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Inside the Investigation That Secured a Guilty Plea for 84 Wildfire Deaths
This article is well worth the trip to the library. For some reason, The Wall Street Journal. is letting me read the whole thing online. I am not a subscriber.
U.S.
Inside the Investigation That Secured a Guilty Plea for 84 Wildfire Deaths
Neglect, shoddy record-keeping and overlooked warnings added up to a crime, not an accident
By Katherine Blunt
https://twitter.com/KatherineBlunt
katherine.blunt@wsj.com
Aug. 25, 2022 10:00 am ET
A brilliant flash broke the morning darkness on Nov. 8, 2018, as strong winds pummeled a power line scaling the Sierra Nevada mountains 90 miles north of Sacramento, Calif. A worn hook hanging from a century-old transmission tower owned by PG&E Corp. broke clean, dropping a high-voltage wire that spit electricity just before sunrise. A shower of sparks set dry brush aflame. PG&E recorded an outage on the line at 6:15 a.m. ... The message reached the local fire station at 6:29 a.m. Two engines sped north along a remote road running up a steep river canyon that funnels mountain winds down to the valley below. Within 15 minutes, they arrived on the east bank of the Feather River, opposite the makings of a firestorm. There was no way to get ahead of it. The transmission tower, perched high along a steep, gravelly access route, was almost completely inaccessible by fire engine.
Within an hour, the fire had spread 7 miles to arrive at the outskirts of Paradise, a town nestled in the Sierra foothills. Residents awoke to emergency evacuation orders as softball-sized embers collided with dead trees. The fire was entirely out of control. At its fastest, it engulfed the equivalent of 80 football fields a minute, by some estimates. As the evacuation process began, thick black smoke took on the hellish orange hue of the flames. Escape routes became choke points, lines of cars inching along melting asphalt. ... Dozens of people were left behind, unable to escape for reasons that made their gruesome deaths even more tragic. Many were in their 70s and 80s. One man had only just gotten his wheelchair out the front door. Another abandoned his wheelchair and tried to drag himself along the ground. A couple died together in their recliners, holding two dogs and two cats.
The fire overtook the town within hours. At noon, one of PG&’s first responders, called a troubleman, arrived at the ignition point in a helicopter to hover at the tall steel structure that no one had much noticed for decades. ... If you think about the nation’s electricity grid as a network of roads, transmission lines are like highways, built to carry large amounts of power over long distances. The high-voltage wires must be kept away from the towers that support them. If the space between them narrows too much, electricity can jump from wire to tower in what’s known as an arc, a lightning-like bolt hot enough to melt metal and send sparks flying. To reduce that risk, the wires are suspended from strings of insulator discs hooked to the T-shaped arms of their towers.
Peering out of the helicopter, the troubleman saw an insulator string dangling. A hook about the width of a fist had broken nearly in half, dropping the insulator and the wire it held. An arc of electricity surged from the wire as it fell, scorching the tower in a blast of molten steel and aluminum. ... Later, inspectors would discover that the hook, which had hung from a hole in a long metal plate, was almost totally smooth at the point of fracture, evidence of a deep groove that had formed over decades. Millimeter by millimeter, the plate had cut into the curve of the hook, which was scarcely an inch in diameter. A jagged edge a few millimeters across showed just where it had broken.
{snip}
Inside the Investigation That Secured a Guilty Plea for 84 Wildfire Deaths
Neglect, shoddy record-keeping and overlooked warnings added up to a crime, not an accident
By Katherine Blunt
https://twitter.com/KatherineBlunt
katherine.blunt@wsj.com
Aug. 25, 2022 10:00 am ET
A brilliant flash broke the morning darkness on Nov. 8, 2018, as strong winds pummeled a power line scaling the Sierra Nevada mountains 90 miles north of Sacramento, Calif. A worn hook hanging from a century-old transmission tower owned by PG&E Corp. broke clean, dropping a high-voltage wire that spit electricity just before sunrise. A shower of sparks set dry brush aflame. PG&E recorded an outage on the line at 6:15 a.m. ... The message reached the local fire station at 6:29 a.m. Two engines sped north along a remote road running up a steep river canyon that funnels mountain winds down to the valley below. Within 15 minutes, they arrived on the east bank of the Feather River, opposite the makings of a firestorm. There was no way to get ahead of it. The transmission tower, perched high along a steep, gravelly access route, was almost completely inaccessible by fire engine.
Within an hour, the fire had spread 7 miles to arrive at the outskirts of Paradise, a town nestled in the Sierra foothills. Residents awoke to emergency evacuation orders as softball-sized embers collided with dead trees. The fire was entirely out of control. At its fastest, it engulfed the equivalent of 80 football fields a minute, by some estimates. As the evacuation process began, thick black smoke took on the hellish orange hue of the flames. Escape routes became choke points, lines of cars inching along melting asphalt. ... Dozens of people were left behind, unable to escape for reasons that made their gruesome deaths even more tragic. Many were in their 70s and 80s. One man had only just gotten his wheelchair out the front door. Another abandoned his wheelchair and tried to drag himself along the ground. A couple died together in their recliners, holding two dogs and two cats.
The fire overtook the town within hours. At noon, one of PG&’s first responders, called a troubleman, arrived at the ignition point in a helicopter to hover at the tall steel structure that no one had much noticed for decades. ... If you think about the nation’s electricity grid as a network of roads, transmission lines are like highways, built to carry large amounts of power over long distances. The high-voltage wires must be kept away from the towers that support them. If the space between them narrows too much, electricity can jump from wire to tower in what’s known as an arc, a lightning-like bolt hot enough to melt metal and send sparks flying. To reduce that risk, the wires are suspended from strings of insulator discs hooked to the T-shaped arms of their towers.
Peering out of the helicopter, the troubleman saw an insulator string dangling. A hook about the width of a fist had broken nearly in half, dropping the insulator and the wire it held. An arc of electricity surged from the wire as it fell, scorching the tower in a blast of molten steel and aluminum. ... Later, inspectors would discover that the hook, which had hung from a hole in a long metal plate, was almost totally smooth at the point of fracture, evidence of a deep groove that had formed over decades. Millimeter by millimeter, the plate had cut into the curve of the hook, which was scarcely an inch in diameter. A jagged edge a few millimeters across showed just where it had broken.
{snip}