The bad maintenance on the transmission tower is what created the spark, but there's also the point that the area was such a dry tinderbox that one spark was able to ignite the tragedy.
Resilient systems don't show such fragility.
The fact that an unattended campfire, a hot muffler, or any other number of things (inadvertent or intentional) could have caused the same effect shows there's a systemic challenge here. We can grab whatever we legally can from this business malfeasance, but systemic challenges are much harder to deal with (and there's no one to easily blame)...
The tinderbox is not going away, and whatever comes after PG&E is going to be operating in a far riskier business environment.
- Found negligent in the pollution in SoCal Hinkley groundwater pollution
Climate change is a horrible thing, but blaming it for things it didn't cause is a fantastic way to validate right-wing fears. Not fears of climate change, but of irrelevant responses that give the government and their favored industries ever more power. These dangers might be massively overblown, but every time people do this it makes them a little more plausible, and a little easier to spread.