The California Public Utilities Commission approved on Thursday the attenuation plan for forest fires in southern Southern California, rejecting calls to delay the action until we know more about what triggered the devastating fire of Eaton.
Investigators now examine whether Edison's equipment sparked Eaton's fire, which killed at least 17 people and destroyed thousands of houses and other structures. The company's transmission equipment may also have triggered the smallest Hurst fire, according to investigators.
Michael Backstrom, vice-president of Edison's regulatory affairs, said on Thursday that there were not yet any conclusions on the cause of one or the other fire. He said that the preliminary analysis of the Eaton fire company had found no anomaly that would suggest that his equipment triggered the fire.
During the meeting, William Abrams, a survivor of North Bay forest fires of 2017, told the Commission that it would be “imprudent” to approve the attenuation plans for forest fires of the three greatest public procurement of the State – Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric – without knowing what triggered the dead fires last week.
The Commission did not respond to the concerns of Abrams or to those of other speakers who asked the officials to do more to hold the public services responsible for the safe maintenance of their electric lines, approving the forest fire plans of the three companies on a 5-0 vote without comment.
“No one is adequately showing this,” said Peggy Ludington, a resident in southern California, to the commissioners. She underlined some of the 11 areas of concern that security regulators had detailed in their October approval of the company's forest fire prevention plan.
LUDINGTON noted that security regulators had asked Edison last year for information on the Problems they had found in the sparse Used to repair the transmission lines.
Public service said in A response to regulators Sent a week later that it would be difficult to collect this information.
The company has told regulators that “given the high discovery rate” of problems with the spares, it planned to “give up the inspection and to go directly to the correction”. To do this, he said, he was considering a replacement program for the Sparse, from 2026.
Edison said this week that he had done more work to prevent forest fires than the state.
“As we have done, SCE will continue to perform inspections in its risk of high fire risk more frequently than what is necessary,” the company said in a statement in Times.
Backstrom said the delay in approval of the company's forest fire prevention plan until the causes of the fire were determined was not the right decision.
He said the work that the company has done each year under the direction of its plan has reduced the risk that its equipment will trigger a forest fire by more than 85% than it was before 2018.
“It's not fair to freeze practices right now,” he said. “We have to execute.”
Alice Reynolds, president of the commission, spoke of forest fires at the start of the meeting.
“California has worked a lot to considerably reduce forest fires involving public services,” she said, calling the most complete three-forest “forest services”.
“These measures have a cost that is added to public service bills,” she said. “We can wonder if they are sufficient and if public services can do more or do better. This week we can see that they are necessary. ”
