit tricky because in truth a house may be touching trees that are one fire and "will never burn down" (in the sense that it won't that time) can also be a true statement.
I think a generous interpretation is that "A house can be thirty feet from an entire forest on fire and never burn down." is meant to mean that a house thirty feet away from the forest fire likely won't while a house right next to the forest fire likely will.
It was poorly worded, but it isn't necessarily saying what you state.
You're arguing semantics in a non-cooperative way. I had to re-read your first sentence five or six times to glean the meaningful difference. It's unfortunately put you in the camp of either trying to make a moving target argument, or dismissing your peers as children - neither of which is a positive end.
Like with anything, you have to pick what the likely scenario should be and build to it. You can build a nuclear power plant to resist 40ft high swells and still get a 50ft swell and be powerless. Obviously more protected is better, but also more expensive (which makes housing less available and affordable, etc). The recurrent nature of the problem suggests to me that the code may be too lax currently, and that the solutions are non-trivial: likely major work for existing homes (from a homeowner perspective, forest management may be able to do more).
> You're arguing semantics in a non-cooperative way.
Huh, I think that's the first time I've been accused of being non-cooperative for saying what is essentially "I think perhaps how you're interpreting that statement is not how it was meant and you're talking past each other."
All I was saying is that it appears that zzzeek interpreted the original statement as "do X and Y can't happen" when I think ambiguous wording was used and that wasn't the intent, as I didn't interpret it that way.
I'm arguing semantics because I think there is a misunderstanding of people's positions because of those semantics. I understand that it got a little long into the weeds, but there was a point.
You should read it again and understand what’s behind said. If you’re missing the grammatical structure you are probably misunderstanding a huge percentage of the language people are using around you.
The word used was “can” and it means something is possible.
Your misunderstanding is quite commmon in English these days. People say things like “men are pigs” or “chickens fly” and many will interpret that as if a broad claim was made. But “all chickens fly all day long” is a totally different sentence than “chickens fly” and “chickens can fly“.
Keep tree tops 30-60 feet away from structures is certainly good advice, but the environmental extremists are virulently opposed to any efforts to permit homeowners from being able to do that sort of tree management on their own property.
That strikes me as a misleading read on AB 425. It expands the existing exempted activities which don't require a forestry management plan, like temporary road building:
The ability of "private citizens to cut down trees on their own land" doesn't turn on AB 425. The code already has specific provisions for firebreaks, and AB 425 doesn't change them one way or another:
By 'seasoning' it. You slather it with some type of cooking oil and that protects it from turning bright orange with rust.
Cast iron is the material of choice as it is cheaper than surgery grade stainless steel, it retains the heat and it is a traditional material that people expect.
As for where you can buy yourself a grill made from cast iron, the options are many. In towns there are shops that sell such things. You can walk into such a shop, exchange money and get your own BBQ grill in genuine cast iron.
Pretty much all Weber (a very, very mainstream grill brand available the world over) grills/“grates” are cast iron. It works fine! You do typically have to replace them every three to five years, but this isn’t that big a deal, the replacement grates are stocked at most home improvement stores.
> Pretty much all Weber (a very, very mainstream grill brand available the world over) grills/“grates” are cast iron.
No, they are “plated steel” for the cooking grate, and “heavy gauge steel” for the charcoal grate; at least per the specs on their website. (Which matches every Weber I've used over several decades.)
While I believe they receive some kind of coating, Weber themselves refer frequently to them being cast iron.
From their site, “how to care for your cast iron cooking grates”. Quoting Weber’s website, “All our 2017 gas grills except for the Summit and Genesis II LX come with porcelain enameled cast iron cooking grates.”. The spec sheet on the site for virtually every gas grill lists a cast iron grate.
Oh, Weber gas grills. When you said all Weber grills, I thought of and only checked their charcoal grills, the round charcoal grill being their iconic product.
Slate and ceramic tile roofs are good options - they are not combustable and will not melt. I'm not sure they would hold up to a 15 meter log landing on them, but they really do reduce the chance of your house burning.
> A house can be thirty feet from an entire forest on fire and never burn down.
That test in Canada seems to have been done under pretty much zero wind conditions though; the California ones (as also mentioned in the article) deal with high winds as well.
These does are affecting urban areas of California, not just wilderness.
100 feet of urban California real estate costs substantially more than the house - houses are often built right up to the property line, and lots are measured in sqft, not acres.
Dense urban areas have a compensating advantage, though: it's much more economically efficient to set up a firebreak and prevent the fire from reaching 100,000 residents in a densely-packed neighborhood, than it is to set up a perimeter around the one wealthy person's home built in the middle of the forest.
The article seems to be suggest
(but doesn't explicitly state) a policy like this: "Use
public resources to provide a fire protection around the urban growth boundary of major cities, but if you're a homeowner outside that boundary, you're on your own. Design your structure to survive a fire in the surrounding wilderness. We won't suppress fires within the wilderness anymore." In other words, instead of shooting for containment, where the firefighters attempt to control the size of the fire and eventually put it out, they just let the wilderness burn periodically and protect habitation. The added benefit of this is that once the brush is cleared out, future wildfires will be less strong, since there's less fuel.
Also makes sense in economic free-market terms, where public resources are used only when they can defend many properties at much lower cost than the property owners defending them themselves, and property owners who are not situated to benefit from these efficiencies of scale are responsible for defending their own property.
Just about every street plus sidewalks is well over 30 feet. The question is whether there is shrubbery or trees at the edge of the street that provides a much shorter path between homes.
My home was built in a new division 2014, and it requires low maintenance front yards (all wood chips and plants/shrubs), and came with a young tree in the front yard and young trees planted on the other side of the sidewalk easement, so eventually it will be very easy for a fire to spread. I live in Santa Rosa.
100 feet is not enough in Santa Ana wind events, as I've seen homes half a mile from the fire line burn to the ground. I'd recommend clearing at least 3000 feet in Southern California.
The only way to do this, of course is not to live on the urban-wildland interface, but to live behind agricultural fields. Or do like Pepperdine in Malibu and water the world's largest lawn.
Think about it like an electromagnetic field, where the probability of the house getting burned drops rapidly, inversely proportional to the square of the distance. So 30 feet is the minimum, 100 feet is even better, etc.
If you read the article, the issue was embers floating the air and gathering on roofs and parts of the house that are not resistant to flames. So that's why the material has to be changed too, it's not about distance.
That's the same problem in the South East with tornadoes. They happen nearly every week (in summer) and can destroy neighborhoods. Yet we build lightweight framed houses and rely on insurance because the overall odds are low.
Though we are talking many, many orders of magnitude less damage from tornadoes in the Southeast when compared with California forrest fires. My state gets an average of 20 per year, and almost all of these hit uninhabited areas. If a tornado destroys four houses, it makes state news.
A better comparison is hurricane prone locations. After Hurricane Andrew in 1994, Florida conpletely revised its building codes to require homes to withstand a major hurricane.
It’s possible to build a home on the beach to even withstand a catastrophic hurricane, but at possibly double the construction cost.
I recall after there were bad fires in the Everglades many years ago there had been some work to build a foam that could be sprayed on a home to protect it in advance of an approaching fire. I think the person who came up with the idea was inspired by the amount of liquid diapers can hold. I wonder what came of that.
I know some people in South Carolina whose beach house (on stilts and everything) withstood Irma just fine, however it had to be demolished because the beach had eroded enough that it was basically over the ocean now, and it was infeasible for them to dump enough sand there to have it be over dry land again.
It's absolutely possible to build solid safe housing from most natural disasters, but it costs money, and often a lot of it.
"Insurance policies for extreme weather-related
losses -- especially for floods and for coastal wind damage associated with hurricanes -- are not priced to reflect the real risk ... as a result of government intervention in property insurance markets, through either rate regulation or direct government provision of subsidized insurance, private markets no longer generate price signals regarding the cost of living in severe-weather regions."
Pretty much every wildfire I remember since I moved to CA has happened in a place that hasn't burned before. I'm not sure your theory holds up. In particular, because a truly burnt-out area is VERY unlikely to burn again any time soon.
That 99PI episode was one of their best. The image of a mudslide happening because of denuded mountains was terrifying.
I’m reading antifragile right now and he’s talking about systems which improve with a certain amount of volatility and stress. It seems forests are “antifragile” on their own, and our efforts may in fact introduce fragility.
I live near the Rest and be Thankful in Scotland, we know all about land/mudslides due to deforestation :) The hillside above the road has no trees and there are regular landslides that'll close the road (which is the main road into the west of scotland) for a week at a time.
After spending millions on nets and ditches, they've lodged a plan to replant trees above the road...
Seems obvious that if you expose a system to stress, whatever survives will be stress-proof; while if you hide stress from a system, it's a disaster waiting to happen. Same story with allergy immunities and used cars.
