Emily Sortor  |  August 1, 2020

Category: Legal News

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Fire engulfs a tall, thin tree trunk.

The California fire season included a brutal final week in October when 183 fires started.

Fortunately, most of those blazes were quickly extinguished, but severe climate changes will continue to present challenges to residents and firefighters.

California fire season is always during the fall months, in large part because of the Diablo and Santa Ana wind patterns. In northern California, the Diablo winds start offshore and blow northeasterly across Northern California’s Coast Ranges. As a result, the San Francisco Bay Area and the Coast Ranges closest to the Sacramento Valley are at an increased risk of fire danger in the fall, especially in October.

California fire containment becomes a big issue in Southern California due to the seasonal offshore Santa Ana winds that whip downward in Southern California and the northern part of Baja California.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the Santa Ana winds occur most often in the fall but are known to kick up at other times, too. The winds cool as they blow through the mountains, but warm and lose moisture as the air falls closer to land. Plants and trees dry out as the Santa Ana winds blow through them.

The California fire season has become more dangerous as record-breaking winds and crispy vegetation combine to hinder California fire containment.

Gusting Winds Interfere with California Fire Containment

According to The Guardian, meteorologists deemed 2019’s Diablo and Santa Ana winds the strongest known in history. Both Diablo and Santa Ana winds became so fierce, meteorologists called them an “atmospheric hairdryer” that sucked any remaining droplets of moisture right out of the already-bone-dry vegetation.

The daunting winds combined with a relative humidity that measured about 1 percent in some parts of Southern California prompted the National Weather Service to add a more dire fire risk warning to its charts. Beyond the danger of the traditionally worst “red flag warning,” the new “extreme red flag warning” is painted purple on the NWS fire risk maps now.

Safety Precautions

According to LAist, a part of Southern California Public Radio, the California government has required the state’s three largest utility companies to invest $5 billion to stop their equipment from setting fires.

Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric have begun causing intentional blackouts when fire danger becomes severe. For the first time in history, PG&E cut power to three million people Oct. 26 in an effort to prevent wildfires. Suffering through nearly a week of the blackout upset residents, state legislators, and the governor.

PG&E faced a class action lawsuit filed by 14 local California governments after the company’s electrical equipment was found to have started 2018 wildfires. A $1 billion settlement was reached in June.

Critics say the power companies should upgrade their equipment instead of shutting down power, especially because despite the blackouts, PG&E has been implicated in the Kincade fires and others.

More recently, policymakers and experts have debated what PG&E could have done to prevent the wildfires in which they are implicated. Many of these experts reportedly say that burying power lines could have been an effective measure in preventing wildfires. 

This measure, however, would cost $240 billion, by Bloomberg estimates, equating to about $45,000 for every customer. Although this cost is prohibitive, a recent case study from T&D World argues that the solution is actually more attainable than consumers are led to believe.

According to the study, PG&E would not be forced to foot the full bill for undergrounding its lines because it only has to bury a portion of the lines to mitigate California’s fire risk. If the lines were placed underground in areas prone to wildfires, PG&E consumers would reportedly see just $10 increases on their monthly bills.

The case study also disputes PG&E’s statements on its undergrounding facts website. PG&E argues that “the main benefits of undergrounding are aesthetic” and “in some scenarios, underground infrastructure can provide improved reliability during storms.” Further, the utility company reportedly states that “underground lines are not immune to weather damage and are vulnerable to equipment issues, lightning strikes, flooding, earthquakes and excavation damage by a third party.” 

However, T&D World argues that these statements are “misleading.” Underground power lines are reportedly more reliable and “far superior” to overhead lines. It says that shorter power outages, quicker resolution, and lower maintenance costs make these lines an attractive option despite the upfront cost.

With the average temperature up by three degrees Fahrenheit in California fire season occurs in a warmer climate with drier vegetation than found even 50 years ago.

Cal Fire Information Officer Scott McLean told The Guardian, “The prevention side of it [fire] is so important.”

Cal Fire is concentrating on clearing dry vegetation, opting for prescribed burns during calm months and ensuring hundreds of seasonal firefighters are ready to help with California fire containment.

Getting Ahead of the Fires

In fall 2018, the town of Paradise was devastated by the Camp Fire that left 86 dead and burned nearly 14,000 homes to the ground. The Los Angeles Times conducted an investigation that determined Paradise “ignored repeated warnings of the risk its residents faced, crafted no plan to evacuate the area all at once, entrusted public alerts to a system vulnerable to fire, and did not sound citywide orders to fell even as a hail of fire rained down.”

According to Cal Fire, nearly 150 million dead trees dot the California landscape, and every one of those poses a fire danger. The long drought, climate change, disease, and insects have done irreparable damage to the state’s forests.

In addition to upgrading power equipment and managing vegetation, people need to have a plan to escape a raging wildfire, especially because about a third of California homes reside in an area in or near dense vegetation, an area known as the wildland-urban interface. Today, about 4 million Californians live in homes that are particularly vulnerable to wildfire.

Happily, a Stanford, California startup company has developed a new technology that could help reduce wildfires and make California fire season less damaging than it has been in recent years.

Buzz Solutions is a StartX startup, and has developed a way to look for problems with power lines. Identifying these potential problems may be a key way to identity potential starts to wildfires. According to Forbes, recent wildfires have largely been linked to problems with power lines and other equipment. Making sure these power lines stay in good repair may be key to preventing other wildfires.

Now, Buzz Solutions is piloting a technology that would access the many images of power liens have have been uploaded to the cloud. These images reportedly have come from a range of sources, including drones, aircrafts, and helicopters. Buzz Solutions’ new technology will use machine vision and AI to search these images for potential flaws and fire risks. 

This may include identifying problems with power line equipment itself, or scoping out places in which vegetation has become overgrown and could catch fire.

Previously, power companies did try to scope out problems with power lines, but they did it via in-person inspection. This process could take months or years, by which point a fire could have easily started and caused devastation. Instead, Buzz Solutions’ new technology can conduct analysis in a matter of mere hours, for half the cost.

This is a significant benefit, given that California fire fighting resources — both in terms of money and available staff — are already stretched thin. This new technology could help give companies and the state a leg up in trying to get ahead of dangerous power line problems.

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