F
Flyguy
Guest
Not only is he trillions of dollars short for a 60% EXPANSION of the grid, the current grid infrastructure is in BAD NEED of maintenance. This is a ticking time bomb for many in the line of (literally) fire (https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-deadliest-wildfire-in-california-history-led-to-a-guilty-plea-from-pg-e-11661436002?mod=hp_lead_pos5):
A brilliant flash broke the morning darkness on Nov. 8, 2018, as strong winds pummeled a power line scaling the Sierra Nevada mountains 90 miles north of Sacramento, Calif. A worn hook hanging from a century-old transmission tower owned by PG&E Corp. broke clean, dropping a high-voltage wire that spit electricity just before sunrise. A shower of sparks set dry brush aflame.. PG&E recorded an outage on the line at 6:15 a.m.
The message reached the local fire station at 6:29 a.m. Two engines sped north along a remote road running up a steep river canyon that funnels mountain winds down to the valley below. Within 15 minutes, they arrived on the east bank of the Feather River, opposite the makings of a firestorm. There was no way to get ahead of it. The transmission tower, perched high along a steep, gravelly access route, was almost completely inaccessible by fire engine.
Within an hour, the fire had spread 7 miles to arrive at the outskirts of Paradise, a town nestled in the Sierra foothills. Residents awoke to emergency evacuation orders as softball-sized embers collided with dead trees. The fire was entirely out of control. At its fastest, it engulfed the equivalent of 80 football fields a minute, by some estimates. As the evacuation process began, thick black smoke took on the hellish orange hue of the flames. Escape routes became choke points, lines of cars inching along melting asphalt.
Dozens of people were left behind, unable to escape for reasons that made their gruesome deaths even more tragic. Many were in their 70s and 80s. One man had only just gotten his wheelchair out the front door. Another abandoned his wheelchair and tried to drag himself along the ground. A couple died together in their recliners, holding two dogs and two cats.
The fire overtook the town within hours. At noon, one of PG&Eâs first responders, called a troubleman, arrived at the ignition point in a helicopter to hover at the tall steel structure that no one had much noticed for decades.
If you think about the nationâs electricity grid as a network of roads, transmission lines are like highways, built to carry large amounts of power over long distances. The high-voltage wires must be kept away from the towers that support them. If the space between them narrows too much, electricity can jump from wire to tower in whatâs known as an arc, a lightning-like bolt hot enough to melt metal and send sparks flying. To reduce that risk, the wires are suspended from strings of insulator discs hooked to the T-shaped arms of their towers.
Peering out of the helicopter, the troubleman saw an insulator string dangling. A hook about the width of a fist had broken nearly in half, dropping the insulator and the wire it held. An arc of electricity surged from the wire as it fell, scorching the tower in a blast of molten steel and aluminum.
Later, inspectors would discover that the hook, which had hung from a hole in a long metal plate, was almost totally smooth at the point of fracture, evidence of a deep groove that had formed over decades. Millimeter by millimeter, the plate had cut into the curve of the hook, which was scarcely an inch in diameter. A jagged edge a few millimeters across showed just where it had broken.
The Camp Fire, named for the road near its place of origin, burned for 17 days, destroying more than 150,000 acres and nearly 19,000 structures, most of them homes. It killed 84 people. PG&E would later plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter charges tied to each of their deaths.
PG&E now says it has committed to change. The company has improved its inspection and operational practices since the fire, and Patti Poppe, chief executive since 2021, has pledged that the company will bury 10,000 miles of power lines to substantially reduce fire risk.
âUnder new leadership, PG&E understands we must fully acknowledge our painful past as we look to the future and build a safer company,â the company said. âWe are resolved to make it right for wildfire victims and to do everything in our power to make our system safe for our customers.â
This account is based on documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and historical records, as well as interviews with Butte County, Calif., prosecutors, their summary of the Camp Fire investigation and PG&Eâs response to the summary filed in federal court.
Hours after Paradise had been consumed, a crew from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as Cal Fire, made its way to the tower where the PG&E helicopter had been hovering earlier that dark afternoon and saw the broken hook.