I'm sure that's partly true, but it doesn't seem to account for the lack of alternatives to selling a used car. A car offers no utility, and yet continues to depreciate, sitting in the garage. Assuming you want or need to participate in buying/selling a car for life reasons (growing family, moving houses, or moving upmarket into just vehicles), how else do you class back any value from this asset? Other alternatives (donation, trade-in) aren't going to get you even lemon prices in return.
I don’t understand. If you sell the car, you get money which has the maximum utility, because you can trade it for other things. Donating and trading are essentially selling, so what would an alternative that provides positive utility look like?
They are alternatives to selling, but you typically receive less money than you would in a straight sale. I think I'm asking the same question as you.
> Given the fixed price at which buyers will buy, sellers will sell only when they hold "lemons" (since plemon < pavg) and they will leave the market when they hold "peaches" (since ppeach > pavg).
My point is that this is a highly idealized and theoretical model. Life doesn't work this way.
You're missing my point. Those alternatives typically provide you LESS money than selling. How are people supposedly "leaving" the market? Parking an unused car on the street?
Some new housing developments in wildland-urban interfaces are built and maintained such that it's considered safer to "shelter-in-place" than evacuate in some circumstances.
The article doesn't mention it, but controlled burns are actually a regular occurrence in the east and southeast US. I always assumed it was some decision by the Californian state government to not do so. The rest of the country is not stuck in the mindset described in the article.
Fires are necessary for ecological reasons. You can either start them on purpose and control them, or you can wait until they happen anyway and watch them get totally out of control.
Exacerbating the situation, I heard on NPR this morning that some POAs in California forbid cutting down trees on your property. Something has to change. Even if you put a complete stop to human-caused fires somehow (not possible) and stop climate change tomorrow, you will still have fires from lightning strikes, etc. You can either thin forests and underbrush (incredibly labor intensive) or you can have controlled burns.
I have not heard of extensive controlled burns in any western state. It is just too large and the forests here burn too hot and fast in terrain that is too rugged. Of course there are some controlled burns in California and other states, but the large scale burns required are not practical by any measure. California is considered to have one of the most advanced firefighting forces in the world. They inform the fire control decisions, and know the importance of controlled burns. Maybe it is just a tougher nut to crack rather than assumed incompetence?
> I have not heard of extensive controlled burns in any western state. It is just too large and the forests here burn too hot and fast
...Because of the lack of controlled burns combined with weather conditions.
California is not larger than the eastern US. We do very large controlled burns here in rugged terrain. As far as I can see, it's a lack of political will and funding, combined with the reality that it's gone so long that its much more difficult than it should be. There are a few prescribed burns done in California, they're just not anywhere near the necessary scale.
California can either bite the bullet now and dramatically increase the number and area of controlled burns, or watch as things get worse and worse. There is no alternative. I'll repeat again: fires are a natural part of the ecology, with or without human intervention. You can either do it yourself and lessen the impact, or wait for nature to do it and have regular disasters.
EDIT: Just to get a sense of scale, the southeast burns eight million acres in prescribed burns annually. The west burns about three million. California looks to be only in the tens of thousands. The Camp fire has burned approximately 138,000 acres at the last report I can find.
Vast majority of California’s forests are fossils. If you burn them they don’t grow back, you get something else. Climate change is reducing the length of the rainy season, worsening summer droughts, expanding the range of bark beetles, and moving snow lines uphill. Under these conditions our existing forests can survive but not become established.
You discuss this issue as if there is some steady-state solution that can be applied. This is not the case. The climate is in now in transition from one state to another, much warmer and drier state. Controlled burns are difficult or impossible to apply under such a transition, with the number of dead standing trees (hundreds of millions in California) and the unprecedented soil moisture levels and evaporative load.
Secondly, if that is what you believe, then the solution is to burn now, not later. You cannot save forests already damned by climate change, and the longer you wait, the worse it will be.
> Vast majority of California’s forests are fossils. If you burn them they don’t grow back, you get something else.
Then how did they get there in the first place? Human-started fires have been a normal and natural part of California's ecology for thousands of years. Waiting for the weather to get even warmer and drier will just result in more forest being destroyed, more homes being burned, more people dying, because there will be fires, no matter what you do. You can choose to limit their fuel now and save some forest, or you let natural fires have more fuel and burn even hotter and wider and lose all your forest.
The climate conditions of today are not dramatically different from those historically. There have been many, and much longer, dry periods throughout the past few thousand years. In fact, the past century has been unusually wet.
> Stine, who has spent decades studying tree stumps in Mono Lake, Tenaya Lake, the Walker River and other parts of the Sierra Nevada, said that the past century has been among the wettest of the last 7,000 years.
Fires have similarly been a natural part of the ecology for thousands of years.
What's new is not very dry conditions or fires. What's new is the California fire management over the past century or so. The biggest different climate condition isn't the weather, it's the lack of regular fires burning up fuel. Now, tons of fire-fuel has accumulated and fires burn hotter than normal. But there is no way to solve this other than by ripping off the band-aid now. If you don't, things get worse.
> What's new is not very dry conditions or fires. What's new is the California fire management over the past century or so.
Sounds like you don't accept that climate change is exacerbating these fires. As others have noted, average and historical rainfall isn't a direct indication of fire risk.
London [1] has the same annual rainfall (23") as San Francisco, but they have very different fire risks.
Timing of the rainfall and other weather events matters a lot more when it comes to particular events - and the ever later onset of rains in CA is a big factor.
Even then, the fire management practices you point out are in part a response to increasing populations near fire-prone areas. People expect fires near their homes to be suppressed. Unless we stop building homes in such areas, or build fireproof homes, that demand isn't going to go away.
Climate change is absolutely exacerbating these conditions, just as climate change in the past exacerbated these conditions. The climate is not regular in the absence of modern human activity. The timing and amount of rainfall have varied throughout history.
These dry conditions are not abnormal when looking at any longer timeframes. The severity of the fires is abnormal, but only because both humans and nature were regularly setting fires and letting them burn until they burnt out for many, many thousands of years. Only recently did mankind intervene in the natural ecology by stopping fires.
> People expect fires near their homes to be suppressed.
Then they will have to readjust their expectations. I would also say they should pay attention to the Cal Fire messaging about the necessity of fires. ( http://www.calfire.ca.gov/communications/downloads/live_w_fi... )In the rest of the country, we have prescribed fires even in and near residential areas. Clearly they must be managed more carefully now that Californians have allowed the situation to get so bad (e.g., fires started in wetter conditions which won't burn enough, followed by a second fire in drier conditions), but they are the only thing short of everyone leaving that can resolve the situation.
I'm not sure why Californians believe they are special and different. People in this thread keep citing terrain (mountainous areas are burned in the rest of the country), wind (the highest-wind states are actually those with the most controlled burns according to the wind map posted and the forestry website I linked), dryness (not out of historical norms, just recent history.)
Human-driven climate change is a factor, but what we're seeing is Californian climate returning to recent (in a relative sense) historical norms, not some kind of incipient Armageddon. We're not seeing something that's never been seen before. Again, the entirely dominant factor is the insufficient amount of prescribed burns.
Regardless of the cause, the only long-term solution is more controlled burns. The climate is going to get drier and hotter. Fires will happen. There is absolutely nothing you can do to prevent this. Even if you waved a magic wand and took fire away from mankind, fires still occur naturally. The longer you wait, the more dry fuel you accumulate and the worse the fires will be. It might hurt in the short term, some houses may indeed be destroyed in controlled burns (it happens elsewhere, too), but the alternative is more houses burned and more ecological destruction and more people dead. You cannot get around this.
I think we're basically in agreement, although I don't think the issue is about California's thinking they are different. California just has large populations in fire-prone areas.
There is a significant risk in building in these areas, exacerbated by all the aforementioned factors. This will probably be accounted for in insurance rates going forward, which will hopeful deter people from building flammable houses in wildfire zones.
Weather in the Mono basin is irrelevant to conditions in the Feather River canyon. California, it turns out, is a large state with multiple distinct climate zones. As you note, it is the length of the summer drought which is increasing. This is not even contradictory with increasing or stable annual precipitation. It just means more of the water is coming in a shorter, rainier season.
> The article doesn't mention it, but controlled burns are actually a regular occurrence in the east and southeast US. I always assumed it was some decision by the Californian state government to not do so.
Wait what? California doesn't do controlled burns?
I find this _unfathomable_. I'm from a desert state where during dry times it was illegal to light fires and we absolutely did controlled burns.
California's plan is to let everything burn down and then blame a utility (true or not is irrelevant) and try to collect $20B they definitely don't have? This is unbelievable.
