[creato]

Yes, PGE did cause a fire through negligence. That's a problem. However, what is the appropriate penalty for this?

In my opinion, it is the average cost of a fire, most of which are small and don't cause much damage.

That this particular fire blew up into a big disaster was the result of many factors, only a few of which were actually in PGE's control.

[shajznnckfke]

That’s an argument you could make in any kind of liability lawsuit. It falls flat because the lawsuit isn’t worth filing in the average case, so nobody ends up being held to account for anything.

Example: a roller coaster has broken seat belts. Usually nothing bad will happen because physics keeps the rider in their seat. In one case, a rider falls to their death because they were leaning a particular way on a particular turn. Should the theme park not be punished because nobody was hurt in the average case? Or everyone who rode the roller coaster and wasn’t injured needs to sue for their piece of the pie (because the average damage is one death divided by the total number of riders)?

[content_sesh]

Whatever the appropriate monetary penalty is, it feels like jail time for executives and management within PG&E, who are ultimately responsible for the apparent culture of negligence within PG&E, is appropriate as well.

In terms of _average_ cost vs. actual costs, according to my non-lawyer reading of the Wikipedia article on the eggshell skull rule, it doesn't matter that these particular conditions made the fire significantly more costly than average. They have to answer for the damages from the fire they caused, not to the "average" or even "foreseeable" damages from such a fire.

[phendrenad2]

They should be fined the cost of the fire multiplied by the increased risk of fire that they caused. So (cost of camp fire) * ((chance of fire happening due to unmaintained c-hook) / ((chance of fire happening from unmaintained c-hook)+(chance of fire happening from all other sources)