Note: This editorial was originally in the queue to be published in a prominent newspaper, but the editor somehow forgot about it after I submitted it. While it is a little late in the news cycle, the facts remain unchanged and relevant. – Anthony
The title is with apologies to John Milton and Yogi Berra, who surely would have something to say about these dual tragedies.
In November 2018, a massive wind-driven wildfire destroyed the town of Paradise, California. I experienced it firsthand, watching the plume from relative safety and later comforting friends and co-workers who lost homes, and nearly their lives. Eighty-five people did, some who I knew. It was an unparalleled tragedy – until August 2023, when the town of Lahaina in Maui burned to the ground and at least 115 people died. The weather events, fire conditions, and human folly that led up to the Maui fire were nearly identical to what happened in Paradise. It reminded me of what British Prime Minister Winston Churchill famously said in a 1948 speech, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
Some journalists and vocal climate activists were quick to immediately blame “climate change” in both fires before the fire investigations were even started, much less completed. A detailed analysis by meteorologist Cliff Mass, PhD., of the University of Washington shows that the Maui fire was a perfect storm of a high wind weather event, predicted days ahead, combined with a high fuel load due to dry invasive grasses. The same scenario was the setup for the 2018 Paradise Campfire.
In both fires, power lines and high winds were the ignition source and the driver. In both fires, dry high fuel loads contributed to the intensity of the fires. In both fires, there were ample warnings in weather forecasts.
The other common denominator in both fires was the institutional failure of electric utility companies. Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) in California and Hawaii Electric both were pursuing green energy plans to satisfy climate advocates and investors instead of paying attention to basic maintenance of their electrical power lines. The Paradise Campfire was blamed on PG&E ignoring maintenance on century-old power lines, which broke and sparked in a high-wind event. With video and data showing Maui power lines sparking during high winds, Hawaiian Electric is now the focus for lack of maintenance in favor of green projects. The Wall Street Journal, in their article Hawaiian Electric Knew of Wildfire Threat, but Waited Years to Act, noted, “Four years ago, the utility said it needed to do more to prevent its power lines from emitting sparks. It made little progress, focusing on a shift to clean energy.”
The WSJ reporters also discovered Hawaiian Electric had plans to spend nearly $190 million on wildfire mitigation measures on Maui, but spent less than 1.3 percent of that – just $245,000. The wildfire plan was delayed by company bureaucracy. In the meantime, the company focused on green energy climate goals, instead.
Given the makeup of shareholders for Hawaiian Electric, with climate agenda driven Vanguard Group and BlackRock Fund Advisors being the two largest shareholders, it isn’t a surprise to discover the company put their green energy climate agenda over routine maintenance and safety measures.
In 2019, Hawaiian Electric started the risk of fires and in a press release outlined a number of strategies to mitigate the wildfire risks from its aging power lines. The company noted that it was studying how utilities in California were dealing with similar wildfire threats. None of that was implemented.
In June 2022, Hawaiian Electric filed an application with the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission stating it wanted to spend around $190 million over five years on upgrading its transmission and distribution infrastructure to be more resilient, but at the time of the Lahaina fire, that plan still languished, unimplemented. In an August 19 New York Times article, the risk and the delay were laid bare.
“Hawaiian Electric has known for years that extreme weather was becoming a bigger danger, but the company did little to strengthen its equipment and failed to adopt emergency plans used elsewhere, like being prepared to cut off power to prevent fires. The utility knew it needed to upgrade its equipment but did not make changes that could have reduced risks of fires, energy experts said.”
The pattern of deferred maintenance and safety upgrades at the expense of populist climate goals is the same reason for the PG&E Paradise fire, and now the Maui fire. Literally, it is “déjà vu all over again.”
Perhaps it’s time to put aside populist green energy demands and create a company constitution to ensure that system maintenance and the safety of ratepayers is the top priority. Hopefully, with two tragic examples now in full view, other power companies will learn from this history, rather than repeat it.
Images: Hawaii Dept. of Land and Natural Resources, Chico Enterprise-Record via LiPo Ching/Bay Area News Group
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Tragic, in so many ways.
Just need to send a few billion more bucks to Ukraine and now Gaza.
Exactly.
That causes the cost of money (bonds) to go up due to inflation, productivity declines and less work is done.
FJB.
I think you irony flew over the down voters heads.
The wizards of instant attribution to climate change strike again.
