“Trees eventually get tall enough that they will contact transmission lines and those lines will short to ground through a tree setting it ablaze.”
Well in the most recent Paradise, CA fire, the problem has been identified as the failure of a transmission tower. And the problem here was that the tower was one of a number of towers in the same transmission line that had been identified as structurally unsound. Further information says that the tower in question should have been replaced several years ago, but wasn’t.
For a number of years PG&E has had maintenance issues in both their electric and gas distribution systems.You may have read that they had a conflagration in San Bruno, CA where an entire block of home were destroy by a gas fire which was caused by PG&E’s not making a replacement of an aging Hp gas line. Furthermore, down in Carmel, where we have a second home, in the process of relining the gas lines there, they blew up a house. We found them moving our gas meter from the side of the house beyond the kitchen exit door to the front of that area, which would have blocked egress. The issue was that the meter was located under a kitchen window which could be opened. It had been there causing no problem since the home was built in 1940. When I told them that they could not put the meter where they had relocated, they put it back in the original location, promising to put a vent line on the regulator to get it away from the window. That was three years ago, and they have never installed the vent. At the end of the day, after several lawsuits were settled, PG&E completely repaved our street along with a number of others. They have had bad management for years. Their CEO just resigned. Go figure!
Bad management, as seen from the outside, can be a symptom of lack of resources to do the job right.
A maintenance manager is given a budget every year and he told to decide what to fix on that budget. He must to decide what is most critical and what can wait based on the information available to him.
A company that is making a decent profit can afford to fix more things than one that is struggling.
Is the bad management at PG&E or Sacramento? After watching California slowly implode for several decades, I more than half suspect it is in Sacramento.