When the conditions are right its extremely easy for a wildfire to start. Lightning strikes, a glass bottle in the sun, a camp fire, there's so many different ways it could get started. Does it really matter that it happened to be PG&E's equipment in this case? If not them, it would have happened anyway from another cause. It seems unfair to hold them liable, or at least, the extremely hostile tone in these comments seems a bit overboard.

In my early teens my family moved to rural northern Idaho and my dad decided one day to burn some of the brush on our land to clean it up. Well, being from a much more suburban setting we didn't know that that's a real no-no that time of year. The fire got out of control and started burning into the trees and my mom, brothers, and I frantically fought it with hoes and buckets of water while dad tried to plow over it with the bulldozer (we didn't have a phone and this was an hour drive from a fire department). Anyway, we finally got it put out before it got into the national forest bordering our property on the east. Very very scary.

A week later there was a lightning strike fire in the national forest which ended up burning several hundred acres.