Act in haste and repent at leisure.
Yep.
Grab the first headline.
Impression accomplished!
Have any ever repented?
Not publicly.
I think anyone following ESG principles should be sanctioned for violating their fiduciary responsibilites.
ESG + DEI = Wildfire conditions to burn the middle class to the ground, leaving a surviving poverty class dependent on a Ruling Class Corporatocracy and their bureaucratic minions to keep the surviving poor in check.
It only ends in death and poverty for all.
The virtuous economic spiral of growth in the 20th century was a perfect example of the prosperity that could be achieved with relative freedom of the entrepreneurs to develop new businesses, freedom of the workers to form unions that would hopefully look after their interests, and the government restricting itself to making sure monopolies didn’t form.
Without that engine of growth, the parasites multiply and suck the life out of everything – witness the workers paradise of the Warsaw pact countries.
Even in China, the oligarchy is starting to run out of rope, as the expression goes, only bouyed by its international trade and slave labour.
Perhaps the utility’s board members and their financing corporations should be the ones held responsibile.
In both California and Hawaii, I would blame the state regulators even more than the utilities they were “regulating”. Forced cooperation with rash policy is ultimately irresponsible, but investing in a business that is effectively an arm of the state is betting on politics.
“In both fires, power lines and high winds were the ignition source and the driver. In both fires, dry high fuel loads contributed to the intensity of the fires. In both fires, there were ample warnings in weather forecasts.”
Add the Marshall fire in Colorado to that list
Although, fortunately, the death toll was much less at 2 persons.
Even though local governments were somewhat negligent in preventing the Marshall fire, they did do a good job in evacuating folks, mainly by notifying them of the problem and then getting out of their way.
Last week I helped a friend move back into her rebuilt Boulder home. The neighborhood is full of houses in various stages of reconstruction nearly two years after the fire.
Contrary to the opinion that the cause was that electric companies failed to upgrade their lines I believe it was more a failure to remove the growth beneath the lines. You can only design/build lines to certain specs and as the danger zone increases so does the cost to build if you’re including hazards in your specs, which should be done, but can’t encompass all of what nature can give you. No kindling, no fire. Only underground electricity distribution can help solve this problem but the expense is many times above ground delivery.
According to Hawaiian Electric, they de-energized power lines several hours before the inferno. Not sure what newspaper published it.
Just about every online news source published this, if my quick search results were typical.
For example:
Maui Electric [part of Hawaiian Electric: https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/about-us/our-history/maui-electric-history ] said the fire department fought the fire and said firefighters reported it was “100% contained” by 9 a.m. It was around this time that the utility claimed it had shut off power.
“There was no electricity flowing through the wires in the area or anywhere else on the West Maui coast,” Maui Electric said in a statement.
(Source: https://abcnews.go.com/US/maui-electric-responds-lawsuit-claims-power-lines-de/story?id=102623345 )
Which is why the police blocking Lahaina residents from exiting due to the “danger from downed power lines” WAS A LIE.
****************************
My theory: At the time of the Lahaina tragedy, the U.N. and its toadie, Joe Biden, were champing at the bit to declare a “climate emergency.” Biden was on the verge of doing that (per all the usual mainstream media publications). He did not. The facts about what actually happened got out too quickly and forcefully to allow him to get away with it.
Yes. I actually DO believe that those who will do almost anything to make money off of solar and wind and EV’s, etc. intentionally created that horrific tragedy in Lahaina. They were going to use that (along with other propaganda, e.g., the lie that Greece’s wildfires were caused by “climate change” — they were 83% human caused per Greece’s minister for environmental affairs) as emotion-jerking propaganda to promote “renewables” and EV’s, etc..
Edit: The LIE is the police using the power lines as an EXCUSE. The police DID block the residents from leaving. There are videos and many eyewitnesses have testified to that.
Sparking lines is not within specs.
Maintenance of the grounds around their towers and equipment is the responsibility of the utility so the buck stops with them.
I don’t know about you the readers, but being Canadian I think the expression should be “pass the puck” and the “puck stops with…” rather than buck. Why would passing the ‘buck’ ( dollar or male dear) imply responsibility or blame?
It’s from poker – the dealing would pass around the table and be marked by a ‘buck’ or buck-horn handled knife stuck in the table, Truman’s ‘the buck stops here’ is derived from that.