California has millions of dry, dead trees owing to a bark beetle infestation and multiple, 100-degree+ heat waves. Do you know how hot that wood burns? More than a few trees together, and it burns hot enough to spontaneously combust trees up to a few dozen feet away. Without wind. California's forests are dense. They're dense enough that fires, even controlled burns, can and have generate firestorms--where the heat of the fire generates its own atmospheric wind system that feeds the fire.
Do you know what sort of embers these sorts of fires generate? The kind that fly hundreds of feet, retaining enough heat to light structures on fire when they land. Take a look at the shots of the Malibu portion of the Hill/Woolsey fire: there are structures that burned almost a quarter of a mile away from the closest flora.
So the reason that California cut back on controlled burns? Because due to the factors described above, controlled burns very quickly become massive, uncontrolled conflagrations. Controlled burns are something you can do when the trees and climate is relatively wet, since only the stuff you set on fire burns, or where flora is far enough apart and weather patterns mild enough that the fire can't spread on its own.
But you know what's really unbelievable? Someone who doesn't know diddly squat about what they're talking about who thinks they know better than the people who actually have to deal with this on a regular basis.
> So the reason that California cut back on controlled burns? Because due to the factors described above, controlled burns very quickly become massive, uncontrolled conflagrations.
Yeah what a disaster a massive, uncontrolled burn would be.
> But you know what's really unbelievable? Someone who doesn't know diddly squat about what they're talking about who thinks they know better than the people who actually have to deal with this on a regular basis.
Your righteous indignation falls pretty flat when there is plain evidence that they are doing a bad job. Here is a list of the 20 largest CA fires
https://www.fire.ca.gov/communications/downloads/fact_sheets...
19 are from the last 50 years, 16 in the last 20. How many more hundreds of thousands of acres have to burn before the approach is changed?
Let's assume everything in this comment is perfectly true. The past century has been unusually wet in California. Your choice is to burn now, or burn later when its even drier and hotter.
Meanwhile, California apparently agrees with hs, because they plan on increasing the number of prescribed burns.
And like I keep saying: these fires are not burning in forests. They are burning in suburbs, exurbs, and dense residential areas. In towns. Up steep canyons that are treacherous to hike up, let alone tote a pulaski and mattock. In many of the pictures, it's obvious that trees are damaged but survive. It's shrubs, grasses, brush, and chaparral that's burning.
I mean, yeah, we can intensively thin and manage forests to protect high-value, critical areas. We can encourage landowners to pursue defensible space treatments, and maybe save their home, if not their neighbors'. But honestly, I don't see any practicable way to prevent fires like the Camp Fire. Or the Thomas. Or Carr and Mendocino and Ferguson and County and Delta and Hirz and the other 7,579 fires that have burned in California this season. I wish I could claim otherwise.
All I can say is that in the southeast, your trees are wet, and controlled burns do not burn far past the controlled area.
In California, everything is dry enough that even a tiny ember escaping the burn area can turn a controlled burn into a massive fire. In fact, excluding the massive fires of the past 3 years, some of California's biggest blazes were controlled burns that got out of control.
Some of the comments indicate they try to burn as much as they can. The ambivalent, uncertain language is a sign the game is already lost. If you ask you car mechanic if the lugs on your tire are tight, the answer is yes; the answer is not some lugs are federally owned so we did the best we could.
This is a serious public safety issue which if left alone is guaranteed to end in widespread death and destruction.
I think it's more like if you ask your neighborhood mechanic to inspect the brake system, and he said "I inspected everything I could, but the master cylinder is leaking and sealed and only the dealer has the tools and knowledge to open it up" so you have to go to the dealer.
California shouldn't be expected to maintain forests on someone else's property.
If you live on the East Coast then you take the wind for granted. On the Pacific Coast, the winds blow fast and furious, especially as you go up in altitude. Its very hard to control a burn here on most days, especially given the water cycle here. There is vastly more fuel in October and November than earlier in the year as the last rains are about 6 months past.
Controlled burns are probably done best during a short 1-2 month window when ground cover is dry enough, but those are also typically high wind months. To have any control of a burn here you need to be lucky (low winds for a few days), it needs to be a very small prescribed area, and probably needs to be at less than peak fuel.
This all amounts to a very small window for doing a prescribed burn. Given how big many of the forests are, and how much of the state is covered with them, I don’t see how you can have much of any control over a prescribed fire started there.
Certainly not without the heroic effort it takes to put out wildfires. I don’t know how we can ask firefighters to risk their life for a prescribed burn.
The problem with that map is that the annual average obscures the wide seasonal variation, which was the main thrust of my comment. The high winds come during the dry season, then die down during the bulk of the wet season.
Yah, I'm not sure where that information is from, I've run into controlled burns frequently in the Sierra. I called the FD once in South Lake Tahoe as I hiked right up to the fire but missed the signage on the road.
Many of forests in California are National Forest land controlled by the federal government. The Californian State Government is not able to go do prescribed burns in the National Forest. A lot of your beef should be with the National Forest Service.
Also, the recent drought is really exacerbating things. A lot of the trees in the forests are dead now and are just waiting to burn. Yes, we should remove some of this dead wood and thin the forests, but this will be a huge task given the large amount of forest.
As far as POAs and local laws... I am sure some of then are overreaching on things. But, some of them also protect areas from legitimate threats. Many people would gladly cut down all the trees on their property around Lake Tahoe so they can have an unobstructed view. Pretty soon we would have no trees around the lake and the landscape would be drastically changed. Some degree of protection is warranted in places.
This article gives a sense of the actual nonsense a homeowner must endure to cut down a tree. It might sound good to some people on paper, but I can feel the frustration of following such an expensive, bureaucratic process just to cut a tree in your own land. That entire process sounds ridiculous when looking at the aftermath of one of these fires such as the Camp or Malibu fires. The environmentalists responsible for such tripe should be made to work with a fire crew for a single hour to see the consequences of their horrid, naïve and completely ignorant policies.
Here is the money paragraph:
“What does Cal-Fire consider to approve a plan?
Basically, they want to make sure that trees are removed in a way that does the least amount of harm to wildlife habitat, that diversity of plant life is maintained, shade and sun balanced for a particular environment, and watersheds and watercourses are disturbed the least amount possible.
For instance, if protected species are in the area, then either the work is not done, or it is postponed during mating and rearing stages. If trees are removed on a hillside, then potential erosion is part of what is considered, monitored and controlled. There are many factors, and they all need to be taken into consideration.”
Sorry, but Cal-Fire should be concerned about preventing fires first. There are protected species everywhere; so delaying fire prevention forestry so some salamander can do whatever it is salamanders do; that’s just ridiculous. Over 17,000 acres of “protected” stuff just burned up in Paradise, California, so perhaps tripping over a dollar to pick up a nickel doesn’t make the best sense for either the environment or people.
> If trees are removed on a hillside, then potential erosion is part of what is considered, monitored and controlled. There are many factors, and they all need to be taken into consideration.”
> Sorry, but Cal-Fire should be concerned about preventing fires first.
I'm sorry, but soil erosion is not some boogieman invented by pot-smoking hippies who live in a commune. It's a real and serious problem, and leads to landslides, wash-outs, loss of topsoil, loss of other trees (Which often act as windbreaks).
The building code for high risk fire areas should require roof top sprinkler systems. Those exist but haven't been widely installed. Keeping the roof and exterior walls wet is usually sufficient to keep a building from catching on fire unless the fire is very close and hot.
The house I rent part of has sprinklers on the roof. The owner installed them after the 91 Oakland Hills fire (we're just down the hill a little from the edge of that fire), as a newcomer to California this was somewhat frightening, but seems like a good precaution. Depending on where your water pipes are and how big your house it it doesn't seem like a huge project.
Isn't part of the problem that the water pressure (if everyone turns these one) is bad which hinders firefighters when they need to tap the water supply to fight fires. They specifically ask people to turn off sprinklers/water hoses/other water use cases before evacuating.
I recently read something (cant find the link, sorry) about having a generator and pump on-site, and then pumping water from your swimming pool to your sprinklers. I suppose not everyone has a pool, but collecting rainwater etc in an underground sump could be sufficient.
You could even imagine a closed-system that collects rain/sprinkler water from the roof guttering and drains around the property and channelling them into the pool/sump. You'd lose a lot of water to evaporation/steam in a fire I guess, but it could buy you some time.
The other alternative I guess is just dont build your house out of combustible materials. I guess some stuff might just melt in hot-enough conditions, but by that stage where ceramics and metals are just melting in ambient temperatures I think its pretty much a game-over situation regardless... but before that extreme you can probably get a lot of mileabe by building your houses out of brick (there seems to be a lot of brick foundations left in the footage I am seeing on TV)
> but before that extreme you can probably get a lot of mileabe by building your houses out of brick (there seems to be a lot of brick foundations left in the footage I am seeing on TV)
Brick construction itself is seismically unsound, which makes it a bad choice for California. You can use brick cladding to make a building more fire resistant, though, but this isn't a panacea.
