PG&E high-voltage power line broke near origin of massive California fire that forced thousands of evacuations
As reported by the Washington Post. If confirmed, this would be the third major wildfire in California in just the past couple years caused by Pacific Gas & Electric, including the most deadly in state history, at Paradise last year, that killed 85 people.
As the article reports:
As the wildfire torched Sonoma, and others spread in San Bernardino, Los Angeles County and elsewhere, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) railed against all three of the state’s investor-owned power companies, including PG&E, which has already been forced into bankruptcy in the face of billions of dollars in liability claims stemming from previous fires.
“I must confess, it is infuriating beyond words,” Newsom said, accusing the utilities of neglecting their infrastructure and leaving the state vulnerable to fires sparked by outmoded power lines.
His statements echoed those he made two weeks earlier, when PG&E shut off power to nearly a million customers.
“It’s more than just climate change, and it is climate change, but it’s more than that,” Newsom said. “As it relates to PG&E, it’s about dog-eat-dog capitalism meeting climate change, it’s about corporate greed meeting climate change, it’s about decades of mismanagement.”
Newsom sent a letter Thursday to the CEOs of San Diego Gas & Electric Company, Edison International and PG&E demanding better communication about when the utilities would implement precautionary power shut-offs.
“The only consistency has been inconsistency,” he wrote.
PG&E's twin-reactor Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in Avila Beach near San Luis Obispo is supposed to shut down for good by 2025, per an agreement hammered out between the nuclear utility, environmental groups Friends of the Earth, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, and the nuclear power plant's labor unions. However, even then, the high-level radioactive waste stored on-site will likely remain for years, if not decades.
PG&E also owns the long-closed Humboldt Bay atomic reactor in Eureka, CA, where high-level radioactive waste is similarly stranded.
Southern California Edison owns the permanently closed triple reactor San Onofre nuclear power plant in San Clemente, where irradiated nuclear fuel is likewise stranded.
And Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) owns the long-shuttered (by popular vote in direct response to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe) Rancho Seco atomic reactor in Herald, CA, with highly radioactive waste stored on-site with nowhere to go.
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