A year ago, right after the terribly destructive fires in northern California, PG&E was heavily criticized for not having cut the power sufficiently when the winds blew.
Now they are criticized for cutting the power when the winds blow and not having managed in the past year since the fires to have fixed everything that was wrong so that cutting power wouldn’t be necessary. To me this seems an unreasonable set of demands. The magnitude of the problem is huge, and the money (and perhaps even the time) it would take to fix it enormous.
There is no question that the power outages are a hardship, especially for the disabled and/or elderly who rely on various devices that might be electrically powered. But a devastating fire is worse.
And I have no trouble believing that PG&E is poorly managed. But I don’t think that changes what I’m saying.
Last year after the fires in early November I wrote several posts on the subject, but this one has the most information in it. I’m going to quote from it now:
You might say that the victims of the fire should sue PG&E, which may or may not be responsible (or at least partially responsible) for the conflagration. But there’s a catch, because no power company can be 100% successful at preventing these events and still provide power to the public. If PG&E had to pay out to all the fire victims, it goes bankrupt or passes the whole thing onto its customers in a huge rate increase. And what would replace it?
This is how California has recently decided to handle it (from September 2018, prior to the Paradise fire):
“In California, utilities are responsible for fires traced to their equipment whether or not they are complying with regulations. PG&E faces about 200 lawsuits on behalf of 2,700 plaintiffs stemming from last year’s fires.
“…This [recently passed bill] would soften that standard by having regulators determine liability based on whether equipment was reasonably maintained and operated. It would also let utilities issue bonds to help pay damages, with a surcharge on ratepayers’ bills helping to cover interest payments.”
PG&E’s priority right now is to prevent fires as well as the huge liability that comes from them. How can it pay for the upkeep necessary for more meaningful prevention, and who is going to pay? Their equipment is part of the issue, but so is forest management, and the state can’t decide what is that best way to deal with that.
If you think the answer to that last problem is a simple one, and only lack of will and leftist politics makes it seem difficult, I beg to differ. Yes, lack of will and politics are in there, too, but the debate is also real. Among my gazillion post drafts I have one provisionally entitled “The great eucalyptus wars,” and it consists only of links to eleven fairly lengthy arguments on the subject of forest management for fire prevention in California. I read them all last year but never wrote the post because the subject was so overwhelming.
Right now I’ll quote a bit from one of those articles. The following passage just scratches the surface of one small element, but it’s interesting in that it describes a dispute that’s primarily among conservationists on the left, which is rather common in California:
There is, to put it mildly, widespread disagreement about what to do with [Bay Area eucalyptus trees, otherwise known as the blue gum]. The argument is as complex and tangled as the bark streamers that hang from the blue gum’s trunks. In the most general terms, there is a faction of environmentalists that want to see many of these eucalyptus trees removed, because they are a fire hazard close to homes, or because they are non-native and make poor habitat for native species, or both…This faction also includes the local chapter of the Sierra Club.
There is another faction of environmentalists that dispute that the trees are more of a fire hazard than what might replace them, see them as decent or even very valuable habitat, and want to retain them to sequester carbon, provide shade, beauty, and recreation, and to avoid the use of the herbicides that are generally necessary to thoroughly kill them off. This faction includes a longtime correspondent of mine, Mary McAllister, and allies in different groups, including the Hills Conservation Network and the small-but-fierce Forest Action Brigade…
This fight is many years old. There have been lawsuits and there have been letters to the editor pro and con. There have been protests and postcard campaigns and blog posts and newsletters and lots and lots of official public comment on management plans for various eucalyptus forests and groves. It is a classic Bay Area dispute: greens vs. greens, experts vs. experts, and committed amateurs vs. committed amateurs. And it has gotten very hot…
So which side does science support? Well, it is complicated…
And that’s just a tiny topic that’s part of the huge topic of forest management to try to prevent catastrophic California fires. Controlled burns is probably the best answer, but even that prescription has its dangers:
The biggest objection to prescribed fire is not the smoke, but the possibility that it will escape—as Shew says, “the fire doesn’t know it’s supposed to be a prescribed fire.” In 2012, a prescribed fire southeast of Denver, Colorado, escaped and burned 16 houses and killed three people; more than a decade earlier, an escaped fire entered the town of Los Alamos, New Mexico, destroying some 300 homes and buildings. There have been dozens of other escapes and near-escapes each year over the last few decades, occurring in roughly one percent of prescribed fires. The potential for unintended consequences can make the practice a hard sell to the public, says Scott Stephens, a UC Berkeley fire ecologist. “Any time you do something like that,” he says, “there’s risk.”
The risk of runaway fires is part of the logistical tightrope that the “burn bosses” I talk with say they must walk in lighting a prescribed fire, as they try to hit the meteorological conditions that will promote a fire that carries without growing too powerful, get approval from air quality districts, and secure both the money and personnel to carry out the work; the fire crews I meet, now lighting fires, had just come off weeks of fighting fires across the western U.S. Legal liability, too, is a constant worry.
Despite these hurdles, prescribed burning seems to be gaining support in California.
And it’s not as though there aren’t already prescribed fires in California; there are:
Look around, and you’ll find plenty examples of people lighting prescribed fires—in the North Bay alone, land managers at Point Reyes National Seashore, state and county parks, and land trusts have all employed fire to manage fuel loads and encourage native flora and fauna. Some 18,407 acres have been burned in the Bay Area over the last decade, according to the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. The problem is scale. The current enthusiasm for prescribed burning is digging out of a deep hole. This fiscal year, Cal Fire aims to treat 20,000 of the 31 million acres in its purview with prescribed fire, and even more in the future. This is a drastic improvement over years of burning only 2,000 or 3,000 acres, but it regularly burned 60,000-plus acres as recently as the 1980s. As Pimlott says, the new numbers may “not sound like a lot, when we talk about needing to burn three or four million acres across the state.”
During the March hearing, Pimlott also noted that although the number of wildfires had grown substantially between 2015 and 2016, the agency had still achieved its goal of keeping 95 percent of non-prescribed fires on the lands it manages to less than 10 acres. As David Shew told me, that goal “kind of flies in the face of the natural ecology of the landscape”—a fact that Cal Fire is well aware of. Although the Forest Service and other federal land managers have been able to walk back somewhat from all-out suppression, sometimes leaving fires burning under preferable conditions, Cal Fire is more constrained, says Daniel Berlant, the department’s assistant deputy director. “The majority of the land we protect is privately owned,” he says, “inhabited by homes, structures, and infrastructure.” In the North Bay, 81 percent of the fires were on private property. Choosing to let those fires burn wasn’t an option. As the wildfire season stretches, he says, the amount of time that Cal Fire’s seasonally employed fire crews have for prescribed fire and other vegetation management, as well as defensible space inspections, shrinks. The state’s leading firefighting body is trapped in a cycle of fire suppression.
That was written in early 2018, and last year’s fires came many months later. I’m not sure what has happened since (my guess is that the rate of prescribed fires has probably increased), but the problems remain. And in the meantime, PG&E is trying to be careful during the riskiest time of the year.
And my guess is that the position I’m talking here might be an unpopular one.