Imagine a state that has only two houses, both with a pool. 3 people live in one house, 1 person lives in the other. That’s 0.5 pools per capita, but for our purposes is a sufficient number of pools - 1 pool per structure.
Silly metric though. We have the most people/homes so of course we have the most pools. Arizona kicks our ass in the number of pools per person though.
Not these current California fires. Anyone who thinks sprinklers will help hasn’t seen this hell-fire inferno up close. The Camp Fire was spreading at up to 80 acres per minute. It grew to 17,000 acres in 5 hours.
High risk fire areas should be made lower risk by proper forest management — forest management that has been ridiculously incompetent in California for a long time.
I've suddenly started hearing the assertion that forest management is incompetent. But I've not really heard any details as to what is actually wrong and what should be done. Can you please elaborate?
The other weird part about this assertion is that forests in which the Camp Fire started are federal land (Plumas National Forest), under the responsibility of the Forest Service. So while it's entirely possible that forest management in California has been incompetent, that responsibility lies on the federal government.
The general idea is that there can and should be more done.
Lots of open space that builds up vegetation and then dries out, turning into perfect fuel for a fire. Cutting these shrubs, creating firebreaks, and doing controlled burns would at least create much more manageable zones if a wildfire does start.
Please be specific. What exactly can and should be done? Clearing brush is labor intensive and expensive. Who will pay for it? Controlled burns are difficult to manage in many parts of the state; there are often no fire breaks so a slight shift in the wind can quickly turn controlled into uncontrolled.
That is specific: create firebreaks and remove brush. That alone would drastically limit fire spread and damage. Controlled burns are hard but certainly not impossible, and can be done in colder seasons as weather and wind are predictable.
Taxpayers are already paying for it, and the state has plenty of labor. The prison system alone runs many firecrews that can engage in this work. Compared to fighting fires and rebuilding damage, the maintenance cost is trivial.
If an individual house can fireproof itself, than it should fall out of insurance rather easily -- if you want to save $1000/yr or something on home insurance, build to the insurance code, or declare that you are happy paying a higher insurance rate.
Great episode. I talked to a friend that is an environmental scientist/forester about it. She is doing more and more fire risk surveys for homeowners. She said their portrayal of the situation was very accurate.
Another relevant podcast episode is this one from planet money:
>>A house can be thirty feet from an entire forest on fire and never burn down. We learned this through hardcore experiments in Canada where they built homes to test and lit forests on fire nearby.
Fires in CA apparently went as high as 300 feet (~100m) so no, that would not have helped. Heat alone, with zero wind would probably melt everything with xx meters. If they want to build, don't build in forests or clean out a zone and build a 50-100m buffer. If it was not burned today, it will be burned tomorrow.
Air is a ridiculously bad thermal conductor - it's thermal conductivity is 0.024 W/mK, so to deliver the same heat flux as a 100W light bulb through a meter of still air would require a temperature difference of about 4000 K. Most heat transfer through air occurs through convection (wind). Even then, if you can keep a 5 foot buffer zone of still air between combustible material and the raging inferno, you're fine. This is how you see pictures of scientists standing 5 feet away from a moving lava flow.
As the article states, though, it really is all about the embers. If you keep burning material from landing on other combustible material, fire is not going to start. That's why it suggests using non-combustible materials for roofing, avoiding areas where embers can catch, and keeping treetops away from structures.
While you are right that conduction is not really a problem, and right that embers are really important, it's worth mentioning that radiation from a fire can also be a significant source of ignition. And a large "flame front" can ignite structures from surprisingly large distances!
I haven't read whole article yet, but here's an abstract:
Residential losses associated with wildland fires have become a serious international fire protection problem. The radiant heat flux from burning vegetation adjacent to a structure is a principal ignition factor. A thermal radiation and ignition model estimated structure ignition potential using designated flame characteristics (inferred from various types and densities of vegetation) and flame- to-structure distances. Model results indicate that ignitions from flame radiation are unlikely to occur from burning vegetation beyond 40 meters of a structure. Thinning vegetation within 40 meters has a significant ignition mitigation effect.
width or not means that there's a LOT of material to be burned and to collapse into the next lot. I've burned wheat fields after 90% of straw was removed and I can tell you that in certain days it rises to 10 feet and you cannot stay close to it, it's unbearable. Not necessarily flames but heat, that barely visible thing. A week later you see trees 20 feet away with burned leaves. The other thing you learn when you clean canals and lots is that fire is unpredictable. Very.
Now imagine real forests with underbrush and 150 feet tall trees.
I didn't notice anyone mention shipping container homes.
If built with fireproofing in mind (ie the builder refrains from adding any flammable materials to the outside walls), I'd imagine they'd be fairly impervious by default.
Granted, they're not very pretty 'by default' (although they can be made so and still remain flame-proof) but as far as practicality/value/safety goes, that is what I would do if I was buying/building a home in a place like CA.
I'm not sure what "fairly impervious" means but this article looks interesting:
“We know from the experience of the 2009 Victorian bushfires that some people did perish in what they thought were bushfire shelters that they’d built themselves. Whether it was secondary to a wine cellar or it was some sort of building container, shipping container, they died. And it wasn’t necessarily they died because of fire; they suffocated. The oxygen was extracted out of the bunker because it wasn’t air-tight or the heat essentially killed them.”
Right, I should have been more specific, you definitely wouldn't want to stay inside if there is a fire outside in hopes that it will insulate you, the containers are definitely not air tight.
What I meant is that the interior of the house would have been protected from burning up, so any inanimate things inside would have been safe.
I'm working in an Australian research project (for the Bushfires Crown Research Center) in which we're modeling risk, from bushfires but also earthquakes and flooding, using (amongst others) upgrading BAL levels as an intervention option. It's incredible how little is known about bushfire modeling at scales that are relevant for policy making, our work is met with a a lot of interest at e.g. firefighter's conferences.
The crux of the issue is though (from a policy perspective) that defending against low recurrance interval events is most cost effectively done by restrictive zoning, which is (politically) a very hard sell. Observed preference is that people actually prefer band aids over real solutions. It's a hard problem.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
I don't necessarily agree with your 'simple logic' - there's plenty of stuff that can be done (but not perhaps outright regulated) that can reduce the incidence of fires around electrical equipment. (i.e. maintaining clearances around transmission stations, etc.) That involves probably more cost that the /free market/ would enjoy bearing. This measure can be framed as an attempt to force the externality (i.e. the damages caused by fires) onto the cause - Why shouldn't individual power consumers of California bear additional cost to prevent/reduce the incidence of fires? Your position is one of deliberate helplessness, and entirely assumes that companies should only toe the regulatory line and go no further.
It's a regulated utility so the free market doesn't really come into it, fundamentally regulated rates are set by CPUC.
These rates need to go up to allow more a more aggressive vegetation control schedule. Sure, I agree with that, and I agree that individual power consumers should pay for that. However the way I think they should pay is precisely through that rate mechanism.
What I do not think is efficient is putting the entire consequential damages of a fire caused by an electrical fault on the utility. That is only an effective mechanism to the extent that the fire damage is preventable by them. While they can reduce the chance of this happening through stepping up vegetation clearance and they probably should, it is not possible to reduce it to zero and given the size of the network there may well be fires every year even in the best possible case.
To say in the context of climate change, forestry policy, the location of houses in areas that face these fire risks, and the construction of those houses of flammable materials that PG&E "caused" this fire and the previous ones and should therefore bear the damages seems strange to me.
The size of the network also increases the number of their paying consumers, so I don't think that's a good excuse for them. Two Californias side by side would have half the mean time between fires, but also twice the budget to prevent them better.
They can go higher...and they will. The state can always issue bonds, so creditors always get paid. CA isn't about to default for a few tens of billions.
The biggest problem is zoning. OK, PGE might caused this, but odds are that within a decade it would have burned anyway. A camp fire, a faulty car exhaust on late August, fire works and so on. ZONING is the real issue now. You know that the area is prone to fires and people build houses in the mountains, surrounded by 100 feet trees?
> I don't necessarily agree with your 'simple logic' - there's plenty of stuff that can be done (but not perhaps outright regulated) that can reduce the incidence of fires around electrical equipment.
Your objection to the grandparent's "simple logic" seems right to me.
Inverse condemnation could motivate utilities to seek solutions that have longer-term profitability but require higher capital investment, something that would be difficult to legislate.
For example, PG&E could choose to deliver electricity through underground equipment which would cost more than pole-and-wire networks but might reduce forest fire risk. Legislating such a requirement even for strictly regulated utilities might be more complicated than inverse condemnation.
