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Pacific Gas & Electric said Monday it will plead guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter in connection with the 2018 fire in Northern California that killed 84 people and decimated three towns.Pacific Gas & Electric said Monday it will plead guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter in connection with the 2018 fire in Northern California that killed 84 people and decimated three towns. The utility said in a statement it will also admit to a single count of unlawfully starting a fire. Advertisement Under a plea agreement with the Butte County District Attorney’s office, PG&E will pay the...

California's wildfires are getting deadlier and more destructive each year. Naturally then, state politicians want to make it easier to get insurance in fire-prone areas. On Tuesday, Assemblymembers Lorena Gonzalez (D–San Diego) and Monique Limon (D–Santa Barbara) introduced Assembly Bill (A.B.) 2367. Their "Renew California" bill would require that insurance companies write new policies or indefinitely renew current ones for existing homes provided they meet yet-to-be-determined state standards for fire-hardening. Roughly one million homes in wildfire-affected areas are already covered by a one-year moratorium on non-renewals issued by the state's elected insurance commissioner, Ricardo Lara, in December 2019. Lara has...

Vineyards in Northern California began planting thousands of acres of new vines in 2016, and with more efficient harvesting methods, it has led to more bountiful harvests of grapes. Having more grapes to make wine sounds good, but if there’s not enough demand to support increased production, the surplus grapes go to waste. Jeff Bitter, president of Allied Grape Growers, told CNN that it’s possible for surplus grapes to make it to the secondary market, where they’re used for brandy or as grape concentrate. But that market doesn’t typically provide sustainable returns for growers. “The main cause of oversupply today...

The Bureau of Land Management has announced plans to fund 11,000 miles (17,703 kilometers) of strategic fuel breaks in Idaho, Oregon, Washington, California, Nevada and Utah in an effort to help control wildfires. The fuel breaks are intended to prop up fire mitigation efforts and help protect firefighters, communities and natural resources, The Oregonian reported Saturday. According to the BLM, wildfires are becoming bigger and more frequent across the Great Basin states. Between 2009 and 2018, more than 13.5 million acres of BLM land burned in the project area.

Australian fire-lighters come in six colors — yellow, black, white, blood red, dark green, and light green. All are relevant to bushfires and forest management. "Yellow" is the fire-lighter that has been with us forever. It is the yellow flash of lightning, which has always ignited the Australian bush. We're dreaming to think we can lock yellow fire out of parks, forests, and heritage areas. But good forest management can reduce the ferocity and destruction of lightning-strike fires. "Black" fire-lighters came with the first Australians. Without matches or tinder boxes, they probably captured the fire genie from a lightning fire....

Al Gore blames the climate crisis; Barack Obama says Australia’s bushfires are the very real, very urgent consequences of climate change. Hillary Clinton declares we are in a climate emergency. More than three months ago there were warnings of an unusually strong Indian Ocean Dipole, with warm water off Africa contributing to rain there and cold water off Western Australia leading to severe drought there. Strong winds and updrafts created conditions for hundreds of lightning strikes. Together with the build-up of fuel – five years ago, bushfire expert David Packham warned that forest fuel levels had climbed to their most...

Climate experts are apparently backing President Donald Trump’s repeated arguments that California’s wildfires were a result of poor land management rather than climate change, E&E reported Thursday. Roughly 75% of damage stemming from California’s wildfires was a result of “the way we manage lands and develop our landscape,” Scott Stephens, a professor of fire science at the University of California, Berkeley, said Wednesday at a conference in Washington. Wildfires used to burn through 4.5 million acres a year in the 18th century, when indigenous communities populated California’s countryside, Stephens noted. “Fire was almost as important as rain to ecosystems,” he...

Police have charged at least 24 people for intentionally starting bushfires in the state of New South Wales, according to a statement the New South Wales Police released Monday. NSW Police have taken legal action against 183 people, 40 of whom are juveniles, for fire-related offenses since November 8, the statement said. The legal actions range from cautions to criminal charges. Out of those 183 people, 53 have received cautions or criminal charges for failing to comply with a total fire ban and 47 are accused of discarding a lit cigarette or match on land, according to the police statement......

The NSW Police Force has taken legal action against more than 180 people for bushfire-related offences since late last year. Numerous bush and grass fires have impacted the state, claiming the lives of 18 people and destroying hundreds of millions of animals and livestock, thousands of homes, and more than 4.9 million hectares of land, so far this bushfire season. Since Friday 8 November 2019, legal action – which ranges from cautions through to criminal charges – has been taken against 183 people – including 40 juveniles – for 205 bushfire-related offences. Of note: 24 people have been charged over...

A 45-year-old Iraqi migrant .. setting several fires in the center of Graz – Austria’s second largest city after Vienna – including ones at city hall and a district court has been arrested. ... arson attacks started .. at the district court of Graz-West.. the man was seen spraying .. flammable fluid throughout the court’s lobby before setting it on fire ... set another one in front of Graz’s city hall.. The staff saw it on video surveillance and sounded the alarm. ... three separate fires were set and that the smoke became so thick that he wasn’t able to...

