I've never understood this urge to find the spark that started a wildfire. The cause of the fire was the large amount of dry vegetation in the area. It doesn't matter what the spark was. If it hadn't been this hook, it would've been something else, such as lightning. Lightning strikes start fires all the time.
Why don't we put more of our efforts into controlled burning in order to keep the fuel load down? Seems like a much safer approach than trying to prevent all fires no matter the cause.
1. No evidence to suggest we are not putting in adequate efforts into controlled burning. Perhaps you have some?
2. Even if we were putting satisfactory efforts into controlled burning, we would still need to know where sparks are likely to occur to, you know, clear or burn the vegetation around said sparks.
3. Sparks also matter when they are coming from unexpected places, or places that are owned by individuals charged with preventing said sparks.
So you think any time something bad happens that's evidence that not enough things were done to prevent those types of bad things? Presumably the only things we are well-prepared for in society are things that never, ever occur?
Guess we'll have to agree to disagree on that point.
I've been reading an amateur anthropologist's blog, and an eternal theme is that primitive people get trapped in a cycle of violent retaliation with every other group nearby.
It's very common for the mechanism to be a lack of belief in chance. If Joe was bitten by a snake, that's not because he stepped near a snake. It's because someone cursed him, attracting the snake. If he died from the bite, then a neighboring tribe / village needs to be raided to teach them a lesson.
Attributing all misfortune to malicious intent is a universal urge.
The idea that a bad thing happening is evidence that somebody did something wrong is enough to call it "attribution to malicious intent" for my purposes here. A bad thing happening is not in fact evidence that anybody did anything wrong.
That would depend if you got bit by that snake in a snake pit. If so, Joe's extreme lack of caution in a dangerous area points to his misfortune.
Fire hazards are not much different. These places will burn. That is the natural state of the habitat. The fire has no intent, just the necessity of chemistry.
> Calfire currently has a goal of burning 20,000 acres a year, a goal put into place in 2016.
Last year.. Calfire came close with 19,000 acres control-burned. But two years ago, only 13,000 acres were burned while the previous three years each saw only around 3,000 acres burned.
When it comes to the environment in CA I don't know what to believe anymore. Like I fully expect CA to be anti-resource extraction, even if it's good for them, but I also don't trust the corporate interests that want to extract those resources.
> I've never understood this urge to find the spark that started a wildfire.
Because ultimately, the legal system allows you to blame people for negligence and mischief. If you intentionally ignite a national park or a nature reserve, that's a very different issue than if lightning struck it. One has malice and intent and is a crime. One is a random act of nature.
Or in this case, it may be negligence. (The hook itself is not a random act of nature. It presumably is not malice and intent. But it still could be negligence.)
Can they blame and sue for negligence the towns that didn't keep a fire-line on their highways out of town? or Towns (and HOA's) that have laws/rules against some of the best practices [1] for defensible space that the federal government publishes?
Those 2 things seem to have done much more damage than a single spark in some dry brush.
Everything has a cost. Controlled burns cost money.
Is the cost of regular controlled burns < the cost of eliminating most risk of wildfire starts? Im not sure we are qualified to answer that question without data and analysis.
Why don't we put more of our efforts into controlled burning in order to keep the fuel load down
Because it's ugly.
The high amount of available fuel is primarily a California thing. Every other state conducts preventative burns. But California changed its policy on this about ten years ago because rich people don't like smoke in their backyards.
When Trump pointed this out, he was ridiculed by those, including California's governor, who say it was purely global warning.
The president may be a buffoon, but he's not always wrong.
> If it hadn't been this hook, it would've been something else, such as lightning.
Yes and no. While it's true that occasionally there will be natural disasters such as lightning strikes that occur in high-risk areas during times of high winds, power lines are carrying huge amounts of power all the time and thus coincide with high winds more than lightning strikes. As an example of how to mitigate this risk, PG&E has a policy of cutting power to lines temporarily during high-risk times like extreme winds in high risk areas — although in another sign of negligence in this case, they failed to follow that procedure during the windstorm that led to the outbreak of the Camp Fire.
You can't prevent all disasters, but you can mitigate risk, which at least reduces the incidence rate of disasters. It's starting to look like PG&E was negligent in their prevention efforts. I agree that doesn't mean they're entirely to blame, but as a society we still need to hold companies accountable for negligence so that we help incentivize safety.
> And possibly break the company up Ma Bell style.
So PG&E is split into, let's say, 5 different equal, smaller companies. And Company C caused this fire. Now you have a company 1/5th the size and revenue having to pay the full load. How would that work?
The fine obviously wouldn't be imposed on only one of the small subsidiaries when the problem was caused when they were still unified. You'd impose the fine on the unified company before cutting it up.
Insurance pays some, and the rest is paid back by bond. I.e. the state government just give PGE an installment plan and they have 30 years to pay it back. In theory, the government has time to wait.
Where do you think the money to pay it back over 30 years comes from if not the consumer? Breaking up the company doesn't achieve a damned thing beyond employing more people doing the same job. Wiping out equity changes nothing beyond bankrupting the company.
The mind boggles. You cannot change behaviours/regulate infrastructure maintenance or safety through fines to shareholders (and, by proxy, consumers).
With infrastructure you have a few options for managing risk:
1. Stiff regulation for "natural monopolies," or for effectively state-monopolies. The state legislature then prevents the company from raising rates in order to pay back loans or pay off fines. Negligent behavior is punished by the state.
2. Competition, e.g. the Ma Bell breakup. Break up PG&E and have its small companies compete with each other. Any one company can't raise rates to pay off negligent behavior, because they'll lose out to their competition. Negligent behavior is punished by the market.
3. Ajit Pai yourself into a few monopolies with no regulation, and rejoice as you live with whatever Comcast deigns to give you. Actively malicious behavior goes unpunished, or is even rewarded.
Monopolies have a decent amount of government oversight - more or less depending on the locale, but probably more in a place like California. This is something people can influence.
This distributes the risk over the companies (useful financially, bad for risk mitigation), but also creates an incentive for the insurer to audit policies, practices, and procedures to minimise risks. Insurance is a pretty powerful business invention, and is unique amongst virtually all businesses in that it seeks out risks (and then tries to manage them).
