[kevingadd]

The forest fires (of this magnitude) are also a relatively new development, and they're partially due to poor line maintenance. The poor line maintenance is the real direct cause of the outages, not lawsuits - if the lines were well maintained they would not be causing fires and no shutoffs would be necessary. We don't see line shutoffs like this all over the country right now.

[scrumbledober]

I keep seeing this said, that the fires were caused due to poor line maintenance. Are the fires caused by lines failing or is the maintenence that they are failing on just clearing brush from around the lines?

[kevingadd]

We've had multiple fires so far that were caused by line/infrastructure failures producing sparks. Brush-clearing is also a factor

[malandrew]

There was a court case that made PG&E liable even when they were not negligent.

[kevingadd]

The definition of negligence is difficult in these cases. I would agree with an argument that some court cases overreach, but we have clear cases where bad line hardware directly caused fires (PG&E has even admitted such).

I'm not personally a fan of suing them because it comes out of customers' pockets and not executive compensation or dividends, but we need to do something. I'm happy to see state ownership considered as an alternative to the lawsuits.

[malandrew]

The definition of negligence doesn't matter. Even if they are proven to not be negligent and they did all the preventative maintenance, they are still liable. Under this scenario, it doesn't matter if they do preventative maintenance or not since they are on the hook either way. The only way to avoid being on the hook is to shut off power since that is the only way to reliably prevent even the best maintained equipment from causing a fire.

[dragonwriter]

> Even if they are proven to not be negligent and they did all the preventative maintenance, they are still liable. Under this scenario, it doesn't matter if they do preventative maintenance or not since they are on the hook either way.

Yes, there is a strict liability regime. Yes, this makes the definition of negligence irrelevant. No, this doesn't make preventive maintenance irrelevant: strict liability only applies to fires caused by their equipment, and preventive maintenance obviously effects that (that's what it is preventive of.)

But, in any case, if there weren't at least negligence involved, the behavior contributing to the fires would probably not have been found to be a violation of their criminal probation on top of any civil liability for damage caused by the fire.

[kevingadd]

If they did everything they needed to, how are they negligent? I don't understand. The negligence so far has specifically been because poor maintenance triggered fires.

The power shut-offs are in response to the past fires, which were caused by poorly maintained lines.