Thanks for that. You learn something new around here every day. 🙂
How exactly did you and Wall Street Journal establish that PG&E “ignored” maintenance? CPUC hears rate cases every 3 years. Did you go to the 2008,2011,2014,2017 CPUC rate case hearing records and see if the in rate cases, PG&E tried to increase maintenance budget to upgrade those lines or if PUC reduced it by hundreds of millions of dollars because that would have put burden on customers? Did you see where PUC was happy to raise electricity prices to fund Wind/Solar? Did you maybe go see where it denied request a request to increase the maintenance budget from PG&E’s Engineers and Scientist was also refused? Nope, you didn’t do any of that because if you had you would not have been silly enough to just quote the WSJ on who should be blamed for lack of maintenance and upgrade. I never worked for any utility but I have been in projects under CPUC and they always have the final say on what happens.
OK Mr. “I’m so smarter than you.” You are welcome to go find those things, and post them here. If you find them and post them, I’ll make a correction.
Otherwise, you’re just whining.
Mr. Watts, while I don’t want to overly discount the role/resposibility of the utility companies, Elec_Engineer makes valid and correct points, at the end of the day Public Utility Commissions (PUCs) in both CA and HI have an outsized impact to and final approval of nearly EVERYTHING the utility companies they regulate do, right down to the maintenance of the distribution system and keeping vegitation trimmed to provide a degree of safety from a downed line causing a significant fire.
I work in the industry as an energy/utility consultant for the federal govt., the DoD specifically, and am based in CA, but previously worked in HI as a DoD employee working in utilities, so I see and have seen these PUCs in action up close.
I know you are quite aware of how govt. regulation, and particularly regulation that is as pervasive as these (and many other) PUCs are, with almost constantly changing regulations, needing to approve pretty much any expenditure that ties back to the rate payers, and the “revolving door” between the regulators and regulated, it’s really what I describe as one big game, cronyism, with the consumers, or in this case, rate payers, getting the short end of the stick.
To Elec_Engineer’s point, you can’t only blame the utility companies, they are forced to comply with and generally follow the signals given by the PUC that controls them. If you REALLY want to point to the primary source of blame, it’s your state level politicians, as they appoint and/or approve the members of the PUC.
Folks with a platform, like yourself, should be sure to always mention, and in the case of these and other tragic fires, be sure to clearly describe, the outsized influence the PUC and in turn, the politicians have in these tragedies.
As I understand it the CA PUC can line item veto a utility’s proposed budget. Sounds like HI is the same way.
Ouch…..
Did you read the article by chance? The answer is there, the utilities had outlined plans to do maintenance but never got it done. And they don’t have to go for permission to do maintenance, there’s allowances for that in the budget already.
Anthony was talking about “basic maintenance” which shouldn’t cost all that much. Seems there’s no excuse.
Define “basic maintenance” and show its cost.
Not true, having a plan and having and APPROVED plan are 2 completely different things. Like I stated before, even maintenance, basic or not, MUST be approved by the PUC. Generally speaking, clearing of any vegitation, from grass to trees, is frowned upon because these PUCs are controlled by and/or in bed with the envirnomentalists, who want everything to be “natural”. Well, nature includes fires, and in times before man, namely ranchers, farmers, etc., began managing these areas, the fires would get quite large. That is natures way of getting rid of the old, dead, diseased vegetation/trees and keeping animal/insect populations under control. Ever wonder why with some pine trees, the only way the cones germinate is if they get hot enough, it takes a fire to cause them to grow, addapted to the environment they lived in for thousands of years.
PG&E recently proposed spending billions to put nearly all their power lines underground, but the CA PUC didn’t approve. It would be expensive, but not as expensive as the potential law suits from fires.
Foolishly CA allows utilities to be sued for the fires, but says the cost cannot be passed on to the rate payers. No business can have expenses that are not passed on to its customers, it wouldn’t be a business for long, so the utilities get coverage built into their insurance, and pass on the insurance premiums in their rates, but most people are too unaware (and I’m being nice here) to understand this.
Like I said before, it’s just a big game, cronyism to an extreme, and the rate payers get the short end of the deal.
I can assure you, these PUCs (and likely most) are FAR more interested in climate change and what they believe to be envirnmental benefit over preventing fires. I have sat in day-long discussions involving these people, one word: SCARY!!! They are true believers and part of that belief is humans are the problem, so if some are eliminated, they really don’t care.