There are smaller power companies within California (most of them are municipality-owned utilities), and they tend to be fairly accountable to their individual market-owners.
Insurance against wildfires doesn't really work. You get one big event and it wipes everything out. It doesn't make any sense for the insurance company to take that bet, unless they're shady and they discharge all of the claims in bankruptcy.
State of California says otherwise to the tune of $12 billion.
California statewide wildfire insurance claims nearly $12 billion
For Release: January 31, 2018
LOS ANGELES, Calif. — Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones today announced that insurers have received nearly 45,000 insurance claims totaling more than $11.79 billion in losses from the devastating wildfires that burned across the state in October and December 2017 damaging and destroying more than 32,000 homes, 4,300 businesses, more than 8,200 vehicles, watercraft, farm vehicles, and other equipment....*
Again, insurance companies internalise rather than externalise risks. They also manage risks.
This can mean changes to construction, landscaping, fire response, utilities operation, activities restrictions (including legal sanctions, e.g., restrictions on mowing or tilling during high-fire season), hydrants, and more.
There are of course limitations to what can be done. A wonderful concept comes from the field of marine navigation and seamanship:
"The Art of ship handling involves the effective use of forces under control to overcome the effect of forces not under control."
-- Charles H. Cotter
That is the essence of all engineering.
California has extensive experience with major catastrophic fires which have strongly influenced its insurance landscape. The morning of 18 April in 19 and 6 comes to mind.
I would love to agree with you, but in this case we're talking about electricity distribution. It's almost impossible to start up a second independent distribution network - the towers alone will cost millions, not to mention the costs of getting permission from all the landowners along the way and fighting all the communities who don't want even more towers over the landscape.
And after all the capital and political fighting your goal is to make less money than the incumbent.
Batteries. If suddenly you must pay 20c/kWh and previously it was 8c/kWh, new avenues opportunities are created. Maybe then it makes sense to go full rooftop solar and use a big battery.
If the costs are passed to consumers wouldn’t that be a matter of properly accounting for externalities? It means they’re paying the true cost of the power.
> Serious question - how can you hold such companies accountable when fines would be passed directly to consumers?
PG&E rates have to be justified to and approved by regulators; liability costs for wrongfully causing widespread devastation maybe shouldn't be considered a valid basis for rate increases.
So a regulatory agency gets to decide which price increases are "valid" or not based on the fact the price increase followed a court ruling in favour of another regulatory agency which showed negligence by the company? Or does that also include civil tort cases showing negligence? What exactly is the deciding factor which proves a price increase is not "valid"?
That would make sense if not for the fact that there is substantial evidence that frquency of fires has very little influence on how frequently any particular parcel of land undergoes fire.
In other words, the fire happens nit because somebody lit it but because the environment is ready for it. If you prevent sources of fire then you just get larger fire when the inevitable spark happens and it effectively makes up for all the "avoided" fires.
It is better to have more smaller fires as they are better controllable than one single humongous fire that overwhelmes our resources to control it.
To avoid fires without getting rid of all trees it is better to figure out the conditons that make fires happen more frequently on any particular piece of land, like dropping water table or drying climate.
I am afraid that until we have drones to detect and remediate EVERY fire, immediately, within minutes, there will be no easy solution.
1. Try to stop fires from occurring at dangerous times (high winds), when there's a high risk that the fire will get out of control.
2. Do controlled burns during safe times (low winds), to clear out fuel without killing people or burning down homes.
Unfortunately there's been far too much fire suppression, rather than controlled burns, over the past century in CA [1]. So we're dealing with a pretty huge backlog in addition to climate change.
Because sometimes a completely preventable thing caused it. Dismissing any attempt to reduce causes because "it will just burn anyways" doesn't seem right.
Having the hook start a fire is completely preventable. Having a fire start is not preventable.
Reducing the number of fires that start doesn't make fires better -- it makes them worse. That was the lesson of the Yellowstone fire. There's a total amount of fuel to burn, and all of it will burn; the question is whether you want it to burn in more little fires or fewer enormous ones.
That second point -- all of the fuel an area produces will eventually burn -- is why it doesn't really matter what started a fire. It's 100% correct to say that if one cause had been prevented, another cause would have started one later, and that later fire would have been worse the one that did happen (barring controlled burns to manage the amount of fuel in the area).
You can think of wildfires using the same model as earthquakes. The movement of two tectonic plates against each other builds up a store of potential energy as one plate is driven out of alignment. The release of that energy is an earthquake. The amount of energy released by earthquakes is fixed by the amount of potential energy accumulated over time. The form of release is not -- you might see harmless earthquakes or city-destroying ones.
If dynamite from a mining operation triggers a huge earthquake, that's bad, because huge earthquakes are bad. But the dynamite didn't cause anything that wasn't going to happen anyway. The same amount of energy gets released regardless, just at different times.
For fires, the growth of plants in the area builds up a reservoir of potential fire energy over time, and you have the choice of either releasing that energy in fires or physically transporting the fuel somewhere else. Only the first is practical.
Sure, if fires existed in vacuums that would be the end of the story. Instead, they often exist near camp sites and other inhabited areas. Tracking down and minimizing causes of man-made fires, which tend to cluster around inhabited areas, happens to minimize the chance of death in forest fires - regardless of the total energy built up.
It's all just navel-gazing in the face of climate change. The Camp fire happened because we received precisely zero inches of precipitation from the beginning of April, to the end of November this year, not because of a spark. Short of curbing emissions worldwide and building new sequestration capabilities, this is going to be inevitable moving forwards. The best people can do is try to place blame for the immediate consequences to find some financial relief which will never come otherwise due to government's total refusal to acknowledge the problem.
This, exactly. Don’t expect much movement on climate change until the political elite feel the pain. When the fisheries collapse, fires rage across our corn fields, beef prices skyrocket, and our coastal cities sink into the ocean will you see a climate change denier stand up and throw up their hands and yell “How did this happen! We need to act! Also, why is my steak so expensive. Outrageous!”
