Much of Maui’s electric infrastructure is old and wooden power poles all over the island were leaning due to frequent strong winds. HEC was aware its infrastructure was falling apart. Much of it was built between 1950 and the early 1970s – or 50 to 70 years ago. Today, it is believed the collapse of power lines started the fires that destroyed Lahaina.
In Oregon (where I live), Pacific Power lost a court case finding the utility’s power infrastructure was responsible for the loss of some homes in recent wild fires. More lawsuits are still pending on that. The Oregonian found power lines were involved in numerous huge wildfires in Oregon. Obviously, there are other causes of wild land fires too – including lightning, arson, and frequently power tool usage in the forest or grasslands is implicated – not related to power lines.
Downed power lines found responsible for fires in Washington State, also, having caused 400+ fires just on state owned land in 5 years. Recent fires destroyed 366 homes in Spokane County – the fire department has blamed human causes but details are not yet available. (More here – populating the “urban interface” with wildlands is blamed for why so many homes were destroyed there.)
In California, the PG&E utility was found at fault for the Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise, CA – as well as other fires. In the case of the Camp Fire, the fire started when a wire hanger, which PG&E knew was badly corroded, dropped a power line. The poles were 72 years old.
PG&E plead guilty to 84 felony counts of manslaughter.
While utility lines cause a relatively small percent of fires, they are often associated with the worst fires.
Utilities in California and Oregon are now pre-emptively de-energizing power lines when fire weather conditions warrant. This might be a necessary step for the next few decades as it may take decades to replace and update old, aging infrastructure that is too weak to withstand routine high wind events.
It is worth pondering if we many of our wildfires in the western U.S., all occurring now, are, in fact, occurring because of the electric utility infrastructure is similarly aged, old, and falling apart throughout the west – and could be a root cause in the midst of contributing factors like drought or heat.
The average age of U.S. electric infrastructure is said to be 40 years old and ‘aging’. Utilities are spending money – tens of billions – for many years. They are working on it.
I was not able to determine if power lines played a role in the large number of fires in Canada in the summer of 2023. Some news reports range from no cause has yet been determined to many were started by lightning strikes.
The standard approach in the media today is that all fires are caused by climate change and apparently, there are no other causative factors. Applying factfulness, we see there may be other, primary causes of these fires – climate change may play a role, but a minor role in the overall set of factors. Wildfires have been part of the west forever and this is not new – what is new is that many big fires have started in recent years due to failing electrical infrastructure, all of which is now 50-75 years old – and falling apart.
Update: A couple of days after I wrote the above, this appeared in my LinkedIn feed:
Update: And a couple of days after that, this: Wildfire risk: Electric utilities face billions in liability with aging lines (cnbc.com)
Update: The total number of hours of power outages is trending upwards in the U.S., which suggests possible infrastructure problems.