BTW, it’s HUGELY expensive to do vegetation control. Think about rugged terrain, a team of well paid employees (can’t be just anyone around electrical equipment) cutting grass, often with weed wackers because the terrain is too rough for any type of mower, trimming bushes, using a bucket truck to trim trees. All this across many, if not hundreds of miles of power lines, substations, and other equipment.
“BTW, it’s HUGELY expensive to do vegetation control.”
Cheaper than fighting huge fires.
Looking for evidence of ignored maintenance? A two minute search online to find images of PG&E extremely worn power line hooks.
These incidents could have been avoided if media moguls and their outlets had given the same energy and intensity used to beat the climate change drum to beating the climate resilience drum, directing the public’s attention toward the relaxed posture of power companies maintaining their assets and government officials maintaining the forests.
The media moguls did not live up to the level of trust that others placed with them.
I think you nailed it with “relaxed posture”.
The many parallels are truly amazing. There ought to be a degree of criminal culpability for some of the utility execs.
While I agree with holding the suits responsible, Rud, holding the politicians and their bureaucratic minions responsible would be far more effective in remedying utility reliability problems.
“In an August 19 New York Times article, the risk and the delay were laid bare.
“Hawaiian Electric has known for years that extreme weather was becoming a bigger danger, ” ”
Don’t you just love it how the NY Times can twist an article that had nothing to do with climate change (“extreme weather becoming….”) into a Watch Tower-type of pamphlet for its doomsday cult.
I noted that myself and was going to comment on it, but you did it for me.
Yes, they always have the CO2 monster in the back of their minds anytime any kind of weather is involved.
They are obsessed. And they are delusional since there is no evidence CO2 has anything to do with how Earth’s weather unfolds..
Excellent article. These non climate change caused wildfires are also enhance by idiot environmentalists who use ill conceived environmental laws to preclude forest thinning efforts, use of prescribed burns, use of logging to remove dead trees and overgrown tree growth, etc. Environment idiots have been given a free pass by the climate alarmist media for decades for the huge damage their incompetence has caused in increasing wildfires across the nation.
Bingo!
Recalling Anthony’s article at the time of the Paradise fire, it seems that the other common denominator in the horrendous death toll was the single, restricted, escape route through the two towns which caused a fatal traffic jamb.
Actually, there were two ways out, albeit the other one was a narrow, 2-lane road with a lot of twisty turns, but probably less traffic.
In the photo of Lahaina, there is a white building (built of brick or concrete perhaps?) with a red roof (tiles or steel) that appears to have survived the fire. IIRC there were a few brick or concrete buildings in Paradise that survived.
In the Fort McMurray fire of 2016, there were frame-construction houses with vinyl siding and asphalt shingle roofs less than 5 metres from the forest edge. I don’t have to spell it out, do I?
One difference at Fort Mac was that the evacuation of 90,000 people went well, and there were no deaths from the fire. I refrain from commenting on that – despite some rather disturbing stories coming out of Maui.
The old Lahaina house that stood had been recently purchased. The new owners redid the landscaping—removed everything planted under the roof overhang and replaced with crushed stone. The red roof was clay tile. So house did not combust.
Makes sense.
I rode my bicycle around Louisville and Superior after the Marshall fire in Colorado and I noticed that it tended to be the back side (down wind) of trees, fence posts and buildings where burning or scorching began and at ground level at least for most trees and fence posts.
Besides being made of less combustible materials, houses that survived tended to be in relatively open areas. Places where embers could settle were ignition points.
This suggests that individuals can and should take some responsibility for the safety of their surroundings. PUCs and electric companies make easy and lucrative targets for legal action. But in Lahaina the fires were spread by overgrown grasses on land belonging to a patchwork of private and public entities: The Housing Finance and Development Corporation, State of Hawaii, County of Maui, Kamehameha Schools, and Companies owned by Peter Martin.
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/climate-environment/maui-fire-invasive-grass-cf6dbca2
Downed power lines near Boulder have been identified as one source of the Marshall Fire. But a second cause was a smoldering coal seam above the town of Superior which was fanned to life by the hundred-plus mph winds, and which ignited open space grasses.
Such grasses in both locations would historically have been burned off by indigenous people, then later grazed by cattle, sheep and goats brought in by European settlers up until the 20th Century. Now, grasses are an extension of the “wildland urban interface”, and as such environmentalists don’t want to significantly reduce them. In a personal query to Boulder Open Space Parks Manager about grasses, she replied,
So there is that. Balancing the health of migratory birds against the threat of wind-whipped grass fires.