Also noted in the above pdf is the salt water intrusion into the Biscayne Aquifer which is used for drinking water in the area - this is a major issue.
"The Camp fire happened because we received precisely zero inches of precipitation from the beginning of April, to the end of November this year, not because of a spark."
absolutely ridiculous assumption and overreach.
There are far too many people looking to point to climate change for every natural disaster that occurs. Many areas in California are naturally hot, dry, and prone to fires much of the year.
we are building more and more houses / structures in fire prone areas, making it worse.
"by 2050, 645,000 houses in California will be built in “very high” wildfire severity zones."
we also contribute to it beyond just starting the fires directly (power lines, vehicles, appliances, etc), we make the conditions worse with poor land management
"Some researchers said that logging in the burned area after a fire in 2008, which was intended to clear out fuels and make this part of Northern California safer, may have had the opposite result. The logging may have left fast-burning weeds and young trees in the fire’s path."
A study published earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, or PNAS, found that 84 percent of wildfires are ignited by humans, whether through downed power lines, careless campfires, or arson.
“Human-started wildfires ... tripled the length of the fire season, dominated an area seven times greater than that affected by lightning fires, and were responsible for nearly half of all area burned,” the paper reported.
> The Camp fire happened because we received precisely zero inches of precipitation from the beginning of April, to the end of November this year
It rained in May and October. It is not helpful to your argument that you are expressing your best honest guesses as if they were canonical fact.
In my opinion, there were a number of direct causes:
1. Drought killed a lot of plants adding to the amount of dry fuel
2. A wet winter grew a lot of new plants which, when dried out, added to the fuel
3. Rain sufficient to eliminate fire risk came unusually late in the year. Normally arrives in the range of 2 to 6 weeks earlier. So it was unusual, but the variation is pretty large in the first place.
4. We had a high-wind event sufficient to turn a fire which would not be national news into national news.
5. PG&E negligence.
To make the case that this fire is caused by climate change, you need to link one or more of the direct causes I've listed to climate change. In my opinion, while climate change is a possible cause, California climate has so much variation it is hard to pin these events to it at this time.
You also missed one point: the lack of both controlled burns and huge fire barriers between forest sections (i.e. barren land), both of which led the fire to explode.
California has controlled burns. Fire barriers and escape routes do need to be improved, but not sure that mattered given the wind in this particular incident.
Also thanks, I liked that article describing blocking, but it didn't tie the phenomena to climate change. In fact, it says that blocking is a long-known thing. Do you know of any research that does tie it?
>It rained in May and October. It is not helpful to your argument that you are expressing your best honest guesses as if they were canonical fact.
I made the statement to explicitly point out hard data that most might think were hyperbolic. This is far from a guess. It did not rain one drop in NorCal from the beginning of April to the end of October 2018 [0]. If you have evidence to the contrary, please let me know.
>3. Rain sufficient to eliminate fire risk came unusually late in the year. Normally arrives in the range of 2 to 6 weeks earlier. So it was unusual, but the variation is pretty large in the first place.
Yes, this was my entire point. The rain came a month late this year, which is why the fires got out of hand.
>To make the case that this fire is caused by climate change, you need to link one or more of the direct causes I've listed to climate change. In my opinion, while climate change is a possible cause, California climate has so much variation it is hard to pin these events to it at this time.
I wouldn't have made the assertion without direct causality. Why did the rain come late? There was simply no energy left in the Pacific after a record setting hurricane season. It took a month of no hurricanes in the eastern pacific for sea surface temperatures to get back to where they can produce consistent moisture over the west coast.
Take a look at this series of images. They show a snapshot of the SST anomaly data for September in the western hemisphere from 2014 to 2018.
See how much more energy is out there in 2014-15 (years with really wet summers/falls) vs. the cooling that becomes really apparent by 2018? It's as if the oceans have reached a total carrying capacity for energy and passed a tipping point where these massive storms get whipped up and burn off all their energy quickly, rather than having a slowly dripping moisture source over the west coast as we always have had.
You can see here that we are currently sitting at ~18% of normal precipitation for the year in Northern California [1].
Your reference is for Napa. The reference for Paradise from the same site[1] shows rain in May and October, as I mentioned.
SST anomalies, like all anomalies, cannot be interpreted without first understanding the distribution of anomalies. Examining 5 sequential years is not as helpful as you might want, especially since 2015 was an El Niño year.
And as a Californian let me assure you the tails on all our weather distributions are enormous. We only get a dozen storms[2] on average. But just a few here and there can easily change that to six and a drought, or 24 and a deluge.
Does it matter what the cause of death is? I mean murder, accident, natural causes...it’s all the same because the person was going to die anyway right?
There is already massive effort put into controlled burns and training/funding firefighters...and you are right sometimes an act of god (lightning) will cause a fire, but those acts of god are more likely to occur in non populated areas and actually provide the benefits of a controlled burn. So the point is firefighters have enough to contend with naturally, they don’t need people/companies running around starting fires in populated areas.
FYI 84% of wildfires are started by humans, nearly 1/3 if wildfires are intentional arson.
If somebody in your neighborhood was being careless and accidentally burned your house down, would you handle that situation exactly the same way you would if your house had caught on fire because it was struck by lightning?
Would it make a difference if that person had a history of disobeying safety rules, had been warned a number of times, and had caused significant damage in the past?
The fact that some subset of fires can't be prevented doesn't mean we should throw up our hands and never try to prevent any fires. When somebody causes one we should investigate and take appropriate action.
If I improperly stored tons of firewood right against my house, and someone caught the firewood in fire, and then my house burned down, I think I'd share some of the blame. Some blame would have to go on the other person too.
Your analogy doesn't quite fit. A wildfire zone with large amounts of flammable dry vegetation isn't analogous to an ordinary house. It's more like a house with a gas leak that's been left alone long enough for the entire building to fill up with natural gas.
Now, in that situation, does it matter whether your house gets struck by lightning or your neighbour's cigarette lighter happens to set it off near a cracked window? Assuming your neighbour is miraculously unhurt, the answer is no.
