There's a lot of debate about the electrical utility's (PG&E) responsibility for other fires. But I think this shows that it's really a matter of when, not if, fires will break out. If it's not an electrical wire sparking in the wind it will be a hammer or a tail pipe.
But you’re forgetting that something like 80%+ of the big wildfires were started by PG&E equipment. It’s also willful negligence in the lack of maintenance [1]. It’s not 100%, but we can do far better.
What if you reform PG&E and those 80% go away. Will the next wildfire that breaks out be 5x bigger now that dry material had more time to accumulate? Should controlled burns be done more often to reduce the impact of inevitable wildfires when they do happen?
> Should controlled burns be done more often to reduce the impact of inevitable wildfires when they do happen?
The forest management servicepeople are starting to wake up to this, although there is a lot of inertia in bureaucracy so reform is slow. But controlled underbrush burns are becoming more common.
Source: father owns a house in Yosemite National Park. We have to take care of our property by mowing/removing virtually all vegetation within 50ft of the house, but there are also controlled burns semi-regularly in our community performed by USFS.
Most of the land that burned in the Camp Fire last year (the infamous one that burned through a town and killed 80 people had burned just a few years before; much of the rest was manicured grasslands and woodlands within the town. Newly burned/cleared land grows back quickly with grass and brush that actually poses more of a fire hazard than a dense forest.
I'm guessing that there are probably better ways to manage fire risk than to wait for some random power lines to overheat.
For example, if you do a controlled burn you can pick the day with the best weather conditions and have trained responders ready to deal with any problems. If a random power line overheats, you only know about it when half the state is on fire.
I found it interesting is that PG&E was recently given the go-ahead to TURN OFF POWER during high wind situations.
Not that there aren't maintenance and management problems, but allowing power to be turned off seems like a no-brainer but maybe management didn't have that option before.
Um, when they turn off the power, it’s not to a single neighborhood. It’s going to be to wide swaths of the power grid. They were talking on KQED the other day that this might even at times include San Francisco and San Jose, depending on where the risk is. Whenever that happens, intersections are going to be left without stoplights, people on life support will lose their power, hospitals will go onto backup generators, etc. Its possible that people will die as a result of power outages, especially if they happen in the heat of summer.
“People talking on KQED” is not anything you should trust if it’s one of the many programs where people call in and concern troll or where the host pontificates on “what-ifs”.
Unless it has actually been identified as a risk, I’d say it’s safe to assume PG&E wouldn’t just shut off the power in the bay for any extended period of time. There isn’t really anywhere in the US with that level of instability.
By people, I meant reporters. Here’s a link to a story on CBS. The issue is that the Camp Fire was caused by major transmission lines - turn off some of those, and SF/SJ will lose power coming from major hydro sources in the Sierras.