People have to make their own choices if they aren’t protected by officials in government.
Yeah, goats and sheep could be helpful, particularly this year with the excess of vegetation.
People are never protected by officials in government. People are secondary to Leftist politics and ideology.
Can’t recall where I saw but there is a full write-up about that house and it’s incredibly simple why it survived;
2 reasons:
Else there was/is absolutely nothing special about it at all.
And here everyone is blaming the utility company for not clearing their brush/scrub/undergrowth around electrical infrastructure.
“” Methinks The Lady doth protest her innocence a little too strongly“”
The buildings which survived intact were recent construction using cement board siding…
Here in NSW Australia, we have what is called a BAL rating depending local environment.
These are determined (iirc) by the local councils in consult with the Rural Fire Service.
I am in a BAL29 area
Construction Standards to Comply with Australian Standard 3959 (mybuildingcertifier.com.au)
The restriction on buildings seem quite reasonable to me, even if they do mean an increased cost.
I know I am in a “bushfire” zone, having a state reverse on the opposite side of the road, so safety first makes sense..
My house is steel floor framing, treated wood wall and ceiling timbers with steel roof, and 9mm fibrous cement sheeting. Windows are all 6mm tempered glass, with aluminium screens
Front veranda is steel joist with 19mm compressed fibrous cement, Merbau posts & rails Steel roof etc.
Back deck is 100% Merbau.. expensive. But that stuff is hard to burn, even in a fireplace.
Most of the commercial buildings in downtown Paradise had flat tar roofs with roof air conditioners hidden behind facades that created wind shadows, allowing embers to fall onto the flammable tar.
However, a conventional house my ex-wife owned had asphalt shingles. She had allowed nearby trees to grow over the roof to take advantage of the shade. It burned down. A small building on the property with corrugated metal roof and sides survived.
See the following link for California’s long standing government driven wildfire debacle that has only gotten worse with climate alarmism stupidity responsible for the continuing and on going escalation of this debacle.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/05/14/californias-government-solely-responsible-for-states-forest-management-and-wildfire-debacle/
About 10 months ago Vanguard Group pulled out of the initiative on tackling climate change. I think some of the other investment-industry firms did also. Not that I caused this but I did tell my advisor I wanted nothing to do with climate related investment decisions.
At the time, Bloomberg reported:
– The decision follows ‘considerable period’ of review
– The firm’s pledge to net-zero group led to investor confusion
A few auto companies are beginning to question their EV strategies and are scaling back on them.
Tesla stock tanked 15% this week and the stock of the main Chinese EV makers dived in unison.
AND from CNN:
‘Solar stocks also tumbled on Friday after solar product manufacturer Solaredge warned that demand in Europe has significantly weakened, furthering battering sentiment on the renewable energy sector amid a difficult year.
The Invesco Solar ETF (TAN) tumbled 6.57% Friday and was last trading at $44.18, putting it at its lowest level since July 2020. Stocks in the solar sector fell broadly on the pessimistic outlook. Sunrun and Sunnova were down 5.7% and 8.9%, respectively, while Enphase Energy shed nearly 15%.’
A definite cooling of sentiment!
Yes!😀
Somewhere I found a map of fires around Paradise Ca over the past 30 yrs or so. Map indicated that large areas around Paradise, but not the city itself had been burned at one time or another such that the town had had large area burns on all sides of it over the past 3 decades.
Did you realise that Joe Biden nearly lost his wife AND HIS CAR – a ’67 Mustang !
A small fire nearly burnt his kitchen and nearly spread to the rest of his house.
And Hamas and their wicked allies need to “learn how to shoot straight.”
Yeah, wasn’t that precious of J.B. to let those Maui residents know that he felt their pain. As they stood gazing at the smoldering ruins of their town and at rows of cars burned to the ground.
Oh, and here’s $400.00 for ya.
*check watch*
Would like to stay, but, hyuck, hyuck, my wi– IS THAT LADY MY WIFE?! Hahaha, I thought she was that waitress I gave my kidney to, the one from Scranton where I won the heavy-weight championship in 1958 against Cornpop.
Our leader. Unbelievable that this idiot is in charge of our country.