Many sites are reporting that the Aussie investigators now suspect that up to 85% of the fires were caused by human beings. They have arrested a number of people and many of them were found with accelerants in their possession. Arrested yes but many of them are now free. Muslim teen Fadi Zraika was seen laughing as he left court on Tuesday in Sydney. Fadi and his brother Abraham are accused of starting a fire at a Guildford park in December.

Australia’s rampant and destructive wildfires were started by arson, and fueled by dry conditions and high temperatures, but you’d never know it from the Golden Globes or mainstream media outlets. In November, a teenage volunteer firefighter from New South Wales was charged with setting 7 bushfires in the region, and then returning with his brigade to fight them. Apparently, he has set 17 fires, and the pyromaniac has now been barred from access to any firefighting equipment. ... Police arrested 183 people for lighting bushfires across Queensland, NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania in the past few months. NSW police...

Bushfires have nothing to do with climate change, says scientist and bushfire expert Australia’s current bushfires have nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with fuel-loads, according to scientist and bushfire expert, David Packham AO. Five years ago, Mr Packham, a former bushfire researcher at CSIRO, warned that unless there is a drastic increase in annual fuel reduction burnings “a massive bushfire disaster will occur”. According to Mr Packham’s predictions, “The forest and alpine environment will decay and be damaged possibly beyond repair and home and people [will be] incinerated.”

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Joe Fatula left the Bay Area in 2017 wanting to settle down in the mountains somewhere quiet. He chose Colfax, a small town rich with Gold Country history, and became mayor last year with the goal of boosting business on Main Street. But his sanctuary turned apocalyptic in October. Every gas station, grocery store and restaurant closed due to massive power shutoffs as part of the state's efforts to avoid a major wildfire. The mayor found himself loaning out his personal pickup truck and RV, which have built-in generators, to the town's 2,000 residents as they scrambled...

(SAN FRANCISCO) — Pacific Gas & Electric Co. was set to begin shutting off power Wednesday to some 375,000 people in 18 Northern and central California counties as the region faces extreme fire weather that’s lasted since October. A virtually rainless fall has left brush bone-dry and forecasts called for low humidity and winds gusting at times to 55 mph (88.5 kph), which might fling tree branches or other debris into power lines, causing sparks that could set catastrophic fires in the region, PG&E officials said. **SNIP** The planned blackout would be the latest in a series of massive outages...

“California’s reliance on hydropower and proliferation of remote, centralized renewable energy plants; the mandated environmental mothballing of 19 coastal natural gas power plants located close to customers; redundant transmission lines for green power; and seasonal wind blasts, results in lethal blast-furnace-like wildfires that leave trees alone but incinerate houses.” “California leaders and opinion-makers must first abandon their blame game and diagnose the problem more clearly than using clichés like ‘global warming,’ ‘Donald Trump,’ ‘greed’ or even ‘not enough clear cutting,’ if they are going to responsibly deal with the dangerous unintended consequences of de-modernizing its electric grid.”

Navy helicopters usually used to hunt submarines have been deployed to identify fire hotspots around the country. The move came today as Defence drafted plans for an extraordinary deployment of Army Reservists to join regular troops committed to the fire fight. In what has now become the biggest ever military call-up for a civil emergency of its kind in Australia, squadrons of Army, Navy and RAAF aircraft were working through the day and night on operations as tasked by Emergency Management Australia. But critically, Defence is also now actively scoping a possible full “call out” of ADF Reservists - under...

Those who leave their energy-guzzling multi-million-dollar mansions when they fly off on their private jets to save-the-planet climate change conferences like to ease their consciences and explain their hypocrisy by pointing to their carbon offsets like paying for trees to be planted somewhere that might mature in a hundred years or so. There are a lot of trees in California and a good number of them are on fire, thanks to environmental regulations and policies that are supposed to protect the environment but are in fact destroying it. The irony in California that the very trees that are supposed to...

For much of the United States, invasive grass species are making wildfires more frequent, especially in fire-prone California, a new study finds. Twelve non-native species act as “little arsonist grasses,” said study co-author Bethany Bradley, a University of Massachusetts professor of environmental conservation. Wherever the common Mediterranean grass invades, including California’s southern desert, fires flare up three times more often. And cheatgrass , which covers about one-third of the Intermountain West, is a big-time fire promoter, Bradley said. “In a lot of ways, California was ground zero for invasive grasses. Much of California’s native perennial grassland was replaced by Mediterranean...

According to the official, widely reported story, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) shut down substantial portions of its electric transmission system in northern California as a precautionary measure. Citing high wind speeds they described as “historic,” the utility claims that if they didn’t turn off the grid, wind-caused damage to their infrastructure could start more wildfires in the area. Perhaps that’s true. Perhaps. This tale presumes that the folks who designed and maintain PG&E’s transmission system are unaware of or ignored the need to design it to withstand severe weather events, and that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and...