[jeffdavis]

I'm not blaming all of these fires on PGE. The state is simply not resilient to fire -- the smallest fires quickly become infernos.

They deserve some blame, of course. Clearly arson is wrong, and so is negligence. But how negligent are they really being? It seems like the latest fire was caused by a tower that was regularly inspected.

[inferiorhuman]

But how negligent are they really being?

PG&E has a history of astounding incompetence and negligence, so probably very. PG&E blew up a San Bruno neighborhood because they were so lax about record keeping. I just heard something blow up about half an hour ago (sounded like a transformer). I still have power, but the last time this happened (a month or so ago) PG&E cut power for nearly 20 hours before even bothering to send anyone to investigate (overall I was without power for 22 hours).

It seems like the latest fire was caused by a tower that was regularly inspected.

The easy answer is that this infrastructure should be underground so that it can't cause these sorts of fires in the first place.

From reddit:

From OP's article: "The utility says the transmission level outage on the power line relayed and did not reclose."

Which means:

From OP's article: "The utility says the transmission level outage on the power line relayed and did not reclose."

Unless I'm mistake, the "re-closing" refers to a line that becomes de-energized somehow- the circuit is broken, or "opened". Sometimes this is because a physical cable broke from wind or a tree branch, sometimes it's a technical malfunction; so PG&E sends some juice through the (potentially physically broken) line to see if the current returns, and attempts to restart the line.

Basically, the re-closing sends live current through a line that may be physically compromised, in order to see if it's not compromised and can be turned back on simply. So, in this case, it seems likely that a) wind broke one of PG&E's major transmission lines, causing it to fall onto the tinder-like brush below the tower, and then PG&E sent juice through that broken line, at least once (in the past the re-closers would make three attempts.)

PG&E apparently let one of their cables fall on dry brush, and then sent sparks through it, possibly multiple times, starting the fire.

This poster goes on to point out that Southern California utility companies typically disable this behavior during fire season and other posters pointed out that typically older reclosing mechanisms were just dumb relays that you couldn't easily disable while newer infrastructure will be using SCADA devices that you could easily disable.

[wglb]

>The easy answer is that this infrastructure should be underground so that it can't cause these sorts of fires in the first place.

Is it feasible to put the very high voltage lines underground? I know it is done for residential areas.

[thaumaturgy]

https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/PG-E-cited-for-... ...

> The most recent audit of PG&E’s work in Sonoma County, conducted in 2015, found 3,527 maintenance and repair jobs that had been finished past their scheduled due dates. A 2013 audit of PG&E’s North Bay division, which includes Marin and Napa counties, counted 9,520 repair or maintenance orders finished late and 3,270 still overdue.

> The commission ... counted more than 1,000 late repair or maintenance jobs in six of PG&E’s nine Bay Area districts.

> No other California utility, or utility division, was found to have more than 1,000 late corrective actions in audits the commission performed from 2013 through this year. Only the Sacramento Municipal Utility District came close, with 993 late repair or maintenance jobs cited in an audit this year.

> The 2015 audit of PG&E’s Sonoma operations, for example, included spot-check inspections of PG&E equipment in Cazadero, Guerneville, Rohnert Park, Santa Rosa, Sonoma and Windsor. Problems found include one instance of vegetation growing too close to a power line, one of vegetation obstructing the climbing space on a pole and several instances of improperly installed guy wires, which help hold a pole in place.

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/PG-E-diverted-safety-... ...

> Pacific Gas and Electric Co. diverted more than $100 million in gas safety and operations money collected from customers over a 15-year period and spent it for other purposes, including profit for stockholders and bonuses for executives, according to a pair of state-ordered reports released Thursday.

> The documents link a deficient PG&E safety culture - with its "focus on financial performance" - to the pipeline explosion in San Bruno on Sept. 9, 2010, that killed eight people and destroyed 38 homes.

> The "low priority" the company gave to pipeline safety during the three years leading up to the San Bruno blast was "well outside industry practice - even during times of corporate austerity programs," said the audit by Overland Consulting of Leawood, Kan.

> "A cursory review reveals that a significant portion, in the millions, has been awarded to the CEO," the commission staff report said in a reference to former PG&E head Peter Darbee, who retired last year.

https://www.salon.com/2019/10/09/after-choosing-profits-over... ....

> [PG&E] chose to diverting money from power line under-grounding projects — among other infrastructure initiatives — to “other high priority system improvements” like boosting corporate profits and paying executives even more. Despite their recent bankruptcy filing, the company's chief executive officer Bill Johnson received an annual base salary of $2.5 million for a three-year contract — double the salary of the previous CEO.

> Thanks to a subsequent California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) investigation, the public learned that between 1987 and 1994 PG&E diverted $495 million from its budgets to maintain its systems to boost corporate profits.

> Decades later, another an investigation by the California Public Utilities Commission found that PG&E diverted more than $100 million in gas safety and operations collected from customers over a 15-year period to spend on bonuses for executives, among other profit-makers for key stakeholders.

---

Given the decades-long pattern that's documented here, we not only can hold PG&E 100% responsible, we should. Defending them for attempting to operate in WUI areas holds no water when they consistently chose to cash out funds that were supposed to be used for equipment maintenance.

PG&E's practices are indefensible, they are wholly responsible for the deaths and property damage they have caused, their "just turn it all off" solution is absurd, and they should cease to exist if only to give future executives a reason to have a moment's introspection in between sips of top-shelf liquor.