The 2018 Paradise fire in California and the 2023 Lahaina fire had much in common.
The utility detected faults on the transmission line. Shortly thereafter, fire erupted in an area suffering from drought, high winds, low humidity, and available fuel in the form of vegetation and older houses.
The fire temperature exceeded 2,000 °F. Communication towers fell over and burned up. Water delivery systems melted. The turbulent winds prevented airplanes from dropping water.
Both areas had previous fires. The 2018 Lahaina fire burned more land than the 2023 Lahaina fire. Lahain town was saved in 2018 when the winds abruptly changed direction. The lessons were not learned, and history repeated itself. The fast-moving fires burned both towns down.
Some areas in both Paradise and Lahaina were told to evacuate while other areas were not told to evacuate but burned anyway.
Some residents went into the water: a lake near Paradise and the ocean by Lahaina. Congested egresses and burned vehicles slowed the movement of vast numbers of cars out of the community.
The Paradise fire, a.k.a. the Camp Fire, was caused by a failure of equipment on a Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) transmission line tower just after 6 a.m. The fire raged for 17 days before it was contained, destroyed more than 18,000 structures, and burned 153,336 acres, or about 40% of the area of Oahu.
Wildfires thrive on heat, oxygen, and fuel. Boiling gases in propane tanks exploded in fireballs. Back-up generators caught fire; bullets, and tires exploded. Houses became fuel as super- heated air caused fires to ignite within buildings. Toxic smoke made seeing difficult.
The Camp Fire caused the deaths of 85 civilians, and injured 12 civilians and five firefighters. Those who died in the Paradise fire were more likely to be older, disabled, those who chose to protect their homes, those who tried to flee too late, and those on long dead-ends. Another 50 people died after the fire from interrupted medical care, stress, and smoke inhalation. Post fire suicides and heart attacks increased.
The fire was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California’s history. The total damage was $16.6 billion with 25% of the costs uninsured.
The Town of Paradise in Butte County, California, is in the Sierra Nevada foothills, about 90 miles north of Sacramento and 165 miles north northeast of San Francisco. People who lived in the cooler foothills had to find new places to live. The nearby town of Chico had a general shortage of houses and apartments. Those who fled the fire faced sharply rising rents.
San Francisco Chronicle journalist Lizzie Johnson wrote “Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire.” The book tells stories of the people and responders prior to the fire, during the terrifying fire, and the aftermath.
Wall Street Journalist Katherine Blunt wrote “California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric–and What It Means for America’s Power Grid.” The book discussed several PG&E disasters including the San Bruno gas explosion just south of San Francisco.
Blunt noted, “In one way or another, the anomalous weather exposed the vulnerability of the grid. Once an inconspicuous machine, its failures were becoming more obvious, and more consequential. The grid had been built to withstand climate patterns of the past, and those patterns were changing fast at a time when electricity had never been more critical. Every utility would soon face the same question: How should its system change to account for future risk?”
Climate change is decreasing the live fuel moisture in local vegetation in drought-stricken areas, altered wind and rainfall patterns, increasing lightning strikes, and making forests ripe for invasive tree-killing species.
The California Wildfire season goes from June 1 to the first heavy rains in October, November, or December. In contrast, the Honolulu Fire Department web site states, “in Hawai`i, wildland fire season is all year long due to our consistently, warm climate.”
Hedge funds buoyed the utility financially by purchasing PG&E stock, buying insurance policies covering losses from the fire, and acquiring other financial instruments. Bought at bargain prices, the hedge funds gained the upper hand in bankruptcy court and gained the most financially from the outcome. The victims not so much.
Municipalizing the utility was out of the question as any new buyer would be responsible for electric lines that if stretched out, would circle the earth five times at the Equator. Many of these lines were decades old, were built in hard to get to places and/or in high-risk fire zones and lacked documentation.
PG&E and other California utilities de-energize utility lines for periods lasting multiple days in October and November 2019. Many people were not aware that lines would be de-energized. The rolling blackouts affected everyone. Three million people lost power. Businesses, schools, hotels, medical facilities, and offices closed. Food spoiled. Cell phones could not be recharged. The economy shrank.
