Another season of big wildfire risks in California was never an if, always a when. And so here we are again. Whatever you think of PG&E’s management before last year’s fires and its fire mitigation plans since it entered into bankruptcy proceedings, many experts assumed at some point PG&E would need to shut down portions of the grid to remove the risk of power lines being taken down by high winds and sparking a wildfire like the one that devastated towns like Paradise in 2018.
So now that, too, is happening. But being angry or feeling helpless against a giant utility won’t help anything. PG&E has gotten plenty wrong in the past and may get wrong the decision to shut down power when and where it turns out not to be needed, but the message to Californians — and everyone living in areas at risk of natural disasters — is that it’s time to take control of as much power generation as you can.
The fires will keep coming. That’s the opinion of wildfire experts from Leroy Westerling, who studies wildfires and climate at the University of California, Merced, to Sarah Lewis McDonald, principal at Envision Geo, a geospatial technology firm that has worked on studies of wildfire risk in California. When she looked back at one forecast map she helped to create before last year’s devastating wildfires, what the technology had provided as its best guess turned out to be reality.
“We looked back and said, ‘Oh my God.’ Here it was, bright on our map.′ Bright pink. Paradise. And the other ones that are bright pink on our map remain vulnerable in the future,” Lewis McDonald said in an interview with CNBC earlier this year.
The zones of high risk that she called “disproportionately dire” across northern California are not going away, and people who assume that these events are once-in-a-lifetime weather scenarios are making a big gamble.
“These events are going to be more prevalent in future across the West,” Lewis McDonald said. She said the previous wildfire season in northern California was “a perfect storm of events of extremes, but with climate change that is going to be case.”
Published Thu, Oct 10 20191:38 PM EDTUpdated Thu, Oct 10 20196:53 PM EDTEric Rosenbaum@erprose