Patti Poppe, who took over as CEO of PG&E in 2021, has said the company will take various steps to reduce wildfire risk, including burying 10,000 miles of power lines.
The next day, the crew shared its findings with Mike Ramsey, Butte Countyâs district attorney. Mr. Ramsey, a plain-spoken prosecutor with stern white eyebrows, knew the county better than most anyone. His family had been there in the Sierra foothills for four generations to witness its evolution from a scattering of gold-mining settlements along the Feather River to a bucolic spread of communities home to more than 226,000 people. Mr. Ramsey became district attorney in 1987 and had been re-elected ever since.
Mr. Ramsey told the Cal Fire team that his office wanted to join in their investigation. He told them to treat the transmission tower as a crime scene and to prevent anyone, including PG&E employees, from entering unaccompanied. The next week, Cal Fire supervised as company line workers began dismantling the tower. The investigators seized hooks and hanger plates as evidence.
Mr. Ramseyâs right-hand man was Marc Noel, who had started working for Mr. Ramsey just a few years after he took the top job.
In the weeks after the fire, Messrs. Ramsey and Noel brought in experts from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to assist in analyzing evidence. Mr. Noel took the hook and other parts collected from the suspect tower and showed them to an FBI metallurgist. It was obvious how the hook had failed. The question was whether PG&E could have prevented it from happening. The metallurgist told Mr. Noel his team would need to collect parts from towers in the vicinity. Without a basis for comparison, it would be impossible to tell whether the fire was the result of the companyâs negligence or simply a tragic accident.
So Messrs. Noel and Ramsey devised what they called the Exemplar Tower Project, a sweeping search for similar towers along the canyon. Mr. Noel boarded a county helicopter on New Yearâs Eve and instructed the pilot to fly low and slow along the transmission line, known as the Caribou-Palermo.. He had learned, by that point, that hooks like the one that broke are supposed to fit snugly in the holes of their hanger plates. As he flew, Mr. Noel noticed something suspicious. The holes looked especially large. It was a sign that the hooks had been hanging for decades, wearing down little by little with every windstorm. Three towers in particular seemed especially similar to the one where the fire had started, with gaps between hook and plate large enough to stick a finger through. Messrs. Ramsey and Noel planned to seize parts of them as evidence.
The blaze was triggered when a hook that was nearly a century old snapped, left. The transmission line that failed, known as the Caribou-Palermo, was built in 1921 by the Great Western Power Co., right.
PG&E launched its own investigation as Messrs. Ramsey and Noel began theirs.. In December, not long after the fire stopped smoldering, workers set out to inspect the Caribou-Palermo in its entirety. They climbed transmission towers perched high on the rocky, forested slopes of the canyon to look closely at the tiny pieces of hardware holding the wires aloft. The diagnosis was devastating. The linemen discovered more than a dozen critical hazards, mostly involving hooks and other connectors that had been in place for decades.
Across the country, transmission lines are among the oldest parts of the grid. Many were constructed in the years after World War II as Americans moved from cities to suburbs, built homes wired with wall sockets, and bought electric appliances. Some transmission lines are even older, developed shortly after the turn of the 20th century to replace gas lamps and candles at a time when electricity was still something of an experiment.
Local prosecutors Marc Noel, left, and Mike Ramsey pursued criminal charges against PG&E after inspecting transmission towers and company records.
The Caribou-Palermo, a 56-mile conduit running along the rugged edge of the mountain canyon, was a relic of that era, so old that it was once considered for the National Register of Historic Places. It had been built around 1921 by a company called Great Western Power Co., which had competed with PG&E until the two companies merged in 1930.
PG&E shut down the Caribou-Palermo in the weeks following the Camp Fire, after the December inspections revealed the extent of its problems. Employees began a frantic search for construction and maintenance records. The Caribou-Palermo files were incomplete. And it wasnât just that line. The company lacked records on dozens of others.
