Many California residents—especially retirees—are drawn to rural areas by the natural beauty. Who wouldn’t want to live in the Sierra foothills? But many also move to escape soaring housing costs in the state’s notoriously anti-development major cities. More people inhabiting the wildland-urban interface means more lives and structures placed at risk. As a result, today’s routine fires cause even more damage than those in the past. Disaster experts call this syndrome the “expanding bull’s-eye effect.” (We see the same problem in Florida, where beachfront overdevelopment means that even small hurricanes can inflict property damage costing billions.)
Where people go, power lines must follow. Utilities have no choice but to serve fire-prone communities. And power lines themselves vastly amplify the risk that fires will occur. Overgrown vegetation can cause short circuits and dead branches can ignite if they get blown into wires. In high winds, the lines themselves sometimes “slap” into each other and shower the ground below with sparks. Cal Fire, the state agency that manages wildfire policy, recently confirmed that a PG&E power line did indeed spark the Camp Fire blaze. “The booming industry up here in Butte County is the lawyers signing people up to sue PG&E,” a former Paradise town councilman said. PG&E says it has set over $10 billion aside to cover fire claims.

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