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Comment by tuna-piano | Hacker News Reader

I think the point is that PG&E negligently caused sparks. But many things can negligently cause sparks, including dozens of human and natural causes. Even among power operators, sparks seem to not be too rare (for example, the tree that fell on the line).

So while PG&E can be blamed for that specific fire that doesn't really address the root cause of "why can some sparks in one place cause such huge destruction and can we do anything about that?"

I'm just not so sure that if you accidentally knock over one domino and a cascading whole room full of dominoes falls that you should take the blame for the cascading effects. Maybe whoever setup the dominoes behind the first one shares the blame as well...

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> But many things can negligently cause sparks, including dozens of human and natural causes.

My favourite: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-mendocino-compl...

Someone tried to stop an angry yellowjacket nest by driving a concrete stake into the hole in the ground and their hammer thew off sparks and started a 459,123 acre fire-- the largest recorded in state history at the time.

Problem solved, I guess.

If the forest is so sensitive that hammer sparks set off a fire, maybe no humans belong in the forest - except for the humans proactively trying to manage burns.

The fire started in grassland, not in a forest. As it grew, it spread to forested areas. There is a lot of grassland out in California and it gets very flammable in the summer when it all dies out and dries up. Dead grass is basically well-aerated vertical kindling. It's so easy to light that when I was growing up outside of Sacramento, a common cause of local wildfires was cigarette butts flicked out a car window. When we mowed the lawn in the summer, we would keep the garden hose charged. Basically, it burns, burns easily, and burns quickly.

I suspect that man was lying... It is very very very hard to start a fire with a hammer, even deliberately...

Yet if you had a wasps nest, you'd totally be tempted to douse it with a bit of gasoline, believing you could put it out before it spread to anything else... Except you couldn't...

And when the investigators came round, you'd totally tell them about the stake but not the petrol...

> I suspect that man was lying... It is very very very hard to start a fire with a hammer, even deliberately...

Out of the millions of people who use a hammer to strike metal on metal every day, one of them will manage start a fire eventually.

Even the unlikeliest events are actually pretty likely at scale.

Sure, two thirds of them may just be lying, but unless you can prove they are (which really shouldn't be that hard, considering burning fuel leaves obvious traces), you should assume each of them are telling the truth.

I laugh at the image of a statistical ensemble of people hammering bees with hammers, with one of them causing a fire.

I laugh at the image of a statistical ensemble of people claiming to to bees with a hammer while instead setting them on fire with gasoline, with one of them actually hammering bees with a hammer.

Aside, I use a very large clear glass bowl to kill the nest. Flip it over the hole, leave it for a little over a week and the nest will be dead.

It has to be a clear bowl to trick the wasps to think that they can still get out otherwise they will dig a new exit.

Heh, and you might just be the next person to start a massive fire from a lensing effect.

"why can some sparks in one place cause such huge destruction and can we do anything about that?"

Forest fires happen naturally all the time, but we've gotten so good at putting them out quickly, that at some point a huge buildup of dry underbrush will have amassed in a huge area, until a fire happens that is so big that we have no way to stop it. We're basically accumulating these huge powderkegs instead of letting the gunpowder burn one handful at a time.

In addition, as the original twitter stream says, climate change promoted additional growth of vegetation, which added even more fuel for wildfire. It would be an interesting topic of research to see which one contributed more to the proliferation of wildfire we are observing in the west coast.

A couple whose trailer they were towing with an RV had a flat tire and sparks from the rim scraping on the pavement touched off the enormous and deadly Carr Fire of 2018.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carr_Fire

> I'm just not so sure that if you accidentally knock over one domino and a cascading whole room full of dominoes falls that you should take the blame for the cascading effects.

Yes, you do and should take the blame under the eggshell skull doctrine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull). If the initial action was unlawful, then the perpetrator bears liability for the full set of consequences -- even if those consequences are more severe than normal based on unknown factors. Here, PG&E was clearly guilty of gross negligence in their maintenance, so they bear liability for the consequences.

Worse yet, this background situation wasn't previously unknown. The enhanced fire risk was widely understood, which would put PG&E under an even greater obligation to ensure their equipment was operated safely.

One cannot reasonably blame them for all fires, but one can reasonably blame them for fires with a direct causal link to their negligence.

> Maybe whoever setup the dominoes behind the first one shares the blame as well...

There was a famous story here a couple years ago here where a mountain biker lit some toilet paper on fire and caused half a hillside to go up in flames.

Negligence, sure. Stupidity, no doubt. But it's also dry here in the summer, and that hasn't changed year after year. So sure, I guess, let it be the weather's fault or global warming, why not.

It's easier, afterall, to place the blame on other people or forces than to change behaviors that would prevent disasters in the first place.

No. I think the point is can we change our forestry practices. Ignoring the root causes and blaming the first dominoe isn’t helpful because there will always be some dumb thing to set off a massive fire. We have been assigning blame - is that effective at stopping the fires?

We do blameless post-martens as a best practice in engineering so that when we don’t have constant outages of critical internet infrastructure and that it comes up quickly when issues arise.

Why ignore a successful strategy that may show better results than just blaming whoever happened to be responsible for some sparks this time around? Who are you going to blame when lightning is the spark?

> blameless post-martens as a best practice in engineering

First, those don't exist -- despite any evidence to the contrary.

Second, engineers don't have shareholders demanding stock buy backs.

It's hard to have a "blameless postmortem" when 86 people are dead.

The NTSB doesn’t seem to have much trouble with it.

Fires can start from natural causes too. It's ignorant to say that this sort of disaster can be prevented by fixing behaviour, and it's a special form of hubris to think that you can "unstupid" everyone. This is the worst plan you can have. Relying on all individuals not doing something stupid for a long time is a lost cause, just look at the state of covid in the US. There are people literally throwing parties or sending their kids to school while they know that they have covid.

Many things can crash cars but if you crash one you're liable.

If the wildfires in CA were a new thing this season, I wouldn't want to witch hunt this year's culprit. But it's been a huge hazard for years now -- negligent sparks can't be tolerated.

I love the car comparison because I think the comparison to car manufacturers' stance pre-"Unsafe At Any Speed" seems quite fitting. In fact car manufacturers at least had drivers to blame, whereas PG&E can really only blame themselves or "acts of god"

The reason it "some sparks" caused such huge destruction is because PG&E was also not maintaining the brush underneath their towers. All they were doing was literally fanning the flames by flying over it with a helicopter.

> literally fanning the flames by flying over it with a helicopter.

That's a hilarious image, but I doubt that literally happened

It was just a little flare to add to the comment :) But I guess a lot of people took that part far more seriously than the first part.

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