PG&E soon announced plans for a massive inspection blitz covering every part of its electric system in areas at high risk of wildfire. A decade earlier, those areas had been confined to a few thickets within the forests that blanket much of Northern California. Then a severe drought set in, turning trees into standing firewood vulnerable to the smallest of sparks. The devastation encompassed most of the coastal and mountain regions surrounding the Central Valley, putting more than half of PG&Eâs 70,000-square-mile service territory at risk. PG&E had 5,500 miles of transmission lines traversing the riskiest areas. Its distribution network spanned far wider. The company promised to finish the inspections before the early-summer start to Californiaâs wildfire season. That meant completing yearsâ worth of work in a matter of months. Workers fanned out in the final weeks of 2018.
After a grand jury indicted PG&E on 84 counts of manslaughter, the company agreed to plead guilty.
In June, seven months after the Camp Fire, the company released an apologetic statement. It told the public that the inspections had revealed the need for more than 250,000 repairs across the system. Ten towers supporting a transmission line near the Golden Gate Bridge needed complete replacement. And the Caribou-Palermo, riddled with problems, would never run again.
In the spring of 2019, Messrs. Ramsey and Noel had seen enough transmission towers to conclude that the one where the fire started wasnât alone in its disrepair. It was time to start collecting parts as evidence. They returned to one of the three towers that had appeared especially run-down during their helicopter flights. But the old hooks and plates were nowhere to be seen. PG&E had replaced them with new parts, even though it had deemed the line too unsafe to operate.
Mr. Noel was infuriated, he recalled in an interview. When it came to PG&E, it didnât take much to set him off. Any hint of obstruction sent him reaching for another tobacco plug. He dialed up PG&Eâs outside attorneys to ask why the company had taken parts from the tower. PG&E was preserving them for use as evidence in other litigation, one of the attorneys replied. If Mr. Noel wanted to take a look, he would have to drive to a warehouse where PG&E had stored them. Mr. Noel demanded return of the evidence.
âWhere would you like us to deliver it to you, Marc?â the PG&E attorney asked sarcastically.
âIâd like you to deliver it to the FBI national laboratory in Quantico, Va.,â Mr. Noel replied.
The line fell silent for several seconds. âAre you serious?â the attorney asked.
âYeah,â Mr. Noel recalled replying. âFâing serious.â
The fire overtook the town of Paradise within hours, leaving some residents unable to escape the flames.
The companyâs attorneys allowed the prosecutors to send for the evidence. Within 48 hours, it was ready to be shipped off to Quantico. At the end of March, Mr. Ramsey empaneled a special grand jury to determine whether PG&E should face criminal charges. It subpoenaed all the records the company possessed on the origin and maintenance of the Caribou-Palermo. PG&E sent over enough digital documents to fill several tractor-trailers. After sifting through millions of documents, the prosecutors could draw but one conclusion: PG&E had almost no records on the age of the hook that failed. The company couldnât say for sure just how long it had hung there, rocking on its plate in the windy Feather River Canyon.
At Quantico, the FBI analyzed the makeup of the hook. The results revealed that it was nearly as old as PG&E itself. It had been manufactured by the Ohio Brass Co., which started in 1888 as a small foundry forging buggy harnesses and plumbing valves before shifting to hardware for some of the first transmission lines ever built. Historical records indicate that the hook had been purchased for 56 cents in 1919. By the time it finally gave out, it had weathered nearly a centuryâs worth of wind and precipitation.
The Camp Fire had serious repercussions for the company. The extent of the damage pushed it to seek bankruptcy protection in January 2019, resulting in one of the most complex restructurings the utility industry had ever seen.. The process drained the company of cash and saddled it with debt, compromising its ability to compensate fire victims and secure an investment-grade credit rating at a time when it needed to spend billions of dollars on system safety. The company soon recognized the need for closer inspections of its power lines, more technology to track weather conditions and, ultimately, burial of many high-risk circuits.
âToday, we are writing a new story,â PG&E said. âWe want our employees to feel proud to work for this company. We want our customers to believe they can count on us to provide safe, reliable energy that powers their homes and businesses. And we want to collaborate with everyone who has a stake in our shared energy future in California.â
A few months before the company exited bankruptcy, the grand jury concluded that PG&E was well aware that its negligence had created a serious fire risk in the Feather River Canyon but did almost nothing to mitigate it. On March 17, 2020, the grand jury indicted PG&E on 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter. The company agreed to plead guilty.
