Was this a random tragedy, or something we should expect to see more of in areas that aren't historically prone to wildfire? Are we going to have to cut down our trees and gardens in New England to protect against fire?
1. Wildfires that threaten neighborhoods are not particularly common in Hawaii, so people don't have the same level of awareness around defensible space and fire protection, and the government doesn't educate about it / require it
2. Nonnative grasses have taken over swaths of Maui, and they burn more easily than native grasses
3. Maui is currently having a drought and exceptionally dry
4. A hurricane several hundred miles to the south caused very unusual wind conditions: VERY strong winds blowing from the opposite direction wind usually blows
5. The power company's lines are not capable of withstanding the gusts, and they did not shut down the power as a precaution, as happens in other wildfire-prone areas
So powerlines blew over, sparks ignited the grass, fire raced through the town.
As far as I know, a certain amount of energy will be more or less unavoidably discharged when a power line hits the ground: the power line has some capacitance to ground, and it has a voltage (which varies with time) relative to ground, and the stored energy (1/2 C V^2) isn’t going to just disappear. This isn’t all that much energy.
But there is no real reason that the power station needs to keep delivering more power to an arc after the capacitance discharges. Avoiding it is somewhat complicated, but the technology is available off the shelf:
http://www.swedishneutral.se/main.php?name=gfn
IIRC some Australian customers have tested this system by intentionally dropping a live power line onto dry grass, and nothing catches fire!
i've seen a grass fire start when a bird touched its wingtips to two lines on the same pole, and the smoking carcass hitting the ground was enough to ignite it.
A short to another phase wire can happen, but it’s less common.
https://www.colorado.edu/today/2022/01/25/what-marshall-fire...