I’m not sure about that particular statistic (half of the total number of fires, regardless of size? Half of acres burned?), but utility lines definitely cause a lot of fires. This can be mitigated by burying lines, which IIRC is what San Diego does, but it’s expensive so companies don’t want to do it unless their arms are twisted.
I read somewhere a while back that most or at least half of California wildfires are cause by faulty electrical company equipment. Is this true? And how come no one has ever reported it?
Submitted 1 day ago by Patnou@lemmy.world to [deleted]
Comments
Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
thermal_shock@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It’s sad spending a few more dollars and not reporting billions in profits to save vast amounts of land and property is frowned upon.
Patnou@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yea I guess I should have tried to slip frequency in there somehow.
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It gets reported and investigated all the time. PG&E, a large power company in California, paid around $14 billion in the court case following the big fires there a few years ago.
Brkdncr@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Californians know that the electrical company transmission lines are neglected. It was reported heavily.
meco03211@lemmy.world 1 day ago
But I’m told by some whiny ass crybabies after that Pratt prick lost that it’s the dems fault for all the wildfires.
Brkdncr@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It sort of is. These companies need to be regulated more.
Fondots@lemmy.world 1 day ago
You read it somewhere, so clearly someone has reported it
The issues are how do you
- Get people to pay attention to those reports and care?
- Get those people to vote accordingly?
- Get those elected officials to hold the electric companies accountable?
- Hold those elected officials accountable when they don’t?
- Keep those people engaged and doing points 1-4 consistently so that it doesn’t happen again?
DudeWhoYapsTooMuch@lemmy.world 1 day ago
You show the effects of the consequences of how it was reported, blame them and when it’s elected officials, you hold them accountable. The problem is that no one knows how to actually hold people accountable without getting nasty. We need to do what Zohran Mamdani did and put ourselves in the spotlight and do not shy away but keep it clean, and respectful.
Proprietary_Blend@lemmy.world 1 day ago
[deleted]thermal_shock@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Explain it please.
Proprietary_Blend@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Ok. I’ll try.
Trump sucks.
It’s super popular to blame Trump for everything.
Dude can’t read.
Tell me if you’re still confused.
bluGill@fedia.io 1 day ago
Many of those forests need to burn regularly. Check with a qualified forester for your area but often the forest needs to burn so who cares.
Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Fire isn’t needed at any intensity at any time of year, every year. Fire adapted plants can be and are getting over-burned by fires that are getting more intense (less rain, more heat). This is exacerbated by non-native plants (especially grasses and eucalyptus) that outcompete the native plants and are then extra vulnerable to fire.
massive_bereavement@fedia.io 1 day ago
You're confusing wildfires with bushfires.
bluGill@fedia.io 1 day ago
Many of those forests need to burn regularly. Check with a qualified forester for your area but often the forest needs to burn so who cares.
insomniac_lemon@lemmy.cafe 1 day ago
The search term is
PG&E hooks. For example, a breakdown on hackaday.GreenBeard@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
This. It’s the fundamental reason natural monopolies like utilities are problematic to privatize. Democratic governments have an incentive to prioritize residents and citizens interests. The only interests private companies incentivize are shareholders, who increasingly do not care if their profits result in destruction, death, and disaster because they don’t know or care about the people being harmed. They don’t live in the places that are burning, so why would they reduce their take just to ensure the safety of the communities the company serves. As long as the losses they take from lawsuits and the cost of paying governments to limit their liability, are less than the cost of maintaining the lines then 100 year old hardware seems “Good Enough” to them.
Can you regulate them to the moon and back to prevent that? Sure. By the time you’ve finished building that bureaucracy, it would have cost you a fraction of price just to have a government department do it.