From âCalifornia Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electricâand What It Means for Americaâs Power Gridâ by The Wall Street Journalâs Katherine Blunt, to be published on Aug. 30 by Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2022 by Katherine Blunt.
A brilliant flash broke the morning darkness on Nov. 8, 2018, as strong winds pummeled a power line scaling the Sierra Nevada mountains 90 miles north of Sacramento, Calif. A worn hook hanging from a century-old transmission tower owned by PG&E Corp. broke clean, dropping a high-voltage wire that spit electricity just before sunrise. A shower of sparks set dry brush aflame.. PG&E recorded an outage on the line at 6:15 a.m.
The message reached the local fire station at 6:29 a.m. Two engines sped north along a remote road running up a steep river canyon that funnels mountain winds down to the valley below. Within 15 minutes, they arrived on the east bank of the Feather River, opposite the makings of a firestorm. There was no way to get ahead of it. The transmission tower, perched high along a steep, gravelly access route, was almost completely inaccessible by fire engine.
Within an hour, the fire had spread 7 miles to arrive at the outskirts of Paradise, a town nestled in the Sierra foothills. Residents awoke to emergency evacuation orders as softball-sized embers collided with dead trees. The fire was entirely out of control. At its fastest, it engulfed the equivalent of 80 football fields a minute, by some estimates. As the evacuation process began, thick black smoke took on the hellish orange hue of the flames. Escape routes became choke points, lines of cars inching along melting asphalt.
Dozens of people were left behind, unable to escape for reasons that made their gruesome deaths even more tragic. Many were in their 70s and 80s. One man had only just gotten his wheelchair out the front door. Another abandoned his wheelchair and tried to drag himself along the ground. A couple died together in their recliners, holding two dogs and two cats.
The fire overtook the town within hours. At noon, one of PG&Eâs first responders, called a troubleman, arrived at the ignition point in a helicopter to hover at the tall steel structure that no one had much noticed for decades.
If you think about the nationâs electricity grid as a network of roads, transmission lines are like highways, built to carry large amounts of power over long distances. The high-voltage wires must be kept away from the towers that support them. If the space between them narrows too much, electricity can jump from wire to tower in whatâs known as an arc, a lightning-like bolt hot enough to melt metal and send sparks flying. To reduce that risk, the wires are suspended from strings of insulator discs hooked to the T-shaped arms of their towers.
Peering out of the helicopter, the troubleman saw an insulator string dangling. A hook about the width of a fist had broken nearly in half, dropping the insulator and the wire it held. An arc of electricity surged from the wire as it fell, scorching the tower in a blast of molten steel and aluminum.
Later, inspectors would discover that the hook, which had hung from a hole in a long metal plate, was almost totally smooth at the point of fracture, evidence of a deep groove that had formed over decades. Millimeter by millimeter, the plate had cut into the curve of the hook, which was scarcely an inch in diameter. A jagged edge a few millimeters across showed just where it had broken.
The Camp Fire, named for the road near its place of origin, burned for 17 days, destroying more than 150,000 acres and nearly 19,000 structures, most of them homes. It killed 84 people. PG&E would later plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter charges tied to each of their deaths.
PG&E now says it has committed to change. The company has improved its inspection and operational practices since the fire, and Patti Poppe, chief executive since 2021, has pledged that the company will bury 10,000 miles of power lines to substantially reduce fire risk.
âUnder new leadership, PG&E understands we must fully acknowledge our painful past as we look to the future and build a safer company,â the company said. âWe are resolved to make it right for wildfire victims and to do everything in our power to make our system safe for our customers.â
This account is based on documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and historical records, as well as interviews with Butte County, Calif., prosecutors, their summary of the Camp Fire investigation and PG&Eâs response to the summary filed in federal court.
Hours after Paradise had been consumed, a crew from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as Cal Fire, made its way to the tower where the PG&E helicopter had been hovering earlier that dark afternoon and saw the broken hook.
Patti Poppe, who took over as CEO of PG&E in 2021, has said the company will take various steps to reduce wildfire risk, including burying 10,000 miles of power lines.