Our“leader.” “… this idiot is [NOT] in charge… .” His handlers are. What is unbelievable is that the Democrats got away with stealing an election when THAT was their candidate. Fake mail-in (never folded and all for Biden) ballots and astronomical “adjudication” of votes by machine monitors (mostly resolved to be votes for Biden), etc. to a degree that is UNBELIEVABLE! But, true.😖He is nothing but a common crook with dementia.
By “J.B.” did you mean The Big Guy 10% Joe “Biden Brand” Brandon aka Robert L. Peters aka Robert Ware aka JRB Ware? If so, then FJB sincerely.
Hi, Dave. I meant the same J.B. whom climategrog was talking about.
Janice, I’m often criticized for not using “/sarc.” I am, however, unrepentant.
Dave. Sarcasm is great. Not using the /sarc is also just fine (I almost always pick up on sarcasm unless it appears to be someone who is genuinely confused, then, the /sarc helps). It was the question marks that made it appear to be, well, a question. Good for you to just write however you like to write. 🙂
Thank you, Janice, I shall continue to do so. Your permission is much appreciated.
I am often confused since I’m married and have three daughters. I’ve studied Remo William’s Korean master for years hoping to learn the trick of “blessed silence.” No luck yet; any tips?
Hey, Dave. No permission, just affirmation.
Clearly, you and I are only going to keep talking past each other, out of sync ad infinitem, so, this will be my parting word.
You are reminding me of the man I was married to. Whenever I made a suggestion (not a veiled command, a bona fide, gently spoken, clear, SUGGESTION), he would respond, “Don’t tell me what to do!”
Me: “If I were telling you what to do, I would say, ‘DO that.’ If I were issuing a command, it would be very clearly an order.”
And ordering my husband is something I will never do (heh, most likely, because I won’t ever again be given the opportunity).
I can’t STAND it when a wife orders her husband (and vice versa). A polite request is all that should ever be done by a spouse.
You are quite bold, thus, I realize the following song is not exactly on point, but, I want to AFFIRM and encourage you, so, here it is,
my “tip:”
“Just say what you want to say and let the words fall out. Honestly, I want to see you be brave.”
Sara Bareilles “Brave”
https://youtu.be/dyAfjUHlFSM?si=PdwyXpt2H9-WKNrk
Yeah, Joe knows just how those fire victims feel. Or so he wants us to believe.
Btw, that was a Chevy Corvette that Joe almost burned up with his kitchen fire. That and all the classified documents Joe had stored in his garage.
There was a large grass fire in Napa, CA not long ago (2020 or 2017?). An article here in WUWT provided photo evidence and background information that invasive grasses, which burned, along with entire neighborhoods, were the fuel problem. Photos showed groves of trees in various undeveloped places that were essentially unharmed but were situated in a black expanse of burnt grass after the fires. Trees in devastated neighborhoods, with every house burned to the foundation, were still green and unharmed.
One point of the article was that a similar earlier fire had totally destroyed the same neighborhoods in the same way but most homes therein were rebuilt with the same characteristics that allowed the earlier houses to burn, with the same results. However, a few homes were made fire resistant, using well understood practices, and those did not burn the second time. The same circumstances in the Paradise fire left a very few structures almost completely unharmed, because of experience in an earlier, similar Paradise fire, while everything around them burned.
The point of this wordy inquiry is not building practices but the green politics reported in some detail in that article, either for the Napa fire or perhaps the Paradise fire. The claim was made, quite clearly, that PG&E had maintenance funds earmarked for fire prevention but that the public utilities commission required PG&E to instead spend the monies on unreliable generation projects. Also, in light of the situation, PG&E had applied for maintenance rate increases in order to have funds to do the maintenance anyway but the public utilities commission denied all such requests.
The outcome was that PG&E management, not the politicians with power over them, took the fall. The question is, was the article about the public utilities commission, and possibly legislative green fanatics being responsible, just a fantasy?
PG&E was dictated to by the Democrats and bureaucrats of CA:
… according to Ted Nordhaus, an environmental policy expert and director of research at the Breakthrough Institute. … Regulators who control PG&E’s funding have focused on climate change and other things instead, he stated. ***
California lawmakers passed an ordinance in 2015 requiring utilities to pay $100 million annually on solar systems in low-income areas, The WSJ Editorial Board noted. That is in addition to the $2.2 billion in rebates the utilities must offer customers for rooftop solar installations.
