You could argue that nobody should be living in a place guaranteed to be destroyed, whether by landslides or wildfires, but the government tried that in Palos Verdes and got sued, lost, and now is bailing out those homeowners to get out of services obligations all the same.
Suffice it to say, you have bought into a very well marketed point of view. There was a lot of ceremony to enact procedural blame on PG&E, but it obscures all the far simpler solutions, that are far more just. People in San Francisco are paying higher rates, no? So PG&E may have been responsible for something somewhere, but the liability is being borne functionally by taxpayers, via a compulsory payment for energy, to balance the books on assholes living in places at risk of wildfires with overinflated asset values. Ultimately, the government here has decided that you should get government-guaranteed-risk-free market rate returns on owner occupied real estate.
Yes. As I recall it, the fire was caused by downed lines that were energized during a dry spell, and the reason the lines were downed was due to negligence around maintaining the C-Hooks holding their high voltage transmission lines. PG&E knew that they needed to be replaced every so often, had a policy that dictated when they needed to be replaced, and then ignored that policy which ultimately allowed a C-Hook to fail and the energized line to start the fire. In fact, PG&E had commissioned a study as far back as 1987 to look into this issue and confirmed that these hooks had a limited lifespan.
They had clear knowledge of the issue. They had a responsibility to maintain the system to prevent the issue. They set policies around how that maintenance should be conducted. Then they willfully ignored their own policies, which lead to the issue they were responsible to prevent. That's textbook negligence.
So, yes, PG&E /did/ cause the fire. They were negligent in doing so. They are liable for the damages.
I agree PGE was negligent, but it also doesn't make sense to assign the entire cost of the resulting fire to PGE. The scale of the fire damage was a result of many factors, only some of which are due to PGE. A huge destructive fire was a matter of time. Whether it was caused by PGE, lightning, or an RV tire blowout was a matter of chance.
Or another way to put it, how much liability would you give the RV drivers in these two scenarios?
The cost wasn’t assigned to PG&E. Brother, the CPUC is approving the rate increases to pay back the settlement. You are getting the same electricity today as you did in 2019. The entire cost was assigned to YOU.
There are so many smart people on this forum. How hard is it to understand the spelled-out-in-the-law relationship between your compulsory payment for electricity rising and the cost of the settlements?
So then, $1.6B of liability to the driver of the RV at the Carr fire, and a few thousand to the Colorado RV driver? For the exact same error in both cases?
Legally, maybe you are right. I honestly don't know. It doesn't seem right to me though.
You could certainly argue that some sort of fire was inevitable, and that the fire would have been much less damaging if people hadn’t built their houses in such bad places.
But the law doesn’t really care about that. You can’t avoid liability by arguing what would have happened or what should have happened. If your negligence causes a fire and that fire destroys a house, you’re liable for it regardless.
California has contribitory negligence. If the court determined it was negligent to build or keep a house in these places and that contributed to the loss, it must determine the share of loss attributable to each party and reduce the award. In some states, a party must have be less than half at fault to receive compensation, but California doesn't have a minimum, if you are 99% at fault and the other party is 1%, you can get 1% of your loss compensated.
> This buyout program provides a viable pathway forward for our most vulnerable community members
> Hong estimates that his home would have been worth about $3.6 million two years ago
Yeah, this person who was able to afford a $3.6M home sure sounds like "our most vulnerable" people. He needs a bailout for making a poor decision on buying that house in a place prone to landslides. Not the hungry kids in our schools whose parents can't afford/won't provide healthy meals.
We got money for millionaires but not hungry kids and people with chronic medical needs.
Then it should be obvious to you the parallels with Paradise, CA, where average home sales prices were at $700k just prior to the wildfire, growing faster than San Francisco’s prices: the reason we are doing this bailout is due to the politically powerful interests of a lot of wealthy savers. The people in this thread saying “it’s PG&E’s fault” are incredibly naive.
That 3.6M million dollar home might have been worth a lot less before asset appreciation happened. There's quite a few people living in expensive areas that bought homes 20-30 years ago when it was dirt cheap, the place became popular, and now they're a teacher or something who owns a multi-million dollar home while living on 80k a year or something.
The article also mentioned their home was a new build and they moved in a few years before this happened.
But sure, keep telling me their new mansion on quicksand needs a bailout and they're far more needful than hungry malnourished kids.
> now they're a teacher or something who owns a multi-million dollar home while living on 80k a year or something.
TBH, if their home is now worth millions, they should retire and move someplace cheaper. The market is telling them that land is worth way more than a lifetime of their earnings. They should capitalize on that. They're still far weather people that he vast majority of Americans, and probably the top 0.001% of people on Earth. That they failed to cash their lotto ticket in time before their mansion on the quicksand fell apart leaves me zero sympathy.
I wish I could fail at cashing in my $3.6M lotto ticket I bought for relative pennies. At least I would have been given the chance, no?
Wait till you read the facts behind this $41m bailout for 20 homes in one of the richest burbs of LA: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-10-29/feds-to-...
You could argue that nobody should be living in a place guaranteed to be destroyed, whether by landslides or wildfires, but the government tried that in Palos Verdes and got sued, lost, and now is bailing out those homeowners to get out of services obligations all the same.
Suffice it to say, you have bought into a very well marketed point of view. There was a lot of ceremony to enact procedural blame on PG&E, but it obscures all the far simpler solutions, that are far more just. People in San Francisco are paying higher rates, no? So PG&E may have been responsible for something somewhere, but the liability is being borne functionally by taxpayers, via a compulsory payment for energy, to balance the books on assholes living in places at risk of wildfires with overinflated asset values. Ultimately, the government here has decided that you should get government-guaranteed-risk-free market rate returns on owner occupied real estate.