Wine Country wildfires:
Investigators are still months away from determining the causes.
California’s top firefighting official said Friday he hopes to determine the causes of the Wine Country wildfires within a few months.
Ken Pimlott, director of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, told a state Senate subcommittee that his agency had deployed 30 investigators to probe the blazes and will issue a separate report for each fire.
“We certainly want to get those done as quickly as we can, so we can all use that information going forward,” Pimlott said at the hearing of the Senate’s Energy, Utilities and Communications Subcommittee in Santa Rosa. “Hopefully, in the next several months, we’ll be reaching a conclusion on many of these. ... I can tell you the process is very far along.”
The fires inflicted their worst damage in Sonoma County. But Pimlott said his department recorded 172 separate fire starts across Northern California that night, eventually leading to 18 large fires.
The hearing, organized by state Sen. Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, and several North Bay legislators, brought together executives from Pacific Gas and Electric Co., Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas and Electric Co. to discuss how utility companies try to prevent wildfires. Although the causes of the Wine County fires — and most of the recent blazes in Southern California — are unknown, many of the state’s most destructive fires historically have been sparked by electric lines and other utility equipment blown about during windstorms.
The hearing also focused on the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates electricity providers. The commission in December finally approved tough new fire safety rules that had been in development for nearly 10 years, and several lawmakers expressed frustration at the speed with which the commission works.
“If there is a mutual agreement that we need to expedite things, let’s come together and figure out ways to expedite,” said state Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg.
Michael Picker, president of the utilities commission, noted that the agency was designed to move slowly, to give the public and industry time to get involved in its proceedings. He said he welcomes the idea of moving faster, although changing some elements of the commission could require legislative action. “I welcome your pledge to unshackle us from this dead weight of historical practices at the PUC,” Picker told McGuire. “We’re bound by the rule of law. You are the agents of creating those laws.”
PG&E senior vice president Pat Hogan testified about the utility’s use of devices called reclosers on that fateful night in October when the Wine Country fires broke out. Reclosers are designed to automatically restart power lines that have switched off. But they can accidentally start a fire if a power line has been knocked to the ground or become tangled in tree limbs.
California’s other large utility companies have for years deactivated their reclosers during fire season. PG&E had run a pilot project testing the idea. But on the night of Oct. 8 — as fierce winds blew branches and entire trees into PG&E’s lines in Napa and Sonoma counties — most of the company’s reclosers were still programmed to restart their lines, even if those lines were lying on the ground.
After the utility’s use of the reclosers came under scrutiny, PG&E changed its approach. When strong winds returned to the area in December, the company deactivated nearly 4,000 of its 7,700 reclosers across Northern California, Hogan said Friday.
PG&E, he said, had been carefully experimenting with the idea to make sure that deactivating the reclosers wouldn’t lead to unnecessary blackouts. If a recloser doesn’t automatically restart a line that has tripped off, a work crew has to do it by hand.
“We did that to make sure it worked and make sure there weren’t any unintended consequences,” Hogan said.