On its face, inverse condemnation does seem to punish utilities even if they are technically in compliance. Perhaps inverse condemnation could exert market influence in ways that are subtler and less technologically constraining than explicit regulation.
Yes, but it's quite probable that (as Mvandenbergh claims) there is no way to make the equipment 100% safe. It occasionally fails. Humans have a response time. People make mistakes. Homeowners shriek if you cut their electricity off preventively.
PG&E has 81k miles of overhead power lines and 26k miles of underground distribution lines.
How can you operate a system where one screwup -- one decaying tree too close to a line, or one underground construction mistake -- anywhere in 100k miles of power lines can create a $15B bill?
PG&E is now cutting off power preventively and homeowners should complain about it. Making everyone buy a generator for their house is not very cost effective and symptom of system collapse, but if they are going to get a $15B bill because of poor forest/land management by other entities, that's what they will need to do.
Maybe this situation will progress like the toxic waste disposal business. Break down PG&E into small utility companies so that when the $15B bill comes due the $100 million company just disappears and someone else picks up the tab.
With new technology? I see no inherent reason that a downed power line needs to cause several giant arcs. I don’t know exactly how big an arc is needed to start a fire, but ISTM it should be possible to make line-to-ground faults only arc a tiny bit and line-to-line faults make much smaller arcs.
CA has a big head start here over the rest of the country: in CA, utilities cannot have current-carrying wires that are grounded at multiple points. That practice is widespread elsewhere and is rather dangerous for several reasons. And I think it would interfere with several potential technologies to reduce arcs.
(I don’t really know, but I assume CA’s rule is related to the dairy industry. Utility-induced ground current turns out to be hazardous to cows being milked with metallic equipment.)
Insurance (expensive and a pain as they'll be checking on you but...)
Honestly, if you cause economic harm, the minimum is that you should pay for it. People lost everything in these fires and insurance companies will pay but then sue the other person /entity responsible.
PG&E is a joke.They have done next to nothing to mitigate risks in extremely high risk areas for decades. Of course you can't get to zero risk, but it is right to push heavy responsibility on them until they up there game to remotely modern standards. If their corporate culture can't handle it, then they should be absorbed into one that can.
You make good points, but if I read that correctly California also limits how much they are allowed to charge customers. I'm all for them bearing the risks and letting the free market pass that cost on to customers, but that's not the system that's in play.
Also from the article: PG&E will likely use a bankruptcy threat again as a way to get legislative aid, Gimme Credit’s Levenson said.
Please don't let them do that. Have them actually go bankrupt and deal with the fallout from that.
> You make good points, but if I read that correctly California also limits how much they are allowed to charge customers
All (most?) states do this, it's the entire role of the public utilities commission to review tariffs proposals by utility companies to ensure they aren't price gouging. This is the tradeoff for having a state-granted monopoly over a region.
CPUC isn't there just to prevent price gouging. They've already decided a guaranteed return on equity / return on rate base. If the legislators decided tomorrow the lines must be buried, and the CPUC allowed the rate hike necessary to do so, PG&E would happily comply.
> The PG&E and other investor owned utilities that are essentially granted monopoly status in California are guaranteed a negotiated fair rate of return on equity (ROE). PG&E's ROE rate was set at 10.4% and a return on rate base (ROR) was set at 8.06% by the CPUC in December 2012.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Gas_and_Electric_Compa...
Australian here, our fire danger charts start at 'high' and now go past 'extreme' to 'catastrophic'. (https://goo.gl/maps/FqEpv2MTUnB2 not that you can read the text but consider the fact that red wasn't bad enough and we had to go to stripey for the last segment.)
I think that in some environments, fire hazard needs to become a publicly managed risk rather than an externalized one where the liability is pushed onto whoever fails first. Our last big bushfire where I live was started by some silly bastard using an angle grinder near dry grass. The one before that was pinned on our local power utility for a sparking pole-top transformer (iirc).
Our environmental management agency (whose name changes on a regular basis) conducts regular burn-offs to keep overburden down but even so, it feels like we're leaving munitions lying around. In a country where even the wildlife wants to start fires (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3439042/Birds-prey-...) we need a systematic, coordinated approach.
If I understand this system correctly, this means that utilities will need insurance of some sort, and that therefore every home and business in California will pay higher utility rates to cover that extra cost. Indeed it seems a bit of a roundabout way to manage things - I guess the major political advantage is that it is a "hidden" tax?
(as opposed to just mandating a certain level of safety and then having the government cover costs of accidents if these levels were respected)
> Anyone operating an electricity distribution network is therefore operating assets that are inherently fire and explosion prone
So, engaging in an activity with high risk of causing damages that cannot be prevented with reasonable care—a long-established basis for imposing strict liability.
> 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.
No, economic roles which are necessary but impossible to fill by private operators, especially natural monopolies, are what government is for.
>No, economic roles which are necessary but impossible to fill by private operators, especially natural monopolies, are what government is for.
So there are multiple ways of allocating risk here:
One possibility is to have the entire thing run by the state, that's certainly not uncommon for natural monopolies. The whole risk then sits with the state.
Another is to set tighter technical standards and accompanying higher rates for the regulated utilities and to restrict liability to a certain cap - enough to push investors without making the company unfinanceable - and have the state take the liability for the excess. That insulates the state from minor accidents but leaves it with the catastrophic risk. That's how nuclear regulation works. Of course the criticism of that has always been that socialises the risk while privatising the profit which is a fair criticism.
A third approach is to fine the company per pre-cursor event at a significant level. For instance $100m per fire caused by their assets that spreads beyond their boundary. That would give them a strong incentive to reduce events within their control without holding them responsible for the overall dryness of the state of California which they cannot control.
Your entire line of reasoning is based on the assumption that risk of fire is unavoidable and such we don't want to exert pressure on them to reduce that risk any further than regulation requires.
I disagree.
Government should regulate the minimum required to make society function. If citizens decide they don't want to rebuild their burned down homes every once in while, then this might include some minium safety requirements utilities have to satisfy or be criminals. This has little to do with pricing risk.
Beyond that, we want to find the best cost/benefit trade-offs. And finding those best trade-offs is what we use competing private companies for in the first place. That's the reason the gov hands the privilege to run the local utility to whatever company makes the best offer running it. Only in return do we allow them to keep additional profits competitors couldn't match. Ideally, this should include all externalities, like this preventive measures vs insurance cost trade-off.
I understand the price has to payed by citizens anyway. Either directly to the utility, or by tax funded subsidy, if they want to cap prices. Either is fine. But if we use profit generating companies to optimize cost, then it just makes no sense to not have them optimize on a significant chunk of cost society will suffer.
>Your entire line of reasoning is based on the assumption that risk of fire is unavoidable and such we don't want to exert pressure on them to reduce that risk any further than regulation requires.
Not quite. I think some risk of fire is unavoidable but I'm not saying they should do only what the regulatory minimum is and no more.
If we assume that there is a relationship between the amount of "effort" (whether that is money, management insight, or whatever) they put in and the fire risk then we want them to be incentivised through most of the range of that function. If they are good at preventing fires, investors and management should benefit, if they are bad then they should pay penalties.
The point I'm making if that single events can cause 10s of billions of dollars of damage, and if the trigger for that event is something which can be reduced but not eliminated, then the incentive structure ends up being much more like a lottery ticket than a smooth relationship that rewards diligent management.
If they were instead fined a substantial amount (say $100m) every time one of their assets caused any kind of fire in a risky area without being liable for all the damages (which is not within their control) then I think that would drive a much more effective set of incentives.
It's fundamentally a contrast between a light-touch regulatory mechanism with uncapped tort liability + insurers requiring certain behaviour and a heavier regulatory incentive where a regulator requires that behaviour but with the liability of the consequences held elsewhere.
To be fair, in many cases the US uses the former and it may just be my European utility regulation perspective that makes me think it is odd since we typically use mechanisms of the second sort. My intuition says that when the cost of the consequences has a power-law type distribution (most fires cost very little but a few cost billions), it is more efficient to use the latter model rather than rely on insurance models but that's admittedly not based on any detailed analysis.
One issue that's often overlooked is that PG&E has severe issues in their safety record. Last year their equipment sparked 16 wildfires, 11 of which may have been related to negligent maintenance. https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/PG-E-to-pay-2-5.... In 2010, they blew up 8 people and an entire neighborhood from improperly maintained gas pipes. https://abc7news.com/news/pg-e-receives-maximum-sentence-for.... I'm ok with open-ended liability for things like this. These are risks that are managed by utilities across the country and around the globe, in a responsible way.
I'm generally OK with open-ended liability, even against people who were following the rules, to a T. (And especially against people who were not - see [1])
With wildfires, though, I'm not so sure. These forests are giant powderkegs, and that's no fault of PG&E.
