California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric--and What It Means for America's Power Grid - Hardcover

Blunt, Katherine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 059333065X ISBN 13: 9780593330654

Verlag: Portfolio, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
2022 Winner of the Golden Poppy Award for Nonfiction (California Independent Booksellers Alliance)

A revelatory, urgent narrative with national implications, exploring the decline of California’s largest utility company that led to countless wildfires — including the one that destroyed the town of Paradise — and the human cost of infrastructure failure

Pacific Gas and Electric was a legacy company built by innovators and visionaries, establishing California as a desirable home and economic powerhouse. In California Burning, Wall Street Journal reporter and Pulitzer finalist Katherine Blunt examines how that legacy fell apart—unraveling a long history of deadly failures in which Pacific Gas and Electric endangered millions of Northern Californians, through criminal neglect of its infrastructure. As PG&E prioritized profits and politics, power lines went unchecked—until a rusted hook purchased for 56 cents in 1921 split in two, sparking the deadliest wildfire in California history.

Beginning with PG&E’s public reckoning after the Paradise fire, Blunt chronicles the evolution of PG&E’s shareholder base, from innovators who built some of California's first long-distance power lines to aggressive investors keen on reaping dividends. Following key players through pivotal decisions and legal battles, California Burning reveals the forces that shaped the plight of PG&E: deregulation and market-gaming led by Enron Corp., an unyielding push for renewable energy, and a swift increase in wildfire risk throughout the West, while regulators and lawmakers pushed their own agendas.

California Burning is a deeply reported, character-driven narrative, the story of a disaster expanding into a much bigger exploration of accountability. It’s an American tragedy that serves as a cautionary tale for utilities across the nation—especially as climate change makes aging infrastructure more vulnerable, with potentially fatal consequences.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Katherine Blunt covers renewable energy and utilities for The Wall Street Journal. Her team's reporting on PG&E has been honored with a Barlett & Steele award for business investigative journalism, the Thomas L. Stokes award for energy and environmental reporting, and was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is based in San Francisco.
 

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Chapter One: Indictment


A brilliant flash broke the morning darkness on November 8, 2018, as strong winds pummeled a PG&E power line scaling the Sierra Nevada ninety miles north of Sacramento. A worn hook hanging from a century-old transmission tower broke clean, dropping a high-voltage wire that spit electricity just before sunrise. A shower of sparks set dry brush aflame.

PG&E recorded an outage on the line at 6:15 a.m. Five minutes later, one of the company's employees noticed a fire under the tower as he drove east on State Route 70, a remote two-lane road running through a steep river canyon that funnels mountain winds down to the valley below. Cell phone out of range, he radioed nearby colleagues, telling them to call 911.

The message reached the local fire captain at 6:29 a.m. He had risen early that morning, roused from sleep by the sound of pine needles pelting the roof of Fire Station 36. The two-engine outpost, tucked along State Route 70 at the mouth of the canyon, was clocking wind speeds as fast as fifty-two miles per hour. The call came as the captain was making breakfast for his small crew. It was already too late. Within fifteen minutes, both engines arrived across the river from the makings of a firestorm. There was no way to get ahead of it. The transmission tower, perched high along a steep, gravelly access route called Camp Creek Road, was almost completely inaccessible by fire engine. The crew struggled to stand upright as the winds whipped the flames. They were spreading with staggering speed. The captain radioed dispatchers for backup.

"This has the potential of a major incident," he said.

Within an hour, the fire had spread seven miles, burning through the small mountain communities of Pulga and Concow to arrive at the outskirts of Paradise, a tight-knit town of nearly twenty-seven thousand people nestled in the Sierra foothills. Residents awoke to emergency evacuation orders as softball-sized embers collided with dead trees. The fire was entirely out of control. At its fastest, it engulfed eighty football fields a minute, by some estimates. The tortured evacuation process began as thick black smoke took on a hellish orange hue. Escape routes became choke points, lines of cars inching along melting asphalt.

Dozens of people were left behind, unable to escape for reasons that made their gruesome deaths even more tragic. Many were in their seventies and eighties. One man had only just gotten his wheelchair out the front door. Another abandoned his wheelchair and tried to drag himself along the ground. A couple in their sunset years died together in their recliners, holding two dogs and two cats.