Drive onto ranch land with a hot exhaust system, pull off the road into tall grass, start a 200 acre grass fire, and try to use that line of reasoning with a with a straight face.
Analogies are fun. If you have a tower of sand that collapses, do you find the grain that started moving first and put the entire blame of collapse on it? Your example is of relatively stable system (presumably healthy human life) that takes a big external disturbance to cause failure. The sand tower is an unstable system that takes a tiny disturbance to trigger failure. I think the California forest situation is somewhere between these two extremes.
Regardless, for such a vast system wildfires are to some extent inevitable. From a macroscopic perspective a poorly maintained tower is just as foreseeable as an arsonist or an overheating car that pulls onto the side of the highway. And at some point the marginal cost of prevention far exceeds the marginal reduction in risk. In other words, a some point we just need to accept the risk.
To the extent we require PG&E to be perfectly diligent, then we incentivize people to build their houses with matchsticks.
It's annoying when people get upset about California "bailing out" PG&E. As a regulated utility PG&E can't control the prices they charge users, nor do they have any power over, e.g., building regulations that would minimize damages. In a free market for PG&E to completely internalize (and minimize) the fire hazards they create, electricity prices would almost certainly be politically unviable, particularly in remote communities.
No matter what we do the costs of these fires will be socialized. PG&E is a heavily regulated public utility. The time to punish PG&E is when they fail to abide by regulations, not after big fires.
As a society we've already decided on the principle mechanism for incentivizing diligent behavior on the part of PG&E. When big fires happen we'd be better off emphasizing remediations like changing building codes (including requiring retractive remediation), and maybe tightening PG&E regulations. But of course it's far easier and more politically expedient to simply blame PG&E outright. And the politicians who understand this dilemma? We blame them for being corrupt for not doing the "obviously right" thing. And this is why politics is broken; because we refuse to accept that there are trade-offs, that no matter what we do bad things happen, people will get hurt, and we have to make difficult decisions about maximizing equality (sic) while trying to avoid moral hazard.
What I find is that of wildfires, human sources of ignition are 80% of fires in northern California (the percentage is higher in Southern), but that the rate falls as low as 40% where humans are less active (Great Basin).
The large number of lightning-caused fires out West should remind us that wildfires are inevitable in the region. Measures like campfire bans and public lands closures, which may succeed in cutting the number of human-caused fires, can only do so much.
In this case, it's partly because PG&E negligence resulted in a massive gas explosion a few years back in Redwood City, and now no one trusts them to perform long-term maintenance on their infrastructure — and evidence is mounting that their unmaintained infrastructure is responsible for both this year's fire in California _and_ last year's.
So, everyone ought to do the things you describe, yes — but I can't fault residents of California for having a vested interest in keeping PG&E from burning them down every year, either.
EDIT: It would have cost them ~4x the original build cost to bury all those power lines in the forest, but they chose not to spend on infrastructure and may be bankrupted by their poor choices.
>EDIT: It would have cost them ~4x the original build cost to bury all those power lines in the forest
That figure is valid for flat plains. Much more if you're all in a forest (e.g. in Salzburg a cost factor of 8-9x was projected).
Ever tried to run a sewer pipe through a forest? I actually worked in trench digging, it's incredibly hard. Mostly we did telecom wiring, but one particularly fucked up job was running a sewer line with ca. 300m downhill through a forest. Can't use anything larger than a small tiny 1.4 ton excavator. For a 380kV cable it's even harder as you have to dig two meters deep and about 30m wide, and you're straight outta luck when you don't have 2m of soil but only 1m and hard rock below. The trenches required are massive. In addition the waste heat from the power lines heats up the ground (thus impacting the forest) and you gotta maintain the trench plus side margin space to be entirely tree free, as you absolutely do not want tree roots to pierce the cables.
I believe they said last week it was about 3.8x for the mountains that burned last year, but I can’t find a good source. Post here if you find their estimate?
It’s easy enough to do a controlled burn on BLM land, i.e. actual forest land. But most of the destroyed property in this fire and last year’s fires were on the urban-wildlife interface.
Some causes are well-known and easily preventable. For example,
Power transmission systems use arrestors and other devices to protect their system from lightning and other badness. Taking a hit may result in the device blowing apart, including hot metal bits.
Knowing this, a regulatory agency may implement vegetation clearance rules around transmission towers, knowing that these are high-risk areas. If the initiation point for a fire is in an area that's supposed to be bare mineral soil (and maybe isn't), that's interesting.
It should be noted that at least in Australia, DFES no longer refers to burn-offs as "controlled burning", rather as "prescribed burning".
They're finding more and more frequently it's harder to control them in a lot of cases, and it's easier to manage the PR by just calling them prescribed.
The attitude which leads to failure to maintain fits right in with the thousands of D-rated bridges in the U.S. Hey, it's still working and the profits are nice, who needs taxes. Seems laughing at Grandma Millie is still in style.
I would think it is a bit different. PG&E is not government and doesn't collect taxes. Those lines originally may have been public property, but I do not know if they still are? I know PG&E talked about burieing them a few years ago after a large fire caused by overloaded transmition lines in North Cali....too expensive. Pretty sure that math Will come out the same way again.
Anyway Gov collects plenty of money for infrastructure projects they would just rather funnel the money into their own pockets via war spending.
Why don't we have a system of aerial drones to monitor this stuff with thermal cameras and be able to respond to incipient fires extremely fast by dispatching aerial firefighting, etc.?
Why would an executive at PG&E give two shits about that? They get paid via the shell company that owns the utility and their profits are guaranteed by the public regulator while their liabilities are limited by their corporate structure.
I worked at SDG&E shortly after they paid $700M for starting fires in 2007. From my vantage point in the org, I saw that (a) the executives felt pressured, (b) much of the cost was borne by shareholders not ratepayers, and (c) this incentivized the company to invest more proactively in fire prevention strategies.
Having seen a fire almost from the beginning I would say a drone won't spot it much before it's spotted anyways. The one I saw went from zero to a few hundred meters in minutes.
