San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Utility once seen as beneficial behemoth is now under fire
On Nov. 8, 2018, a fire sparked in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Butte County. Pushed by fierce winds, it kindled into the deadliest wildfire in California history. Over the next two weeks, the Camp Fire burned 153,336 acres, killed 85 people and destroyed much of the Butte County town of Paradise.
How do you assign blame for a catastrophe? Blame local governments that permit development on fire-prone land. Blame drought that turns forests tinder dry. Blame climate change for the drought.
But the Camp Fire had a specific, mechanical cause: a broken metal hook on an aged electric transmission tower operated by the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. The utility that helped Northern California grow was now helping burn it down.
PG&E’s incendiary descent is the cautionary tale told by Wall Street Journal reporter Katherine Blunt in “California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric — And What It Means for America’s Power Grid.”
Blunt starts with some history: Founded in 1905 as San Francisco Gas Co., it merged with California Electric Light in 1930, then merged with its competitor Great Western Power and grew into a regulated monopoly that supplied electricity and natural gas to Central and Northern California. It was mostly deemed a beneficial behemoth — in Blunt’s description, it earned the “goodwill of
Calfornia Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric—and What It Means for America’s Power Grid millions of customers as PG&E expanded its services, electrifying industries and creating jobs across the state for thousands of proud engineers” — until the behemoth stumbled.
“It’s hard to say exactly when PG&E Corporation began its fall,” Blunt writes, but one starting point could be the late 1990s, with a state-sponsored push to deregulate California public utilities to encourage efficiency and innovation. Deregulation proved disastrous, bringing skyrocketing rates, power outages and forcing PG&E into bankruptcy.
Critics charged the company was lax about safety and record-keeping. When, in 2010, a gas pipeline exploded in San Bruno, killing eight people, PG&E conceded that the pipeline had been faulty from the time it was installed a half century earlier.
These corporate failures were serious enough. But “California Burning” details how they were occurring in a California beset by climate change. The PG&E power grid — the network of reservoirs, dams, hydroelectric plants and transmission lines that generate and carry electricity across Northern California — has become less tenable in a hotter, drier region, when every strong breeze can spark a conflagration like the Camp Fire.
As a portrait of a state in crisis, “California Burning” isn’t as dramatic as dispatches from the wildfire front lines — instead of heroic firefighters, we get lawyers and engineers — but Blunt is a thorough reporter and a lucid writer. She makes the struggle to supply California with power on a warming planet clear and compelling.
In-person. 6 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 31. Free. 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera. 415-927-0960. www.book passage.com
Bookshop Santa Cruz presents a reading by Katherine Blunt: In-person. 7 p.m. Sept. 8. Free. 1520 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz. 831-423-0900. www.bookshop santacruz.com
The Commonwealth Club of California presents Katherine Blunt in conversation with Andrew Dudley: In-person and online. 5:30 p.m. Sept. 13. $20 in person, $5 online. 110 The Embarcadero, S.F. 415-597-6705. www.common wealthclub.org
Orinda Books presents Katherine Blunt in conversation with Carol Pogash: In-person. 2 p.m. Sept. 17. $29, includes book. 276 Village Square, Orinda. 925-254-7606. www.orinda books.com
Occasionally in “California Burning,” Blunt notes tentative optimism. She points out that PG&E has been a pioneer in solar power. Near the book’s end, she follows a PG&E executive to Butte County, where the exec announces a plan to place 10,000 miles of distribution lines underground, safe from the winds that sparked the Camp Fire. The project will be expensive, and it is only a beginning.
Meanwhile, California rivers and reservoirs are drying, forests are withering, wildfire risks are growing. If it’s hard to say when PG&E began its fall, now it may be harder to know how it can succeed.
There’s something deliciously prismatic about certain short story collections — in the way they throw bands of linguistic light, bending it in ways that seem impossible, and in a topographical sense, too. Each piece might be distinct, but together they form an efficient little contraption that reveals far more about what goes into it than you’d expect.
Sure, some prefer to take the exploded star route, with voice and theme roving from one end of the creative universe to the other, an exciting move that requires an extra grip from the reader. But there’s something else that happens within a collection written by an author trying to work some things out from within a handful of interconnected bits of glass: intimacy. “Tomorrow in Shanghai and Other Stories” is the latest huddle of stories from May-lee Chai, a creative writing professor at San Francisco State University whose previous collection, “Useful Phrases for Immigrants,” garnered an American Book Award in 2019. Chai is also a prolific memoirist, and her expansive, documentarian style is found here (underscored by a preference for a close-third narration style) as she navigates a small selection of lives in the Chinese diaspora.
Over eight new stories, Chai keeps a steady hand on the scrabbled emotional terrain of expats and immigrants, city and country, and, briefly, a tired, spent Earth and a wealthy “New Shanghai” colony on Mars. There is a familiarity about that friction, the awkward
Tomorrow in Shanghai: And Other Stories
City Lights presents May-lee Chai in conversation with Tonya Foster: Virtual event. 6 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 1. Free, registration required. citylights.com
Book Passages presents May-lee Chai in conversation with Melissa Fu: Virtual event. 5:30 p.m. Sept. 13. Free. www.bookpassage.com unease of the in-between. One gets the sense Chai has been mapping its edges for some time now: In “Hong’s Mother” and “Jia,” the narrators are the children of a Chinese father and white mother. Both mothers are blonde, as if to underscore the stark lack of physical resemblance between parent and child, and both struggle to manage public displays of racism.
The roots of these moments aren’t hard to find. While discussing her memoir “Hapa Girl” in a 2020 interview with Hyphen magazine, Chai explains that her family “was attacked when I was growing up in South Dakota in the 1980s because racists there didn’t like seeing a Chinese man married to a white woman.”
Providing safe haven for one’s characters feels like an underutilized authorial power, a benevolence we’re taught to push back against in search of some greater gravitas. When Chai does it, it’s with startling confidence.
In “Life on Mars,” teenage Yu is confronted one night by a gang of bored, rangy boys with fancy bikes. He’s outnumbered, and they mock his accent in a predictably cruel way. We brace for the worst, but Chai has something else in mind: shrewd self-defense skills, granted to the worthy hero. Unoriginal bullies in a small American town, dispatched.
Here, characters are not defined by the crushing weight of representation, and instead of diminishing the impact or validity of these traumas, it simply robs them of their power. Chai does this again and again, elegantly yet forcefully subverting our preconceived notions as readers with each successive read. “Tomorrow in Shanghai” harnesses our attention, splitting it to show the shades of hope, fear, love and loss we’ve already brought to the page.
Number One Fan
appeared in her single-author collection, “Big Girl Plus.” Now with “Number One Fan,” Elison’s fifth novel, she enters the thriller genre. It is a tense, gripping, page-turning masterpiece, told from multiple points of view. It also features a villain who is both completely unhinged and chillingly plausible — a difficult feat to accomplish, as the vast majority of villains in fiction can only be one or the other.
The book is being compared with Stephen King’s “Misery,” and readers will find the two novels are quite similar. They both feature a best-selling author held captive by a reader who loves their books. What makes “Number One Fan” different, however, is the agenda of the villain and the details, which are in some ways far less lurid and in others more grimly realistic.
King wrote “Misery” in the 1980s, before the age of social media and before the details of torture at places like Abu Ghraib became public knowledge. By contrast, Elison’s villain can learn everything he needs to know about where to find his victim and how to break her body and mind by logging onto Twitter and watching videos on YouTube.