The fire overtook the town within hours. At noon, one of PG&E's first responders, called a troubleman, arrived at the ignition point in a helicopter. A regional supervisor had ordered emergency air patrol of the transmission tower in response to the early morning outage. The helicopter arrived to hover at a tall steel structure that, under normal circumstances, scarcely elicited anyone's attention. It had stood there for decades, becoming one with its surroundings, until the day it failed.

If you think about the grid as a network of roads, transmission lines are like highways, built to carry large amounts of electricity over long distances. They pick up electrons at power plants and channel them through thick, heavy wires held aloft by steel towers as tall as fifteen stories. The wires connect to substations, or off-ramps, where the power is reduced to lower voltages and distributed to homes and businesses through networks of smaller wires akin to local streets.

Transmission lines are subject to a cardinal rule. The wires must be kept away from one another as well as from the towers that support them. If the space in between them narrows too much, electricity can jump from wire to wire, or wire to tower, in what's known as an arc, a lightning-like bolt hot enough to melt metal and send sparks flying. To reduce that risk, the wires are suspended from strings of insulator discs hooked to the T-shaped arms of their towers.

Peering out of the helicopter, the troubleman saw an insulator string dangling. A hook about the width of a fist had broken nearly in half, dropping the insulator and the wire it held. An arc of electricity surged from the wire as it fell, scorching the tower in a blast of molten steel and aluminum.

The Camp Fire, named for the road near its place of origin, burned for seventeen days, destroying more than one hundred fifty thousand acres and nearly nineteen thousand structures, most of them homes. It didn't take long for investigators with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection to determine that PG&E's transmission line, known as the Caribou-Palermo, had almost certainly ignited it. Hours after Paradise had been consumed, a Cal Fire crew made its way to the tower where the PG&E helicopter had been seen hovering earlier that dark afternoon. Half a rusted hook dangled from the string of insulator discs still wired to the tower. The hook, which had hung from a hole in a long metal plate, was almost totally smooth at the point of fracture, evidence of a deep groove that had formed over decades. Millimeter by millimeter, the plate had cut into the curve of the hook, which was scarcely an inch in diameter. A jagged edge a few millimeters across showed just where it had broken.

The next day, the crew shared its findings with Mike Ramsey, Butte County's longstanding district attorney. Ramsey, a plainspoken prosecutor with stern white eyebrows, knew the county better than most anyone. His family had been there in the Sierra foothills for four generations to witness its evolution from a scattering of gold-mining settlements along the Feather River to a bucolic spread of communities home to more than 226,000 people. Ramsey had grown up exploring the forests with his father, the local game warden, learning the space where civilization dissolved into wilderness. The younger Ramsey had left Butte County only briefly, for college and law school, returning shortly after graduating when a position opened in the district attorney's office. He assumed the post in 1987 and had been reelected ever since. Upon taking office, he adopted a mission statement: "To do justice, as no one is above the law, nor beneath its protection."

Like other counties atop California's gold fields, Butte County owed much of its early development to PG&E. The company's founders had spent the last decade of the nineteenth century exploring the canals and waterwheels that supported the region's gold miners and buying up the companies that operated them. One by one, they built out a series of hydroelectric powerhouses that generated electricity for Oroville and Chico, Butte County's largest cities, as well as neighboring counties whose populations had exploded during the gold rush. That network formed the foundation of a sprawling monopoly that would grow to encompass almost all of Northern and central California. With it came the goodwill of millions of customers as PG&E expanded its services, electrifying industries and creating jobs across the state for thousands of proud engineers.

Ramsey had watched that goodwill dissipate in the years after he became district attorney. It started in the 1990s, when PG&E power lines caused several destructive wildfires in the Sierra foothills north of Sacramento. Around the same time, a young law clerk named Erin Brockovich discovered that PG&E had allowed water tainted with hexavalent chromium, a carcinogenic metal, to leach into a small town's groundwater supply in the Mojave Desert outside of Los Angeles. Brockovich helped residents sue PG&E, a story that became a Hollywood blockbuster starring Julia Roberts. In 2010, a decade after the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Portfolio
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 059333065X
• ISBN 13: 9780593330654
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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