Because you know little about these fires, especially the Camp Fire. The moment the sparks hit the ground it was too late. You cannot control a fire with 5% humidity and 30mph+ winds.
Worth noting that in the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Australia, there was an AU$494 million class action[0] settlement against a power company (and others), as that fire was determined to have started from power lines.
That said, I'd wait until a proper forensic decision is reached; I can't say I expect a news channel to be too rigorous in its determination of whether a damaged tower caused the fire, or whether the fire damaged the tower.
I also agree with the other comment regarding the need for more controlled/prescribed burning; in Australia again, it is a reasonably established prevention strategy[1], with a long history among indigenous Australians[2].
Possibly more relevant than the 2009 Australian fires are the 2017 California wildfires from last year in the same area, for which this same utility (PG&E) has liability expected to exceed $2.5 billion[0].
1. Building codes allowed this to happen. Why are people allowed to build homes with asphalt roofs and wood siding in the urban-wildland interface? Indoor fire sprinklers are now required by code, why not outdoor fire sprinklers in interface environments like this?
2. Could we have an infrared geostationary satellite that could automatically alert fire crews to new infrared events? How about having helicopters on standby ready to respond within minutes of a satellite-sensed infrared flair up?
Rooftop sprinklers don't even seem that difficult to install. The house I rent part of has them and they are basically just teed off the same lines that supply the hose bibs on the outside of the house. No risk of freezing pipes over here (SF Bay Area) so its pretty simple.
I live on rural property just outside the Bay Area. I can tell you that when there is fire nearby, people do run sprinklers.
Sprinklers aren't magic. They have a very limited range and you must run them for many hours to saturate the area. They might protect you against falling embers but they're not going to slow down a fire jumping tree to tree. And you aren't going to wet down multiple acres of land.
If you're on well (and in the country, everyone is) then you need electricity to run the pumps; did the fire cut you off? Did PG&E, for safety? Very very few solar systems can operate disconnected from the grid. But maybe you have a generator? When was the last time you started it, and do you know how to disconnect the grid and hook it up to the pumps?
Maybe you have a pool and a gas powered pump. When was the last time you ran it? Will it start on the first pull or do you need to rebuild the carb before the fire arrives?
We had a big scare just this last year. We (and everyone else in the neighborhood) ran every sprinkler we had for days. Would it have helped? Maybe, in marginal cases. Mostly it was a good exercise to make us realize how underprepared we really are.
San Francisco Gas and Electric Company and the California Gas and Electric Corporation merged to form PG&E in 1905.
This technology dates from the almost the earliest days:
both Nikola Tesla (d 1943) and Thomas Edison (d 1931) were still alive when this tower was built, and George Westinghouse died only in 1914.
Much as Californians love to hate on PG&E, and much as PG&E has worked might hard to earn the hate, it's not appropriate to speak of a singular cause of the Camp Fire.
yeah as a state we need to limit if not down right outlaw power lines above the ground. Which will be a huge investment and definitely something that PG&E is not going to suggest themselves. But home owners and insurance companies have an interest here. Apart from the 80 people that died, what is the damage in those buildings and loss of economic activity? Much more than putting power lines underground.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadWhy don't we put more of our efforts into controlled burning in order to keep the fuel load down? Seems like a much safer approach than trying to prevent all fires no matter the cause.
Guess we'll have to agree to disagree on that point.
It's very common for the mechanism to be a lack of belief in chance. If Joe was bitten by a snake, that's not because he stepped near a snake. It's because someone cursed him, attracting the snake. If he died from the bite, then a neighboring tribe / village needs to be raided to teach them a lesson.
Attributing all misfortune to malicious intent is a universal urge.
Fire hazards are not much different. These places will burn. That is the natural state of the habitat. The fire has no intent, just the necessity of chemistry.
Here is some:
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/08/03/lack-of-control...
> Calfire currently has a goal of burning 20,000 acres a year, a goal put into place in 2016.
Last year.. Calfire came close with 19,000 acres control-burned. But two years ago, only 13,000 acres were burned while the previous three years each saw only around 3,000 acres burned.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Loggin...
Because ultimately, the legal system allows you to blame people for negligence and mischief. If you intentionally ignite a national park or a nature reserve, that's a very different issue than if lightning struck it. One has malice and intent and is a crime. One is a random act of nature.
Those 2 things seem to have done much more damage than a single spark in some dry brush.
[1] http://www.readyforwildfire.org/Defensible-Space/
Is the cost of regular controlled burns < the cost of eliminating most risk of wildfire starts? Im not sure we are qualified to answer that question without data and analysis.
One word: INSURANCE.
Controlled burning etc will be dealt by the government, lawyers are suing PG&E to recover damages
Because it's ugly.
The high amount of available fuel is primarily a California thing. Every other state conducts preventative burns. But California changed its policy on this about ten years ago because rich people don't like smoke in their backyards.
When Trump pointed this out, he was ridiculed by those, including California's governor, who say it was purely global warning.
The president may be a buffoon, but he's not always wrong.
Why California's Best Strategy Against Wildfire Is Hardly Ever Used: https://www.kqed.org/science/1927354/controlled-burns-can-he...
Lack Of Controlled Burns Contributing To California Wildfires: https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/08/03/lack-of-control...
A Century of Fire Suppression Is Why California Is in Flames: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/12/a-century-of...
A brief search suggests that CA still does controlled burns: https://sf.curbed.com/2018/5/14/17352394/jerry-brown-budget-...
Why California's Best Strategy Against Wildfire Is Hardly Ever Used: https://www.kqed.org/science/1927354/controlled-burns-can-he...
Lack Of Controlled Burns Contributing To California Wildfires: https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/08/03/lack-of-control...
A Century of Fire Suppression Is Why California Is in Flames: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/12/a-century-of...
Yes and no. While it's true that occasionally there will be natural disasters such as lightning strikes that occur in high-risk areas during times of high winds, power lines are carrying huge amounts of power all the time and thus coincide with high winds more than lightning strikes. As an example of how to mitigate this risk, PG&E has a policy of cutting power to lines temporarily during high-risk times like extreme winds in high risk areas — although in another sign of negligence in this case, they failed to follow that procedure during the windstorm that led to the outbreak of the Camp Fire.