The next day, the crew shared its findings with Mike Ramsey, Butte Countyâs district attorney. Mr. Ramsey, a plain-spoken prosecutor with stern white eyebrows, knew the county better than most anyone. His family had been there in the Sierra foothills for four generations to witness its evolution from a scattering of gold-mining settlements along the Feather River to a bucolic spread of communities home to more than 226,000 people. Mr. Ramsey became district attorney in 1987 and had been re-elected ever since.
Mr. Ramsey told the Cal Fire team that his office wanted to join in their investigation. He told them to treat the transmission tower as a crime scene and to prevent anyone, including PG&E employees, from entering unaccompanied. The next week, Cal Fire supervised as company line workers began dismantling the tower. The investigators seized hooks and hanger plates as evidence.
Mr. Ramseyâs right-hand man was Marc Noel, who had started working for Mr. Ramsey just a few years after he took the top job.
In the weeks after the fire, Messrs. Ramsey and Noel brought in experts from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to assist in analyzing evidence. Mr. Noel took the hook and other parts collected from the suspect tower and showed them to an FBI metallurgist. It was obvious how the hook had failed. The question was whether PG&E could have prevented it from happening. The metallurgist told Mr. Noel his team would need to collect parts from towers in the vicinity. Without a basis for comparison, it would be impossible to tell whether the fire was the result of the companyâs negligence or simply a tragic accident.
So Messrs. Noel and Ramsey devised what they called the Exemplar Tower Project, a sweeping search for similar towers along the canyon. Mr. Noel boarded a county helicopter on New Yearâs Eve and instructed the pilot to fly low and slow along the transmission line, known as the Caribou-Palermo.. He had learned, by that point, that hooks like the one that broke are supposed to fit snugly in the holes of their hanger plates. As he flew, Mr. Noel noticed something suspicious. The holes looked especially large. It was a sign that the hooks had been hanging for decades, wearing down little by little with every windstorm. Three towers in particular seemed especially similar to the one where the fire had started, with gaps between hook and plate large enough to stick a finger through. Messrs. Ramsey and Noel planned to seize parts of them as evidence.
The blaze was triggered when a hook that was nearly a century old snapped, left. The transmission line that failed, known as the Caribou-Palermo, was built in 1921 by the Great Western Power Co., right.
PG&E launched its own investigation as Messrs. Ramsey and Noel began theirs.. In December, not long after the fire stopped smoldering, workers set out to inspect the Caribou-Palermo in its entirety. They climbed transmission towers perched high on the rocky, forested slopes of the canyon to look closely at the tiny pieces of hardware holding the wires aloft. The diagnosis was devastating. The linemen discovered more than a dozen critical hazards, mostly involving hooks and other connectors that had been in place for decades.
Across the country, transmission lines are among the oldest parts of the grid. Many were constructed in the years after World War II as Americans moved from cities to suburbs, built homes wired with wall sockets, and bought electric appliances. Some transmission lines are even older, developed shortly after the turn of the 20th century to replace gas lamps and candles at a time when electricity was still something of an experiment.
Local prosecutors Marc Noel, left, and Mike Ramsey pursued criminal charges against PG&E after inspecting transmission towers and company records.
The Caribou-Palermo, a 56-mile conduit running along the rugged edge of the mountain canyon, was a relic of that era, so old that it was once considered for the National Register of Historic Places. It had been built around 1921 by a company called Great Western Power Co., which had competed with PG&E until the two companies merged in 1930.
PG&E shut down the Caribou-Palermo in the weeks following the Camp Fire, after the December inspections revealed the extent of its problems. Employees began a frantic search for construction and maintenance records. The Caribou-Palermo files were incomplete. And it wasnât just that line. The company lacked records on dozens of others.
PG&E soon announced plans for a massive inspection blitz covering every part of its electric system in areas at high risk of wildfire. A decade earlier, those areas had been confined to a few thickets within the forests that blanket much of Northern California. Then a severe drought set in, turning trees into standing firewood vulnerable to the smallest of sparks. The devastation encompassed most of the coastal and mountain regions surrounding the Central Valley, putting more than half of PG&Eâs 70,000-square-mile service territory at risk. PG&E had 5,500 miles of transmission lines traversing the riskiest areas. Its distribution network spanned far wider. The company promised to finish the inspections before the early-summer start to Californiaâs wildfire season. That meant completing yearsâ worth of work in a matter of months. Workers fanned out in the final weeks of 2018.
