San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
State gets tougher on power line fire danger
After years of failing to stop fiery catastrophes caused by California utility companies, state regulators are taking a different approach this year that they hope will prevent power lines from burning more neighborhoods to the ground.
Compelled by a 2019 law, the California Public Utilities Commission in January began a new safety unit focused entirely on averting more deadly wildfires linked to aging electric equipment. It’s an urgent task, because power lines were responsible for some of the state’s worst recent disasters, including the
historically deadly and destructive 2018 Camp Fire.
In response to those calamities, state officials conceived of the commission’s new Wildfire Safety Division as providing a bootsontheground approach to regulating fire prevention. The division has hired a team of inspectors to examine dangerous regions of the state and test whether electric companies are completing promised preventive work and complying with the law.
The fire safety division in theory represents a more aggressive way of doing business for a regulatory agency that was panned several years ago for being too cozy with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. following a devastating gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno.
Forming the division was also part of a broader attempt by state leaders to address a long stretch of fires caused by power lines. While the commission has long hired people to audit infrastructure work and investigate safety issues, recent utilitylinked wildfires — many of them caused by PG&E — forced the state to take a more active approach.
The division has two branches: one that inspects power lines and another for policy work. Next summer, the division is supposed to move out of the utilities commission and into the state’s Natural Resources Agency.
“Everyone recognizes that this is a very deep and longterm effort,” said Caroline Thomas Jacobs, director of the fire safety division. “The grid was not built overnight, so converting it and updating it is not going to happen overnight either.”
Thomas Jacobs came to the utilities commission after serving various roles in state government, including at the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. She also spent nearly a decade at Apple, where she helped introduce the nowwidespread Genius Bar service at the company’s retail stores.
Now, Thomas Jacobs faces perhaps her most consequential challenge yet: meaningfully reducing the wildfire risk of utility electrical equipment. It’s a problem that has only worsened since fires caused by utility equipment plagued the San Diego area in 2007.
To do that, Thomas Jacobs and her staff must succeed where the state has consistently fallen short.
Their first test has already arrived in the form of the 2020 fire season, which will enter its most dangerous period in the months ahead. All of the worst fires PG&E caused in the last five years started in the months of September, October and November. State investigators on Thursday declared PG&E equipment responsible for California’s largest wildfire of 2019, October’s Kincade Fire in northern Sonoma County.
The fire safety division has so far focused mostly on PG&E, which just emerged from a bankruptcy case prompted by its culpability for major wildfires. The company also pleaded guilty last month to 85 felony counts over the Camp Fire.
For years, the utilities commission largely believed that the threat of major liabilities was sufficient to force compliance from companies, said Steven Weissman, a former administrative law judge for the commission.
“It’s not that (the commission) never had the ability to focus on safety before, but this is an order of magnitude that is different from anything else they’ve had before,” said Weissman, who is now a lecturer at UC Berkeley’s public policy school.
Critics say the commission has for too long reacted to problems after the fact instead of preventing hazards from becoming disastrous in the first place.
“They’ve been a lapdog, not a watchdog,” said Loretta Lynch, a former president of the utilities commission. “We need them to be a watchdog.”
State leaders are spending a lot of money trying to rectify the problem. They recently allocated $59 million to fund the division’s work over the next four years, which will help grow its staff to 32 people. Currently, 15 are employed, and the total number of people helping the division will exceed 100 employees when considering staffers who support its mission but work in other areas of the commission, according to Thomas Jacobs, the division director.
So far, the division has completed 894 inspections and found 37 problems that required repairs. Nearly all of that work was done in PG&E’s territory, because the coronavirus pandemic has limited commission staffers to inspections they can conduct within driving distance. The commission expects to expand the reach of the inspections as the division hires more staff.
The division also reviewed PG&E’s statemandated fireprevention plan this year and recommended its approval by the full utilities commission — even while flagging several problems. A review of PG&E’s plan signed by Thomas Jacobs said the company’s plan “lacks significant details for the (division) to be fully convinced that PG&E will be able to execute on its plan fully and on time,” among other concerns.
Commissioners ratified the fire safety division’s recommendations in June, approving plans from PG&E and other utilities while directing a series of improvements. PG&E spokeswoman Lynsey Paulo said the company “supports the Wildfire Safety Division’s mission to advance longterm utility wildfire safety” and is “working cooperatively” with the division.
“We’re working hard every day to deliver safe electric and gas service ... and to reduce the evergrowing threat of catastrophic wildfires,” she said.
State lawmakers chose to form the new safety division last year when they passed AB1054, a wideranging wildfire bill that was crafted in response to PG&E’s bankruptcy case.
Though designed ostensibly to enact more aggressive safety oversight of PG&E and other electric companies, Lynch, the former commission president, questioned whether the division would be able to fulfill its mission successfully. Lynch is currently on the board of the Protect Our Communities Foundation, a San Diego group that advocates before the commission.
“The division can only be as successful as the political appointees allow it to be,” she said. “Employees need to be empowered with the responsibility to stop the process of giving the utilities a gold star before they actually do the work.”
In interviews, officials from the division said they’re trying to spot problems before they metastasize into potential disasters like the Camp Fire, which nearly destroyed the Butte County town of Paradise.
“You may not want to put all of the resources where the squeakiest wheel is if you have an area where people may not have as much of a voice but could potentially be the next Paradise,” said Christopher Meyer, manager of the safety division’s compliance branch.
Meyer leads an 11member team that spends part of its time conducting physical inspections and part of its time auditing utilities’ work. In the field, Meyer’s inspectors are looking out for problems such as hazardous trees that could fall on power lines and start fires, nests on electrical equipment that could ignite, and other dangers. The inspectors also look to see if the utilities are adhering to various parts of their fireprevention plans that regulators approved.
Inspectors are trying to look even beyond areas where utilities have already scheduled work, Meyer said.
“We don’t want to be reactionary,” he said. “One of the big goals of our division was to be proactive.”