***
(Source: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/11/03/heres-how-state-regulators-played-a-role-in-californias-rolling-blackouts-wildfires/ )
That article illustrates Newsom’s typical obfuscation and blame shifting but isn’t the one that made direct claims about the utilities, especially PG&E, being politically blocked from spending on maintenance that should reduce the chance of equipment sparked fires. I seem to recall that article also spoke to PG&E being prevented by regulation from cutting back trees to a safe distance from transmission lines.
Yes, Andy H.. I ran out of time to find it at my workplace, my only wi-fi access opportunity.
If I have time tomorrow, I will try again.
Well, after nearly an HOUR of trying to search using DuckDuckGo and with WUWT’s search function itself, I could not find that article. Tired of trying. So! Here’s something of interest from “The American Thinker.”
California has enacted several laws that heavily restrict such vital fire-preventing measures as logging, removal of dead trees, and clearing of dry underbrush.
***
(Source: “How Regulations Made California’s Fires Worse,” by Richard Zuber, January 18, 2018, https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/01/how_regulations_made_californias_fires_worse.html )
Why?
Hold climate change activists accountable for Maui wildfire missteps
Hawaii’s burn ban came about as a result of lawsuits and lobbying campaigns waged by activists and organizations, including Earthjustice and the Sierra Club. The effort succeeded in ending prescribed agricultural burns, which contributed to the demise of a historic 36,000-acre sugar plantation in 2016.
The case was not about prescribed burns but rather about a sugar plantation’s permit to burn up to 25% coal and petroleum together with sugarcane waste to generate partially renewable energy. But the dissenting opinion in that case was especially prescient. The justices wrote that “the path taken by the Majority here — finding that Sierra Club’s members had a property interest that entitled them to intervene — expands the limits of due process in ways that could have unintended consequences.” Indeed, forcing out the responsible steward of the land, all in the name of clean air, without balancing that consideration against unintended consequences, led to this unthinkable, tragic consequence in Maui.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/fairness-justice/hold-climate-change-activists-accountable-for-maui-wildfire-missteps
The Hawaii State Supreme Court, 2017. More evidence that HI is the greenest state in the union.
What a fine exposé, Anthony. (((APPLAUSE!)))
The comments have added a lot of valuable information, too.
Very helpful article and comments.
Yes, they have. Yours not the least of them. 🙂
Interesting article. In the photo attached from the Paradise fire note the burned houses surrounded
by unburned trees, It’s the ember wash that ignites most homes not flame infringement. I learned
that and more from a forester who did after incident investigating years ago.. he was amazing.
Jack Cohen of the Fire Science’s Laboratory is another expert on that subject. Anyone living in a wildland fire interface needs to read his work and watch his videos.
I have fire foam on hand with applicator, a WEEDS sprinkler system which is a Wind Enabled Ember Dowsing System and have done some of forestry work along with some building design
and landscaping work and some other sprinklers that can be deployed quick and easy. I have
a water source next to the house that will flow well.
But the ember wash defense is a top of the list item. One item to know about is that
the modern emission control systems on vehicles will shut down if it gets into a heavy
smoke situation. That happened I was told in the Ft Mac fire and likely in the Paradise
fire too. I keep a couple of older vehicles around without any emission systems just for
that purpose. Jack Cohen recommended staying and fighting the front..
If it gets bad enough to deplete the oxygen in the air, any car will have difficulty running.
What is ironic is that the town of Magalia, up-slope from Paradise, has a reservoir that supplies water to Paradise. They could have drained the reservoir for roof sprinklers. Only, few people had installed roof sprinklers.
A bizarre similarity is the inability of the endangered local population to flee by road. In Paradise that was because very irresponsible “green” traffic planners put the city on a “road diet,” intentionally reducing available lanes for cars by building road obstructions that designed to supposedly make the roads more bicycle and pedestrian friendly.
In Lahaina automobile escape routes were inexplicably blocked by emergency vehicles and personnel.
Has anything been learned? Does any of these mishaps ever get discussed and exchanged in a forum in this industry to be addressed and the critical deficiencies identified, courses of action formulated and mitigated? Does not appear so.
The two photographs suggest that the California vegetation is more fire-resistant than native Hawaiian vegetation.
I may be crazy but a companies 1st responsibility is to its customers and especially not KILLING them … the shareholders have to come second
Yes, you’re crazy
They are supposed to appease John Kerrry and the climate/insane