Camp Fire

And I recently just finished writing a piece on the environment and AI ethics for a forthcoming volume.

And for that volume, I spent a lot of time looking at the Paradise Fire, what sometimes is called the 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85 people, displaced more than 50,000 people, and destroyed over 18,000 structures and caused an estimated $16.5 billion in damage.

That fire bankrupted PG&E.

whose negligence and whose negligently treated infrastructure was determined to be the cause of the fire.

AB 2700 takes on the power companies and addresses fire victims from years past.

Seven years ago, in the wake of the deadly Camp Fire, the state established a wildfire fund paid into by utility companies.

PG&E had been found liable for the Camp Fire and pled guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter.

The fund was designed to reimburse claims stemming from wildfires that were caused by power company's equipment.

But it wasn't retroactive.

The new Assembly Bill 2700 requires the California Public Utilities Commission to put a dollar figure on how much is still owed to fire victims from the Camp Fire.

and those moving forward.

The Eaton Fire has been blamed on Southern California Edison.

And now...

The granddaddy of all the fires in the last 10 years, the Camp Fire, November 2018.

The deadliest, most destructive wildfire in California history.

150,000 acres.

Paradise, California, that town.

Murdered 85 people.

Campfire was caused by the failure of a single-worn metal hook attached to a PG&E transmission tower.

The hook snapped.

Mm-hmm

... took us back to 2018 to the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, in which 85 people died-

Mm

... more than 18,000 buildings burned, and the town of Paradise was basically all but-

In 2018, a fire started in the off-season.

It burned 150,000 acres and killed 85 people, and was known as the Camp Fire.

And then the Park Fire a couple years ago burned a half million acres on the other side of Butte Meadows.

You can park anywhere.

Farther north of the house, past the lookout on Colby Mountain, is an active volcano, Mount Lassen.

And through some miracle, it's been untouched by catastrophic wildfire.

The, um, Camp Fire came from this side and almost got to Forest Ranch, and then the Park Fire came from that side [laughs] and almost got to Forest Ranch.

So the concern is that it's kind of, you know, it's in the barrel of the gun, so to speak, and it's kind of the next thing that, you know, folks would expect to, to burn.

Thank you for having me.

And there is ongoing risk of if we have another fire, the likes of the Eaton Fire, the Camp Fire, what does that do for utilities given that the wildfire fund that has already existed probably gets depleted by the Eaton Fire? There's a new one that was authorized last year, but what's the...

What's the long term play for that? Is it just we just continue to fund these bailout funds through rate payers every time? I mean, it just it doesn't seem sustainable.

So you have to think he was also looking at that.

It's a little bit like an insurance policy that you buy before a big calamity.

And the policy is funded half out of shareholders' pockets and half out of our pockets, ratepayer pockets.

created in 2019 in the bankruptcy and designed to manage the risks of fire that were made so evident by both the Camp Fire and the Woolsey, the camp in Northern California, Woolsey in Southern California, and the fires in 17 before that.

And it really enabled PG&E to exit bankruptcy and kept Edison healthy through that process.

And what specifically went on here was Gavin Newsom trying to change the way that utility companies can be held liable when their equipment starts wildfires.

Like, I don't know, the Camp Fire or the Eaton Fire.

There are so many examples of these things happening in recent memory.

And Gavin wanted to make it so the insurance companies could not recoup their costs from the utilities, which would have already taken our insurance crisis and sent it to the 10th degree.

How often are they lucky? Less often than you'd hope.

The NIist investigation of the 2018 Camp Fire in California, which killed 85 people and destroyed the town of Paradise, is the gold standard for how this is done when resources are unlimited.

They used tree mortality patterns, power pole fractures, and computer modeling to pinpoint the origin to a specific C-hook on a transmission tower.

A C-hook is a small metal fastener that holds an insulator to the tower arm.

Let's sit with that for a

second.

The Camp Fire Investigation had NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, running computer models backward from satellite data and building a minute-by-minute timeline of the fire's spread.

That's the textbook.

None of the investor-owned utility companies, like PG&E, SoCal Edison, or SDG&E are commenting on any of this right now.

Isn't that interesting? If the utilities are the ones making this big push, and they're the ones that came up with this fake organization, Protect Wildfire Survivors, why don't they wanna be upfront and have somebody talk to Ashley Zavala about what their point of view is, why they need this? It is certainly shady what is going on here, and it is very emblematic of how Gavin Newsom started as governor, bailing out PG&E and screwing over the victims of the Camp Fire.

It's just like Mia Bonta with the Stop Nick Shirley Act.

She did not make herself available to talk about it, because she doesn't wanna have to answer follow-ups, because the argument falls apart.