They will burn, sooner, or later. It might be from power utility equipment, it might be from a van's hot exhaust, it might be from a lightning strike.
Blaming the last person who touched it seems... Unfair, in many ways.
It's a matter of cost. You could probably make the equipment extremely safe, for example by installing an appropriate amount of fire suppression systems along the distribution network. By putting the risk on the utilities it's up to them to calculate how much prevention makes sense.
That will substantially increase the cost of power lines. Is PG&E allowed to decide that running expensive lines through rough, fire-prone terrain isn't worth the cost, and
to simply stop distributing power to cities like Paradise?
This is indeed simple logic. So simple that it probably fails quickly if you think about it. Many things can be done to prevent this, underground cables are one solution.
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.
That’s like saying death is natural and would occur any way, so there shouldn’t be liability if one human causes another human’s death.
Sure forest fires may have occurred anyway but if someone started it either intentionally or negligently, well they should be liable for at least some of the damages.
The difficulty people have in understanding that these fires are inevitable is why they won't stop anytime soon. People will die because of our collective inability to accept the ecology of the region.
It's more like there's a crowded place with a gun pointed at the middle of the crowd. Every 30m the gun is cocked. 1-10m after that based on a random timer, it fires.
If someone trips and accidentally pulls the trigger after 32m in are they liable? Maybe, but only in the smallest way. The actual problem is the gun or the people walking in front of it.
It's wrong to use the word "may" for these fires. These areas have evolved to burn and will do so unless we shrink wrap each plant.
Humans put the gun there, we started burning which gave rise to an ecosystem that thrived on burning and encouraged more. Then, we settled that area en masse.
Whether or not a fire is inevitable has nothing to do with liability for starting a fire.
If a poorly maintained utility truck didn’t start the fire...maybe eventually there would have been controlled burns/fires that ultimately prevented the damages that resulted from this fire. Or maybe, as you say the forest inevitably catches on fire from a natural act (act of god - a legal term of art) and forest fire burns in a less populated area and no damage is caused to people/homes...or maybe lightning starts the same fire in the same location and causes the same damages, well even then insurance exists to cover that, but otherwise there wouldn’t be liability the same as someone negligently/intentionally setting the fire.
Fires can legally be acts of god, same as the law might treat a hurricane or tornado...but unlike the later humans can’t (at least not yet) cause them intentionally or negligently, obviously fires are different as they canso liability (criminal and/or civil) is appropriate for fires started intentionally or negligently.
What if that person trips because they left all kinds of crap on the floor where they needed to walk?
If the "accident" could have been averted by making a reasonable effort to maintain equipment and the surrounding area, then it seems like there should be some liability. Whether that is the case, I don't know.
Maybe. Depends on the facts (what you provided are not exactly facts, just a fact) and the claim for liability.
Questions/issues include:
1. Did you build the wall? Were you negligent in building the wall? Did you breach some professional/industry standard?
2. Did you intend to knock the wall down? Were you negligent in knocking the wall down? Did you know or should you have known if you lean against the wall it will fall?
There are an infinite number of facts one could make up that might change the claim and outcome of liability (also note This is generally about civil liability, but it could possibly extend to criminal liability when talking about death).
There is a pretty famous liability case all Law school students come across early in their torts class, as I recall a driver’s tire blew and he lost control of the vehicle and killed someone. Are the liable? Well come to find out that yes, all drivers have a duty to other drivers to make sure their vehicle is safe for the road and in this case a “reasonable person” (another legal term of art) would have known it was not safe to drive on bald tires and the driver was negligent not maintaining their vehicle safety which was the proximate cause of the death.
Given it's a place where forest fires happen there should be liability for the town planners who decided to put settlements in the middle of what would inevitably one day become a firestorm, or allow existing settlements to grow.
If you designed a building in SF, you'd be expected to make it resistant to earthquakes. When it's known that a type of natural disaster is prevalent where you're building, the liability is with those that allow inappropriate building in those places.
Heh? You can absolutely decide how your house is going to be built and/or refuse to live in a house not built to your standards. Moreover, they certainly have the power to live elsewhere.
Maybe in a magical world where everybody has a great job and plenty of money.
In the real world if an unsafe house exists there will always be someone who is desperate enough to live in it. The only way to stop it is to ban the house, not to rely on market forces.
That's why we have building regulations.
I mean this is obvious really. Suppose there's a house that is cheap and huge and in an amazing location but its wiring isn't up to code and the stairs are steeper than building regs allow. Do you really think nobody would rent it?
Right now I’m talking about property damage, not safety. I would absolutely say that a homeowner who knowingly takes the risk to buy a house with shoddy wiring should bear the risk of that choice (as opposed to the state).
Completely agree. 'Climate change' is just something thrown around now for people and their political units to abdicate responsibility for their own actions. 'Climate change' didn't force people to build housing in California forests and right on Florida beaches, local land-use, urban planning and transportation decisions did.
You drastically underestimate the rapidity of catastrophe as an evolutionary forcing function. Many or most of the trees in these areas are now not merely tolerant to, but dependent on (apparently anthropogenic) fire in order to reproduce.
The limiting factor contributing to the total amount of fire is the growth of trees. Naturally it'll happen due to lightning. If that's less often than human triggers, the fires will be bigger.
That's actually not necessarily the case. By creating more fires evolutionary pressure favored plants that were designed to burn, grow fast, and leave competitive seeds.
BTW much of what burns in CA is not large trees but chapparal.
Please read the linked articles in my parent comment.
They are natural, because humans are natural. California's vegetation has evolved to burn and quickly regrow and easily burn again due to anthropogenic fire for thousands of years.
If it were not for human involvement CA might have more fire resistant species.
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.
If you don’t want to sometimes worry about forest fires, don’t build your house in the woods. It isn’t that complicated.
Equipment decades old coupled with IT systems equally antiquated- this is a core problem for all utilities not just PG&E (I would know, I work for one). Unfortunately, I think we can expect more utility faults as well as severe weather that will continue to cause damage to people and homes. Utilities do not invest in IT unless they are incentivized to do so through rate recovery. This has plagued them to fall drastically behind in IT capability and hiring talent, as well as outsourced a majority of their operations (ie. Siemens, ABB, IBM, etc not only provide the solution but are hired to run the project management and strategy). It sucks companies so vital to reliable electricity see IT investment as a balance sheet stop sign but it will not change unless regulators force their hand...
> If you don’t want to sometimes worry about forest fires, don’t build your house in the woods. It isn’t that complicated.
Bushfires in Australia have previously covered more than 10 million acres. Recently people in greek suburbs were literally driven into the sea. It is pretty complicated.
Exceptions to the general rule that fires mostly affect those who live in the woods. Does not affect my assertion that living away from the woods dramatically decreases your risk/worry of being involved in or affected by forest fires.
The SoCal fires this year are not in the woods, so it happens both in the woods (NorCal) and not in the woods (SoCal), and people die and communities are razed both in the woods and not in the woods.
Sure. If there was gross negligence, some liability would be reasonable. Probably not 100% of damages, but some. That’s not what we are talking about though. I think under current law they could be liable even if they took all due care.
PG&E bills literally include a line item for maintenance, beyond the basic costs. PG&E has repeatedly issued bonuses and comp packages funded by cash they received from that line item while not performing maintenance of their network.
This is exactly what happened last year (line that they weren't maintaining caused that fire), and when they blew up san bruno (when a gas line that had even been stated to need maintenance exploded and killed people).
If you can make a profit while doing all the required work, then fair play to you, but if you're turning a "profit" without performing all the maintenance your network requires, and then getting tax payer support whenever that goes wrong you are not running at a profit. You're a tax payer subsidized siphon, taking money from tax payers to fund bonuses and investors. If you can't run a profit without tax payer backup, you aren't profitable.
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.
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.
> 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.
No. The short term thinking is saying "here, private corporation, fell free to turn a profit by not maintaining your assets in the knowledge that you will be bailed out when you burn down a city". The long term effect of this is that tax payers do the following:
* Pay the "profitable" corporation to receive what ever utility it is providing.
* Pay vastly more than it would have cost to simply maintain the utility when recovering from whatever disaster is caused by the utility not maintaining their system.
In the absence of liability for failure to maintain their network, a utility has (according to modern corporate policy) a /duty/ to not maintain their network, so they can maximize the money they give to their shareholders.
> 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.
You mean like an actual public entity? As has been the case in most countries for a long long time?
> or you're going to have to charge seriously high prices to make it worth the risk
No. If a company needs liability insurance at a feasible price they'd need to actively work to mitigate risk - private insurance would be a good hammer for that as failing to maintain your lines and equipment would increase the costs of your insurance. The other problem with this is it assumes that the cost of "seriously high prices", is higher than the cost for tax payers when they are having to pay to deal with whatever disasters and recovery costs directly.