After a grand jury indicted PG&E on 84 counts of manslaughter, the company agreed to plead guilty.
In June, seven months after the Camp Fire, the company released an apologetic statement. It told the public that the inspections had revealed the need for more than 250,000 repairs across the system. Ten towers supporting a transmission line near the Golden Gate Bridge needed complete replacement. And the Caribou-Palermo, riddled with problems, would never run again.
In the spring of 2019, Messrs. Ramsey and Noel had seen enough transmission towers to conclude that the one where the fire started wasnât alone in its disrepair. It was time to start collecting parts as evidence. They returned to one of the three towers that had appeared especially run-down during their helicopter flights. But the old hooks and plates were nowhere to be seen. PG&E had replaced them with new parts, even though it had deemed the line too unsafe to operate.
Mr. Noel was infuriated, he recalled in an interview. When it came to PG&E, it didnât take much to set him off. Any hint of obstruction sent him reaching for another tobacco plug. He dialed up PG&Eâs outside attorneys to ask why the company had taken parts from the tower. PG&E was preserving them for use as evidence in other litigation, one of the attorneys replied. If Mr. Noel wanted to take a look, he would have to drive to a warehouse where PG&E had stored them. Mr. Noel demanded return of the evidence.
âWhere would you like us to deliver it to you, Marc?â the PG&E attorney asked sarcastically.
âIâd like you to deliver it to the FBI national laboratory in Quantico, Va.,â Mr. Noel replied.
The line fell silent for several seconds. âAre you serious?â the attorney asked.
âYeah,â Mr. Noel recalled replying. âFâing serious.â
The fire overtook the town of Paradise within hours, leaving some residents unable to escape the flames.
The companyâs attorneys allowed the prosecutors to send for the evidence. Within 48 hours, it was ready to be shipped off to Quantico. At the end of March, Mr. Ramsey empaneled a special grand jury to determine whether PG&E should face criminal charges. It subpoenaed all the records the company possessed on the origin and maintenance of the Caribou-Palermo. PG&E sent over enough digital documents to fill several tractor-trailers. After sifting through millions of documents, the prosecutors could draw but one conclusion: PG&E had almost no records on the age of the hook that failed. The company couldnât say for sure just how long it had hung there, rocking on its plate in the windy Feather River Canyon.
At Quantico, the FBI analyzed the makeup of the hook. The results revealed that it was nearly as old as PG&E itself. It had been manufactured by the Ohio Brass Co., which started in 1888 as a small foundry forging buggy harnesses and plumbing valves before shifting to hardware for some of the first transmission lines ever built. Historical records indicate that the hook had been purchased for 56 cents in 1919. By the time it finally gave out, it had weathered nearly a centuryâs worth of wind and precipitation.
The Camp Fire had serious repercussions for the company. The extent of the damage pushed it to seek bankruptcy protection in January 2019, resulting in one of the most complex restructurings the utility industry had ever seen.. The process drained the company of cash and saddled it with debt, compromising its ability to compensate fire victims and secure an investment-grade credit rating at a time when it needed to spend billions of dollars on system safety. The company soon recognized the need for closer inspections of its power lines, more technology to track weather conditions and, ultimately, burial of many high-risk circuits.
âToday, we are writing a new story,â PG&E said. âWe want our employees to feel proud to work for this company. We want our customers to believe they can count on us to provide safe, reliable energy that powers their homes and businesses. And we want to collaborate with everyone who has a stake in our shared energy future in California.â
A few months before the company exited bankruptcy, the grand jury concluded that PG&E was well aware that its negligence had created a serious fire risk in the Feather River Canyon but did almost nothing to mitigate it. On March 17, 2020, the grand jury indicted PG&E on 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter. The company agreed to plead guilty.
From âCalifornia Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electricâand What It Means for Americaâs Power Gridâ by The Wall Street Journalâs Katherine Blunt, to be published on Aug. 30 by Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2022 by Katherine Blunt.