You can't prevent all disasters, but you can mitigate risk, which at least reduces the incidence rate of disasters. It's starting to look like PG&E was negligent in their prevention efforts. I agree that doesn't mean they're entirely to blame, but as a society we still need to hold companies accountable for negligence so that we help incentivize safety.
You wipe out the equity holders at a minimum. And possibly break the company up Ma Bell style.
So PG&E is split into, let's say, 5 different equal, smaller companies. And Company C caused this fire. Now you have a company 1/5th the size and revenue having to pay the full load. How would that work?
The mind boggles. You cannot change behaviours/regulate infrastructure maintenance or safety through fines to shareholders (and, by proxy, consumers).
1. Stiff regulation for "natural monopolies," or for effectively state-monopolies. The state legislature then prevents the company from raising rates in order to pay back loans or pay off fines. Negligent behavior is punished by the state.
2. Competition, e.g. the Ma Bell breakup. Break up PG&E and have its small companies compete with each other. Any one company can't raise rates to pay off negligent behavior, because they'll lose out to their competition. Negligent behavior is punished by the market.
3. Ajit Pai yourself into a few monopolies with no regulation, and rejoice as you live with whatever Comcast deigns to give you. Actively malicious behavior goes unpunished, or is even rewarded.
a) reduce profitability b) issue more equity and use the proceeds to pay back debt c) increase efficiency/lower cost to deliver services.
This distributes the risk over the companies (useful financially, bad for risk mitigation), but also creates an incentive for the insurer to audit policies, practices, and procedures to minimise risks. Insurance is a pretty powerful business invention, and is unique amongst virtually all businesses in that it seeks out risks (and then tries to manage them).
There are smaller power companies within California (most of them are municipality-owned utilities), and they tend to be fairly accountable to their individual market-owners.
California statewide wildfire insurance claims nearly $12 billion
For Release: January 31, 2018
LOS ANGELES, Calif. — Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones today announced that insurers have received nearly 45,000 insurance claims totaling more than $11.79 billion in losses from the devastating wildfires that burned across the state in October and December 2017 damaging and destroying more than 32,000 homes, 4,300 businesses, more than 8,200 vehicles, watercraft, farm vehicles, and other equipment....*
https://www.insurance.ca.gov/0400-news/0100-press-releases/2...
Again, insurance companies internalise rather than externalise risks. They also manage risks.
This can mean changes to construction, landscaping, fire response, utilities operation, activities restrictions (including legal sanctions, e.g., restrictions on mowing or tilling during high-fire season), hydrants, and more.
There are of course limitations to what can be done. A wonderful concept comes from the field of marine navigation and seamanship:
"The Art of ship handling involves the effective use of forces under control to overcome the effect of forces not under control."
-- Charles H. Cotter
That is the essence of all engineering.
California has extensive experience with major catastrophic fires which have strongly influenced its insurance landscape. The morning of 18 April in 19 and 6 comes to mind.
And after all the capital and political fighting your goal is to make less money than the incumbent.
PG&E rates have to be justified to and approved by regulators; liability costs for wrongfully causing widespread devastation maybe shouldn't be considered a valid basis for rate increases.
In other words, the fire happens nit because somebody lit it but because the environment is ready for it. If you prevent sources of fire then you just get larger fire when the inevitable spark happens and it effectively makes up for all the "avoided" fires.
It is better to have more smaller fires as they are better controllable than one single humongous fire that overwhelmes our resources to control it.
To avoid fires without getting rid of all trees it is better to figure out the conditons that make fires happen more frequently on any particular piece of land, like dropping water table or drying climate.
I am afraid that until we have drones to detect and remediate EVERY fire, immediately, within minutes, there will be no easy solution.
1. Try to stop fires from occurring at dangerous times (high winds), when there's a high risk that the fire will get out of control.
2. Do controlled burns during safe times (low winds), to clear out fuel without killing people or burning down homes.
Unfortunately there's been far too much fire suppression, rather than controlled burns, over the past century in CA [1]. So we're dealing with a pretty huge backlog in addition to climate change.
[1] https://e360.yale.edu/features/fighting-fire-with-fire-calif...
Reducing the number of fires that start doesn't make fires better -- it makes them worse. That was the lesson of the Yellowstone fire. There's a total amount of fuel to burn, and all of it will burn; the question is whether you want it to burn in more little fires or fewer enormous ones.
That second point -- all of the fuel an area produces will eventually burn -- is why it doesn't really matter what started a fire. It's 100% correct to say that if one cause had been prevented, another cause would have started one later, and that later fire would have been worse the one that did happen (barring controlled burns to manage the amount of fuel in the area).
You can think of wildfires using the same model as earthquakes. The movement of two tectonic plates against each other builds up a store of potential energy as one plate is driven out of alignment. The release of that energy is an earthquake. The amount of energy released by earthquakes is fixed by the amount of potential energy accumulated over time. The form of release is not -- you might see harmless earthquakes or city-destroying ones.
If dynamite from a mining operation triggers a huge earthquake, that's bad, because huge earthquakes are bad. But the dynamite didn't cause anything that wasn't going to happen anyway. The same amount of energy gets released regardless, just at different times.
For fires, the growth of plants in the area builds up a reservoir of potential fire energy over time, and you have the choice of either releasing that energy in fires or physically transporting the fuel somewhere else. Only the first is practical.
Development is great at reducing land permeability which means any precipitation flows faster into creeks raising water levels faster.
Land use changes are a huge problem we have almost no control on.
https://www.businessinsider.com/miami-floods-sea-level-rise-...
You can also see the historical tide gauge from 1910 through 2010 at https://www.miamidade.gov/green/library/sea-level-rise-flood...
Also noted in the above pdf is the salt water intrusion into the Biscayne Aquifer which is used for drinking water in the area - this is a major issue.
absolutely ridiculous assumption and overreach.
There are far too many people looking to point to climate change for every natural disaster that occurs. Many areas in California are naturally hot, dry, and prone to fires much of the year.
we are building more and more houses / structures in fire prone areas, making it worse.