I guarantee you that JJ's restuarant in this example is still using MGE for their gas. They have no other choice here. Even though it killed one of their employees through negligence.
PG&E would likely just go threw bankruptcy again like it did in 2001. Then, it would come back and operate again. The primary loses would be the PG&E shareholders not necessarily all the PG&e rate payers.
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.
>Ultimately you've got awful forestry management practices that are really to blame for this annual mess.
Agreed, you have to assume forest fires will happen in California eventually (since they have for thousands of years). It's unreasonable to expect there never to be some kind of spark, whether it's an act of god or caused by one of the 40 million humans living in California.
> firms allege in the suit that "PG&E was negligent in failing to maintain its infrastructure and properly inspect and manage its power transmission lines."
Even if they go into bankruptcy (Chapter 11, say) they are legally allowed to recoup the costs of this as part of being a regulated utility, so I would expect higher utility rates to customers as a start for the next few years in order to either pay for the liability insurance or (less likely) to bring their infrastructure to a court-arguable higher standard so as to avoid accusations of liability in the future.
That said, as a private citizen I don't see how a person starting a fire accidentally (not sure how you prove malice if a transformer fails?) could be held liable for all the property damage further downstream. That's what private insurance is for.
Articles on Bloomberg about this already on who pays if they are found liable for huge amounts of damages, ratepayers, shareholders, taxpayers or bondholders. Likely to be a combination of all four in some amount, if the worse comes to happen.
Most likely the shareholders will be wiped out ( equity collapse ) and bondholders are going to cut their losses and simply walk away. It will be rate payers ( customers ) and taxpayers ( both state and federal ) who will be footing the bill. But that's the worst case scenario which I don't think is likely.
Note also: PG&E is already being sued for allegedly causing last fall's devastating fires in northern California. That plus damages for this year's fires is very likely to force them into bankruptcy.
Hence a plunging stock price as everyone rushes to get out while they still can.
In general, does the state operate more or less efficiently than the market? More specifically...
What is the most efficient state run operation? What is the least efficient state run operation?
What is the most efficient market driven operation? What is the least efficient market driven operation?
My sense is that in general a market driven operation will be run more efficiently and practically than a state run operation. There may be particular instances of efficient state run operations that exist in the United States but there are always particular instances of efficient market driven operations too. Taken as a whole, we should skew towards market driven solutions.
I don't think that framing of the issue is very useful on its own. Public and private entities both participate in the market, and the question of which entities are most efficient depends on which definition of efficiency one deems most relevant (i.e. which inputs and outputs one chooses to measure, and by which methods).
Also, people often attribute exclusively to government a class of dysfunctions or inefficiencies that have virtually nothing to do with an organization's ownership structure, but have a great deal to do with management structures typical of large organizations (e.g. wasteful spending due to "use it or lose it" budgets). With respect to these problems, I would be very surprised if substituting public vs. private does anything other than change minor details of how they manifest.
"market" does not mean "private". "market" means "competitive, instead of monopoly". They are orthogonal. You can have competing governments, and you can have private monopolies.
Utilities are natural monopolies.
Not exactly the best fit for a market solution, especially when, as in this case, they are negative externalities borne by the public that the company is trying to avoid paying for.
The company will pay for nothing. Its a powerco not a mint. Their only significant revenue stream is electric bills (pole rental for telco fiber optics, pole rental for cable TV cables, all small amounts of money)
What we have here is a decision between one group of accountants getting electricity users to pay, vs a different group of accountants getting taxpayers to pay. The fraction of the population that are net positive taxpayers is much smaller than the fraction of the population that uses electricity, so in a democracy it would be surprising NOT to see the people deciding the few people who are net positive taxpayers will get the bill. The large chunk of the population that pay electric bills while being net negative taxpayers are not going to volunteer to pay more.
A counterpoint might be that binding private enterprise by strict liability rules might coerce it to be extra cautious not to cut corners that lead to fires -- as opposed to a state owned company which might have less to fear from lax practices.
Although, it's debatable how avoidable starting fires is in the bone-dry tinderbox of 21st-century California, even if you stick closely to best practices.
What you describe is exactly what PG&E is today. Those strict liability rules did not prevent them from cutting corners. They estimate damages at 15B and their insurance and assets are worth $5B. So do the math.... taxpayers will have to pay for rebuilding and if PG&E survives will they pass costs on to rate payers (aka the same people whose houses burnt down) or will they tax PG&E more or ?. Maybe PG&E will become insurance company owned since they will owe the insurers tons of money since they can't pay out for liability.
> That said, if it were proven that PG&E were directly liable for this fire, how would that play out?
As it always plays out: regular people will only sue via class action lawsuit, meaning there will be a settlement that is a fraction of the damage. The lawsuit with the state as plaintiff will drag on until either a settlement or the statute of limitation is reached.
> As it always plays out: regular people will only sue via class action lawsuit, meaning there will be a settlement that is a fraction of the damage.
Businesses and individuals (and public agencies like cities, counties, and special districts) with losses, especially of structures, will in many cases be insured; direct action lawsuits, or the threat thereof, to force a substantially full settlement, to recover from liable parties are a big part of what insurance companies do, and the nature of insurance companies is that each will have much larger losses than any individual, and much more motivation to aggressively pursue them; there may still be settlements that are less than would be recovered in a final judgement (to the extent that time value of money and risk and reduced litigation costs make that a winning proposition), but nowhere near as small a fraction as is typical in a class action.
> The lawsuit with the state as plaintiff will drag on until either a settlement or the statute of limitation is reached.
That's not how statutes of limitations work. They run from the event giving rise to the cause of action to the moment the action is filed; once the case is filed within the statute of limitations, how long it runs is immaterial.
That's only true in some cases. In the recent Tesla occupational-safety case, the statute of limitations ran from time of the incident until time of resolution, so stalling did cancel the government intervention.
> the recent Tesla occupational-safety case, the statute of limitations ran from time of the incident until time of resolution, so stalling did cancel the government intervention.
The one with Tesla I am familiar with ran to filing action. The investigation found previously-unknown potential violations which were too far in the past for CalOSHA to initiate legal action regarding them.
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?
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?
If it were run by the government, how would the government be held liable?
We can’t ‘fine’ the government. All we have are brief elections. So the question becomes - are elections a better incentive for forest safely than financial liability is for a power company?
> If it were run by the government, how would the government be held liable?
At the ballot box. You're correct that they can't be held financially liable even to the extent that corporations currently are. That's why I wasn't personally suggesting that the power grid should be nationalized. I'm just saying that "make PG&E pay for everything without limit" leaves no other option, so that's the debate people would need to have.
I know that's something the think-they're-cool kids like to say, but how is it even relevant? In a tort context, it doesn't matter where the money comes from or whose money it is in abstract, and BTW it could just be made up out of thin air instead of being taken via taxes so even that part isn't accurate. All that matters is whether the plaintiff can be forced to pay. If it's the government then the answer is no. If it's a private party who doesn't have the money the answer is still no. The outcome doesn't change.
If a plaintiff who is providing an essential service is driven into bankruptcy then the government will either have to provide operating funds or take over entirely, and we're back to how they can be held accountable. "Their" money vs. "someone else's" money never comes into it. No matter whose money it is, nobody can force the government to do anything it reserves the right not to. As the entity controlling the courts and the enforcement of courts' decisions, they can simply nullify any decision ... until they're held accountable at the ballot box.
The idea that unlimited liability somehow creates accountability is absurd. All it would do is put more things in the hands of government.
> The idea that unlimited liability somehow creates accountability is absurd
Of course, and I dont agree with your intepretation that the courts can nullify requests on the state: the state often pays a lot of damages and compensations, it just does it by taxing third parties.
It's an important detail: if if PGE threatens bankrupcy and for example, endangers payouts to small counties and individuals that lost their homes, you could think that the state should bail out PG&E to help those people. After-all the bailout is free. Or you should think that the state invents a program to raise taxes to alleviate the condition of the victims, and PG&E is not even mentioned.
> the state often pays a lot of damages and compensations
Even more often it denies suit. It's called sovereign immunity, and at the US federal level it must be explicitly waived before a suit can even start. There are many other ways that governments at all levels protect themselves from the liability a private party would have for doing the same things. An occasional exception doesn't change the fact that they have and use the ability.
> you could think that the state should bail out PG&E
Not "should" so much as "will". I know it's not free, but it's going to happen anyway in the case of essential services. That's the real point. You can't sue PG&E into oblivion. You can just back-door nationalize it via lawsuits. Is that what you think should happen? I'm really not sure what you're trying to get at here, other than repeating a "gubmint is evil" trope that has no bearing on the situation at hand.
