The company has been charging its customers a surcharge for years to cover the cost of the upgrades and maintenance so they wouldn’t have to do this.
Where’d all that money go?
Theft. Fraud. Graft and grift. And CA politicians are neck deep in it.
When I lived there most of the problem was due to poor land management as a result of California’s “environmental” policies that allowed heavy overgrowth and stopped the clearing of old brush and trees around power lines. This wasn’t on the utility but firmly at the feet of environmental lunatics. Also that allowed the few cases of arson to grow wildly out of control.