"by 2050, 645,000 houses in California will be built in “very high” wildfire severity zones."
https://www.vox.com/2018/8/7/17661096/california-wildfires-2...
we also contribute to it beyond just starting the fires directly (power lines, vehicles, appliances, etc), we make the conditions worse with poor land management
"Some researchers said that logging in the burned area after a fire in 2008, which was intended to clear out fuels and make this part of Northern California safer, may have had the opposite result. The logging may have left fast-burning weeds and young trees in the fire’s path."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/us/camp-fire-paradise-cau...
A study published earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, or PNAS, found that 84 percent of wildfires are ignited by humans, whether through downed power lines, careless campfires, or arson.
“Human-started wildfires ... tripled the length of the fire season, dominated an area seven times greater than that affected by lightning fires, and were responsible for nearly half of all area burned,” the paper reported.
It rained in May and October. It is not helpful to your argument that you are expressing your best honest guesses as if they were canonical fact.
In my opinion, there were a number of direct causes:
1. Drought killed a lot of plants adding to the amount of dry fuel
2. A wet winter grew a lot of new plants which, when dried out, added to the fuel
3. Rain sufficient to eliminate fire risk came unusually late in the year. Normally arrives in the range of 2 to 6 weeks earlier. So it was unusual, but the variation is pretty large in the first place.
4. We had a high-wind event sufficient to turn a fire which would not be national news into national news.
5. PG&E negligence.
To make the case that this fire is caused by climate change, you need to link one or more of the direct causes I've listed to climate change. In my opinion, while climate change is a possible cause, California climate has so much variation it is hard to pin these events to it at this time.
All four points you list are a direct consequence of climate change (e.g. due to jetstream blockade: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180524141647.h...). Climate change is real and it's dangerous.
You also missed one point: the lack of both controlled burns and huge fire barriers between forest sections (i.e. barren land), both of which led the fire to explode.
Also thanks, I liked that article describing blocking, but it didn't tie the phenomena to climate change. In fact, it says that blocking is a long-known thing. Do you know of any research that does tie it?
I made the statement to explicitly point out hard data that most might think were hyperbolic. This is far from a guess. It did not rain one drop in NorCal from the beginning of April to the end of October 2018 [0]. If you have evidence to the contrary, please let me know.
>3. Rain sufficient to eliminate fire risk came unusually late in the year. Normally arrives in the range of 2 to 6 weeks earlier. So it was unusual, but the variation is pretty large in the first place.
Yes, this was my entire point. The rain came a month late this year, which is why the fires got out of hand.
>To make the case that this fire is caused by climate change, you need to link one or more of the direct causes I've listed to climate change. In my opinion, while climate change is a possible cause, California climate has so much variation it is hard to pin these events to it at this time.
I wouldn't have made the assertion without direct causality. Why did the rain come late? There was simply no energy left in the Pacific after a record setting hurricane season. It took a month of no hurricanes in the eastern pacific for sea surface temperatures to get back to where they can produce consistent moisture over the west coast.
Take a look at this series of images. They show a snapshot of the SST anomaly data for September in the western hemisphere from 2014 to 2018.
https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2014/anomw.9.4.20...
https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2015/anomw.9.3.20...
https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2016/anomw.9.5.20...
https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2017/anomw.9.4.20...
https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2018/anomw.9.6.20...
See how much more energy is out there in 2014-15 (years with really wet summers/falls) vs. the cooling that becomes really apparent by 2018? It's as if the oceans have reached a total carrying capacity for energy and passed a tipping point where these massive storms get whipped up and burn off all their energy quickly, rather than having a slowly dripping moisture source over the west coast as we always have had.
You can see here that we are currently sitting at ~18% of normal precipitation for the year in Northern California [1].
https://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/napa/california/united... [0]
https://www.ggweather.com/seasonal_rain.htm [1]
SST anomalies, like all anomalies, cannot be interpreted without first understanding the distribution of anomalies. Examining 5 sequential years is not as helpful as you might want, especially since 2015 was an El Niño year.
And as a Californian let me assure you the tails on all our weather distributions are enormous. We only get a dozen storms[2] on average. But just a few here and there can easily change that to six and a drought, or 24 and a deluge.
[1] https://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/paradise/california/un...
[2] I pulled this number out of my head. Consider the idea rather than the absolute value.
There is already massive effort put into controlled burns and training/funding firefighters...and you are right sometimes an act of god (lightning) will cause a fire, but those acts of god are more likely to occur in non populated areas and actually provide the benefits of a controlled burn. So the point is firefighters have enough to contend with naturally, they don’t need people/companies running around starting fires in populated areas.
FYI 84% of wildfires are started by humans, nearly 1/3 if wildfires are intentional arson.
Would it make a difference if that person had a history of disobeying safety rules, had been warned a number of times, and had caused significant damage in the past?
The fact that some subset of fires can't be prevented doesn't mean we should throw up our hands and never try to prevent any fires. When somebody causes one we should investigate and take appropriate action.
That said, this isn’t quite burned down a house, which they should absolutely be on the hook for, this is the whole city burned down.
There is sort of a structural responsibility to limit blast radius of bad actors that also failed.
Now, in that situation, does it matter whether your house gets struck by lightning or your neighbour's cigarette lighter happens to set it off near a cracked window? Assuming your neighbour is miraculously unhurt, the answer is no.
Well, in the same way that if someone is shot in the chest, the cause of rapid bleeding out might be the big blood pumping organ in the area.
No, put finding where that first movement happened is perhaps key to finding the hand that flicked that first grain, and does bear the whole blame.
> Your example is of relatively stable system (presumably healthy human life)
We don't consider the healthiness relevant for most legal purposes; are you familiar with the eggshell rule?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull
That's the problem, is people aren't looking at the actual problem. Fires are natural for this area, your house is not.
To the extent we require PG&E to be perfectly diligent, then we incentivize people to build their houses with matchsticks.