The road to recovery in Paradise is slow. The pre-fire population was 26,500. One year later the population was 2,034. Today it is approaching 8,300.
Critical Infrastructure
Critical infrastructure includes overhead and underground gas, electric, water, wastewater, and telecommunication systems. Each of these types of systems use different idioms to describe the same concepts.
Deb Chachra, author of “How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World,” wrote, “Infrastructure hides itself. `Infra` literally means `below`—these systems are not just metaphorically but often literally invisible, in our walls and floors, under our roads, in a restricted area… They’re cognitively hidden from us, because well-functioning systems are just always there, to be taken for granted, calling for very little of our conscious attention.”
Many of these critical infrastructures were physically and logically separate systems. Advances in automation and web-based technologies have improved efficiency and new vulnerabilities to human error, equipment failure, physical and cyber-attacks, weather and other natural causes, and climate chaos.
Maintenance of infrastructure isn`t glorious or exciting to most people. If maintenance is successful nothing happens. Nothing goes wrong. But when infrastructure fails, everyone notices. Community groups monitoring the effectiveness, cost, and impacts of different systems and their risks must carve through jargon, confidentiality agreements, and technical mumbo-jumbo to safeguard the public interest.
Our infrastructure was designed over several decades for climate conditions and extremes of the past that no longer exist. Infrastructure failures increase as heat increases. Extreme weather events — more intense wind, prolonged temperature extremes, heavier precipitation, more wildfires – buckle roads, sag power lines, and decrease general reliability of all infrastructure. Outlier events occur more often.
Undergrounding Infrastructure
Undergrounding electric lines removes some vulnerabilities while creating other vulnerabilities. Undergrounding electric lines is expensive. Gas lines are underground. Pipeline pigging is essential for natural gas transmission lines. Hawaii Gas relies on smart pigs to travel through pipelines to detect potential future problems.
The 2010 San Bruno Gas Explosion, just 12 miles south of San Francisco, was caused by faulty welding on an underground gas pipe, welded some 54 years before the explosion. Police and fire crew were on the scene within two minutes. PG&E took 95 minutes to stop the flow of gas that was feeding the fire.
The fire killed eight people, 10 people sustained serious injuries, and 48 people sustained minor injuries. The fire affected 108 houses—38 of which were destroyed, 17 of which received severe-to-moderate damage, and 53 of which received minor damage. In addition, 74 vehicles were damaged or destroyed.
Current Public Utilities Commission Action
State law (HRS §269-9) requires that the Public Utilities Commission “shall investigate the causes of any accident which results in loss of life, and may investigate any other accidents which in its opinion require investigation.” Life of the Land asserts that the Commission should have opened a proceeding last year.
Instead, the Commission opened a non-docket late last year that is focusing on cost recovery of utility plans to address hazards. All water, wastewater, gas, electric, telecom, and communications must file a detailed Utility Natural Hazard Mitigation Report on “their ongoing efforts and future mitigation plans to address natural hazards” and how they will bill customers for those plans. The plans may rely on historic community engagement. The Commission rejected the idea of stakeholder intervention in the proceedings.
Lessons for the Future
Life of the Land asserts that holistic solutions are needed for Lahaina and the rest of the state. The approach requires local knowledge, coordinated state and county actions engaged in a meaningful two-way dialogue with local communities. The electric transmission and distribution lines, telecommunication systems, water and wastewater systems must be hardened to prevent their loss during extreme weather events, whether the events are caused by King Tides, Sea Level Rise, Rain Bombs, Tsunamis, Hurricanes, or Wildfires.
Life of the Land asserts that local egress options must be considered including access road gates that open, bike and pedestrian paths, and altering red traffic lights. Sirens must vary in sound and in verbal alerts. Multiple community alert systems are required. Critical infrastructure needs to survive and function. Redundancy and local solutions are less efficient and costs more but prevents the loss of a single node causing a cascading catastrophe.
Life of the Land asserts that local community engagement is essential. The process must be open and transparent, involving utilities, agencies, businesses, residents, environmental and community groups, and other stakeholders.