How is PG&E going to control housing growth into forested areas and policies of the US Forest service, among other factors that cause these fires to do so much damage? They can't, so if they don't get some legal relief on how much damage they are liable for, they may just have to abandon those areas pron to fire (ie., much of the state).
This sort of thing happens with power lines in high winds and drought conditions, although I am not familiar with the particulars of the recent CA fire.
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.
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.
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.
Is this possible? Is it just a matter of spending the money to upgrade the infrastructure?
To use EE terms and try something like CS terms, because the energy travels at the same speed as our fastest communications systems (actually, faster...) coordination is very tricky. In practice the system is entirely "pull based" and whatever energy you ask for we'll try to send and the only control system dampening is via losses (oscillations just turn into heat...). So if you were pulling 1000 KW on a line dampened to send no more than 2000 KW and suddenly you pull 1001 KW there's no communications technology fast enough for us to know if a fire is starting or merely my toaster is making breakfast.
The problem with some kind of packetized transfer of energy between storage batteries is not only is any reasonable packet far more than enough energy to start a forest fire, even the mere capacitance of a long power line, even if given infinite fast commo and protocols, is still way more than enough energy to start a forest fire.
There is no technological way to push energy thru a tinderbox without having occasional failures aka forest fires. You can fix that by only running wires thru a treeless desert, and if you don't have a desert you can make one, or you can not run wires. The idea of only running long distance electricity along a deforested interstate or rail very wide right of way is interesting and would be safe although probably extremely ugly.
Fundamentally something has to fault before you detect that fault and interrupt it. Newer protection relays and circuit breaker equipment can make that interruption faster but the amount of energy required to ignite a tinder-dry forest is so small that I'm not sure it would be possible to detect, trigger, and interrupt the energy escape in time.
So bury all the cables/equipment underground? I'm sure costs are substantially higher to do so, but we could add other infrastructure along these underground lines as well if there was a shred of political will to accomplish this.
PG&E apparently[1] has a project to improve the infrastructure in some areas. They are replacing the existing 12kVA lines with insulated 15kVA lines that still carry 12kVA service. This should provide a larger margin for transient problems and protect against some types of arcing. They are also retrofitting some poles so they hold the individual cables farther apart.
However, the real problem is trees/etc growing too close to the lines, compounded by the extra dry drought conditions throughout CA. Regardless of the type of cable or other technical safety features, power lines are always going to be a fire hazard if they don't receive regular inspection and maintenance. The lesson from these fires is that the existing maintenance schedule is severely inadequate.
So typically burying a cable at HV or EHV is an order of magnitude more expensive than overheads. Underground cables are also prone to thermal issues (ironically) so I don't know that you'd be reducing fire risk as much as you'd think.
Much of the ignition risk comes from transformer explosions, air-insulated CB arcs, and line-to-tree arcs.
Transformer explosions are inherently harder to isolate from flammable material in the American distribution system design than they would be in a European 240v system, that's because the US system has to keep LV (110v) runs short so has extensive HV networks with pole-mounted transformers feeding a small number of properties each. 240v systems can tolerate longer LV runs and use larger pad-mounted distribution transformers with about 20x the power rating of American style pole-mount transformers.
In the Euro configuration, you therefore have many fewer transformers which have a least a fence around them with regular vegetation control within it. You can also put these transformers within enclosures. A typical UK rural/suburban arrangement has the transformer air cooled and outside within a fence with breakers and distribution boards inside a brick or GRP hut inside the fence. In urban areas the whole thing is enclosed in its own structure or in the basement of a building.
Anyway you can't do that with American transformers as there are more of them. These will therefore always be an ignition risk. Yes you can step up planned replacement of older models, be more aggressive about keeping the load per transformer down to lengthen lifetime and reduce fault risk but fundamentally they are a risk.
You can replace air insulated CBs with gas-insulated models at significant expense, that will reduce that risk.
Burying cables as I said is horrifically expensive but you could increase the size of the vegetation-cleared right of way around the overheads and step up the clearance schedule.
None of these will remove every source of ignition.
> Transformer explosions are inherently harder to isolate from flammable material in the American distribution system design than they would be in a European 240v system, that's because the US system has to keep LV (110v) runs short so has extensive HV networks with pole-mounted transformers feeding a small number of properties each. 240v systems can tolerate longer LV runs and use larger pad-mounted distribution
Wait... In the US for household single-phase it is 240V from the pole transformer to the breaker panel, where the 120V is derived by taking one hot or the other against the neutral, and the range/drier/etc 240V circuits are simply across both hots. So there is no difference between EU or US distribution voltages until it gets inside the house. All the US does is add a neutral so that it is easy to get 120V.
UK is 400v phase-phase and 230v phase-neutral. The distribution transformers are three-phase out and the LV main serving a street is 3 phase wires and a neutral, each house is fed from one of the phases and connected to the neutral.
My understanding of the standard US system is that the distribution transformer is fed with one phase, the secondary side of the transformer has a centre-tap neutral and two live phases which have 120v to neutral and 240v phase-phase.
> UK is 400v phase-phase and 230v phase-neutral. The distribution transformers are three-phase out and the LV main serving a street is 3 phase wires and a neutral, each house is fed from one of the phases and connected to the neutral.
Good to know.
> My understanding of the standard US system is that the distribution transformer is fed with one phase, the secondary side of the transformer has a centre-tap neutral and two live phases which have 120v to neutral and 240v phase-phase.
Three-phase power is common for service in the US for commercial, industrial, and rural areas. But it is not typical in urban or suburban residential areas.
And yes, nearly every home is served by 220 V phase-to-phase with a center tap. Am I understanding right that UK houses are only fed by single phase at 230 V with neutral?
Is the reason we have pole mounted transformers in the US really because of voltage drop though? It seems to me the reason would be they are inherently smaller due to the lower voltages, higher frequency, and only converting one phase from the distribution side. The UK has lower frequency, higher voltage, and apparently has three output phases which seems like it would require a larger transformer.
>Am I understanding right that UK houses are only fed by single phase at 230 V with neutral?
That's right, typically houses along a street will alternate phases to maintain overall balance. Standard used to be 60A supply but is now 100A which I believe would be considered low in the US but we don't usually have residential air conditioners and houses are smaller and heated with gas.
I have been told that this is the reason but there are other reasons to prefer the US arrangement so it may not be the only one. US system is more resilient to secondary failure because fewer customers are fed per secondary and you have a much more extensive HV network which is more flexible.
UK distribution transformers are much, much larger. Looks like this: https://cms.esi.info/Media/productImages/Expanded_Metal_Comp...
My point was that it is easier to enclose a smaller number of large assets than a large number of small ones which is relevant to fire risk.
There are certain areas which are known to be very high risk with population centers in the expected path of travel of a fire. It is criminally negligent to not bury lines or provide other extremely robust fire risk reduction measures in these areas. Although not exclusively, the conversation needs to focus on the smaller areas of highest risk.
That is a useless comment. People should not live in hurricane areas, in tornado alleys, etc. But they do. So the infrastructure needs to be designed for it. What people's pastimes are is totally irrelevant and obviously does not inform this type of decision a whit.
That's not my point. My point is that people don't take long term risk of mother nature screwing them into account when they're deciding where to live, they just look at the short term benefits. They don't bother to account for there being a high chance of mother nature destroying their home within their lifetime.
"Surf and ski in the same day brah" is an example of a short term benefit.
I've wondered why it wasn't underground as well. I live in Colorado and have underground at my house. The EIA says underground is 5-10x more expensive.
Most poles don’t have a transformer. It is unlikely that a downed pole caused the fire. The most common reason is letting tree branches grow too close to lines. That’s a lot of work for a system that big.
Tree branches and existing poled electricity is a tricky subject it seems. Locally, the city, electric company and property owners all blame each other for who should trim the branches around poles.
Often nothing gets done and ice storms come to take them down anyways (at the detriment of the city, electric companies, and property owners).
"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."
Of course, a fire-related mudslide soon destroyed many homes there. So a related thought: some places should not be occupied.
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.
Seems to me bailing out the same company twice for the same mistake would be the height of idiocy.
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!"
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!
California sets all the rules for utilities, including rates. There isn’t much wiggle room for PG&E, holding them liable for this is silly. It’s just a political shell game, assigning blame to PG&E and avoid responsibility for legislative failure.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is anyone aside from beach-front property owners in favor of bailing them out? Even the degree to which PG&E should be liable is clearly controversial just based on the comments on this post alone.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-to-burn/
1. Our entire approach to fighting forest fires may just be making them worse.
2. Smart and simple design decisions can save houses.
A house can be thirty feet from an entire forest on fire and never burn down.
We learned this through hardcore experiments in Canada where they built homes to test and lit forests on fire nearby.
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.
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.