It's annoying when people get upset about California "bailing out" PG&E. As a regulated utility PG&E can't control the prices they charge users, nor do they have any power over, e.g., building regulations that would minimize damages. In a free market for PG&E to completely internalize (and minimize) the fire hazards they create, electricity prices would almost certainly be politically unviable, particularly in remote communities.
No matter what we do the costs of these fires will be socialized. PG&E is a heavily regulated public utility. The time to punish PG&E is when they fail to abide by regulations, not after big fires.
As a society we've already decided on the principle mechanism for incentivizing diligent behavior on the part of PG&E. When big fires happen we'd be better off emphasizing remediations like changing building codes (including requiring retractive remediation), and maybe tightening PG&E regulations. But of course it's far easier and more politically expedient to simply blame PG&E outright. And the politicians who understand this dilemma? We blame them for being corrupt for not doing the "obviously right" thing. And this is why politics is broken; because we refuse to accept that there are trade-offs, that no matter what we do bad things happen, people will get hurt, and we have to make difficult decisions about maximizing equality (sic) while trying to avoid moral hazard.
Regulations like "Maintain your equipment to keep it in good working order" and "Follow policies in place to prevent disasters"?
Source?
What I find is that of wildfires, human sources of ignition are 80% of fires in northern California (the percentage is higher in Southern), but that the rate falls as low as 40% where humans are less active (Great Basin).
Northern California acreage burnt tends toward natural causes: https://i0.wp.com/ecowest.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Sli...
The source concludes with this Takeaway:
The large number of lightning-caused fires out West should remind us that wildfires are inevitable in the region. Measures like campfire bans and public lands closures, which may succeed in cutting the number of human-caused fires, can only do so much.
http://ecowest.org/2013/06/04/wildfire-ignition-trends-human...
So, everyone ought to do the things you describe, yes — but I can't fault residents of California for having a vested interest in keeping PG&E from burning them down every year, either.
EDIT: It would have cost them ~4x the original build cost to bury all those power lines in the forest, but they chose not to spend on infrastructure and may be bankrupted by their poor choices.
That figure is valid for flat plains. Much more if you're all in a forest (e.g. in Salzburg a cost factor of 8-9x was projected).
Ever tried to run a sewer pipe through a forest? I actually worked in trench digging, it's incredibly hard. Mostly we did telecom wiring, but one particularly fucked up job was running a sewer line with ca. 300m downhill through a forest. Can't use anything larger than a small tiny 1.4 ton excavator. For a 380kV cable it's even harder as you have to dig two meters deep and about 30m wide, and you're straight outta luck when you don't have 2m of soil but only 1m and hard rock below. The trenches required are massive. In addition the waste heat from the power lines heats up the ground (thus impacting the forest) and you gotta maintain the trench plus side margin space to be entirely tree free, as you absolutely do not want tree roots to pierce the cables.
http://www.gentryoffroad.com/php/maps/california/nationalfor...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/USA_Nati...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumas_National_Forest
Power transmission systems use arrestors and other devices to protect their system from lightning and other badness. Taking a hit may result in the device blowing apart, including hot metal bits.
Knowing this, a regulatory agency may implement vegetation clearance rules around transmission towers, knowing that these are high-risk areas. If the initiation point for a fire is in an area that's supposed to be bare mineral soil (and maybe isn't), that's interesting.
And the cause could have been a piece of glass acting as a magafying glass, a spark from a car or hundreds of other causes.
They're finding more and more frequently it's harder to control them in a lot of cases, and it's easier to manage the PR by just calling them prescribed.
Anyway Gov collects plenty of money for infrastructure projects they would just rather funnel the money into their own pockets via war spending.
Sources:
-CPUC rejects SDG&E's attempt to pass on costs: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/energy-green/s...
-Sempra (the parent company) settles for $700M in damages: https://uk.reuters.com/article/sempra/update-1-san-diego-uti...
-Sempra's earnings and shares down as a result: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-sempras-1st-quarte...
That said, I'd wait until a proper forensic decision is reached; I can't say I expect a news channel to be too rigorous in its determination of whether a damaged tower caused the fire, or whether the fire damaged the tower.
I also agree with the other comment regarding the need for more controlled/prescribed burning; in Australia again, it is a reasonably established prevention strategy[1], with a long history among indigenous Australians[2].
[0]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-12-23/judge-approves-black-...
[1]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-13/is-the-prescribed-bur...
[2]: https://landcareaustralia.org.au/project/traditional-aborigi...
[0] https://www.sacbee.com/latest-news/article213580349.html
Also interesting that three weeks before the Camp Fire began, PG&E were cutting power during high winds.[0]
[0]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/nation-now/2018/10/15/p...
1. Building codes allowed this to happen. Why are people allowed to build homes with asphalt roofs and wood siding in the urban-wildland interface? Indoor fire sprinklers are now required by code, why not outdoor fire sprinklers in interface environments like this?
2. Could we have an infrared geostationary satellite that could automatically alert fire crews to new infrared events? How about having helicopters on standby ready to respond within minutes of a satellite-sensed infrared flair up?
Sprinklers aren't magic. They have a very limited range and you must run them for many hours to saturate the area. They might protect you against falling embers but they're not going to slow down a fire jumping tree to tree. And you aren't going to wet down multiple acres of land.
If you're on well (and in the country, everyone is) then you need electricity to run the pumps; did the fire cut you off? Did PG&E, for safety? Very very few solar systems can operate disconnected from the grid. But maybe you have a generator? When was the last time you started it, and do you know how to disconnect the grid and hook it up to the pumps?
Maybe you have a pool and a gas powered pump. When was the last time you ran it? Will it start on the first pull or do you need to rebuild the carb before the fire arrives?
We had a big scare just this last year. We (and everyone else in the neighborhood) ran every sprinkler we had for days. Would it have helped? Maybe, in marginal cases. Mostly it was a good exercise to make us realize how underprepared we really are.
San Francisco Gas and Electric Company and the California Gas and Electric Corporation merged to form PG&E in 1905.
This technology dates from the almost the earliest days: both Nikola Tesla (d 1943) and Thomas Edison (d 1931) were still alive when this tower was built, and George Westinghouse died only in 1914.