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pge liable for camp fire?

FXCLM5

FXCLM5

bombaclaud
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:mad they will just dodge this one too and chargeback butte county customers :thumbdown

Meanwhile, a landowner near where the blaze began, Betsy Ann Cowley, said she got an email from Pacific Gas & Electric Co. the day before the fire last week telling her that crews needed to come onto her property because the utility’s power lines were causing sparks. PG&E had no comment on the email, and state officials said the cause of the inferno was under investigation.
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https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/8946299-181/under-a-dark-emotional-cloud?artslide=8&sba=AAS
 
It is a “public utulity” so their operations are not without some public scrutiny...

Gross negligence is a problem of course. But still, the customers, and stockholders get to pay for mistakes.

Capitalism, eh?
 
If history is any lesson, and it should be, the free pass they got on the Napa fires should be an indication as to how much they will be hurt by this as a company and as Execs....namely, very minimal.

As long as the decisions were made to increase profits, they were just being good businessmen and doing good business.
 
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*IF the stated email in the OP comes close to being the reason,
Maybe this camp fire would bring a conclusion that a private utility for public use with power lines running over "private property" pretty much ends up up not working.. "in the long term" :rolleyes

Or maybe it won't bring that conclusion.
 
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AbsolutEnduser said:
*IF the stated email in the OP comes close to being the reason,
Maybe this camp fire would bring a conclusion that a private utility for public use with power lines running over "private property" pretty much ends up up not working.. "in the long term" :rolleyes

Or maybe it won't bring that conclusion.
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That's a very difinitive and insightful observation.
 
A downed line can cause a fire. Also, a line can relay due to smoke and ash from a nearby fire. I’ve seen both happen, not enough to draw a conclusion yet.
 
An article in the sac bee said their stock fell by 1/3 today and some investors are leaving.
 
The fire blew up on Thursday and there was a weather alert from Tuesday through Saturday because of the wind and PGE said they were going to shut off power during that time, but they never did. *If* there was a line taken down from a tree that came down from the wind during the weather alert, then I'd say it's very likely they'd be liable.
 
While I don't disagree with what everyone's said so far, how would this be better if it wasn't a private company? If it was purely public, there would surely be even less accountability. Shitty Bay Bridge bolts? Cracked transit center beams? Can you think of one time in the history of California that a public entity was held accountable?

Even if they were held liable as a public entity, then who's on the hook financially? Still the rate payers. The balance would however be on the tax paying public instead of PGE investors.

I think what it comes down to is having transmission lines running through a very windy tinderbox isn't great conceptually. The cost of undergrounding though would be astronomical (although redirecting the moonbeam express funds might be a good fucking start) What to do?
 
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San Bruno cost cutting probably wouldn't have happened. I also suspect there's some sort of bitter game being played. I think they turned it off prematurely last time as an FU to everyone and then caught a bunch of shit for it all over the news and it hurt stock prices, so they decided to let it ride this time.
 
LakeMerrit said:
. Shitty Bay Bridge bolts? Cracked transit center beams?
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Not so quick-
At least one of those two was a product of a private company, used two pieces instead of one.

LakeMerrit said:
I think what it comes down to is having transmission lines running through a very windy tinderbox isn't great conceptually. The cost of undergrounding though would be astronomical
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Yeah I was thinking of that too. But for long distance, underground is probably impossible, additionally due to terrain...
.. however, maybe it deserves a paradigm change. What if the reason predominantly becomes the overhead wires??... There will need to be some change, or else, it will continue to be bad
 
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LakeMerrit said:
While I don't disagree with what everyone's said so far, how would this be better if it wasn't a private company? If it was purely public, there would surely be even less accountability. Shitty Bay Bridge bolts? Cracked transit center beams? Can you think of one time in the history of California that a public entity was held accountable?

Even if they were held liable as a public entity, then who's on the hook financially? Still the rate payers. The balance would however be on the tax paying public instead of PGE investors.

I think what it comes down to is having transmission lines running through a very windy tinderbox isn't great conceptually. The cost of undergrounding though would be astronomical (although redirecting the moonbeam express funds might be a good fucking start) What to do?
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Underground transmission (115kV and up) starts at $6,000,000 per mile.
 
AbsolutEnduser said:
Not so quick-
At least one of those two was a product of a private company, used two pieces instead of one.
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And who, pray tell, was held accountable for that? Was the replacement paid for by the private company who you're pinning responsibility on, or was it paid for by the public entity?

When CalTrans, or any CalPERS recipient for that matter fucks up, are they fired? Demoted? Are damages paid out of their own pocket? Their pension's pocket? No never. We the taxpayers pay for their fuckups every time. We pay the price for their lowest bidder policies. We pay the price for their negligence. We the taxpayers are their employer, their financial co-signer, and their only investor. We are the ones who are held responsible. This is why the cries to socialize utilities confuse me. People are mad PGE may have fucked up, and relish (consciously or not) that there is a big evil corporation to blame. If it was socialized, there would be nobody to blame, nobody to seek damages from. There would still be 120,000+ miles of transmission lines to maintain, and there would still be financial and temporal limitations on how much maintenance can be done in a given year.

I completely understand the anger and dismay, but simple solutions aren't really apparent; no matter how much we'd like a simple boogyman to blame.
 
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Not quite a "solution", but they already have a pretty decent bandaid in place to cover the majority of the problems we've had, which is dry conditions mixed with wind. They hire a company to identify high risk trees, then another company to remove them, then they shut down power when the wind hits certain speeds, then they do a bunch of line testing before turning them back on. They seem to be struggling with actually *doing* the things they've laid out.
 
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