Power Lines Viewed By Lawmakers As Top Cause Of California Wildfires
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — California lawmakers focused Wednesday on power lines as a cause of devastating wildfires, possibly including a blaze this summer that killed two people and damaged or destroyed 965 structures in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
Pacific Gas & Electric Co., the state's largest utility, said in September that a power line rubbing against a tree may have started the Butte Fire that burned 70,000 acres and caused $52 million in damage, becoming the seventh-most destructive in state history.
California fire officials have yet to announce their conclusions on the cause.
It was the second-most devastating fire in a drought year that so far has seen more than 6,000 wildfires, about one-third more than the recent average, David Shew, a fire-prevention planner at the state's forestry and fire protection department, told a state Senate subcommittee Wednesday.
Electrical equipment — including power lines that brush against trees or hit the ground — typically rival only trash fires as the chief cause of wildfires in California, said state Sen. Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, the head of a state Senate subcommittee overseeing the safety of utilities.
He convened the hearing to scrutinize what the state's utilities and utility regulators were doing to lessen the risk.
Hill, long a critic of PG&E and the California Public Utilities Commission on safety issues, focused attention on PG&E.
"I really would like to find a way to trust PG&E again," said Hill, whose district includes the San Francisco Bay Area city of San Bruno, where a PG&E gas-line explosion in 2010 killed eight people and triggered years of examination of state regulators' oversight of utilities.
He told participants in the hearing. "They really don't seem to want to play by the rules of our community."
PG&E vice president Pat Hogan detailed the utility's programs to reduce risks of electrical equipment sparking fires, including monitoring 50 million trees for trimming or chopping down to prevent contact with high-voltage power equipment.
Hill cited a 1994 fire, also in the Sierra, that led to 739 misdemeanor convictions against PG&E for negligence after the utility was accused of diverting $77 million from its tree-trimming budget into shareholder profits.
The PG&E executive told Hill that the utility was spending all the money allotted to it for wildfire prevention on those programs.
Elizaveta Malashenko, head of the safety division of the state utility commission, told Hill that regulators would evaluate that spending.
PG&E and other utilities represented at the hearing and Malashenko rebutted Hill's questions on whether utilities may have placed any wildfire-prevention efforts of their own on hold as state regulators revise their rules for utilities on the topic.
"This isn't an absolute ... it's more of a continuous learning from every fire," Malashenko told him regarding regulating wildfire prevention by utilities.
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