#the whole shutdown should be a crime in on itself but we're not here to discuss WB tax evasions

[lesbianseaweed]

Happy Birthday to the one and only Weiss Schnee

[aelia-likes-monsters]

I'm doing a project for school about how the fires (specifically the kincade fire) are affecting people and businesses. I am focusing specifically on pg&e's negligence. We are business students and we're hoping to be the sorts of people who help businesses avoid doing this kind of shit. What do you want me to make sure that people really understand? Or even just raising awareness. I live far away so too many of my classmates are just brushing the whole thing off :/

If you want more in-depth information you should look a little further back in time at the 2017 fires. The Tubbs fires started just South of where the Kincade fire is now burning, and were the worst fires on record for their time. That record was broken by the 2018 fires, especially the Camp fire. PG&E has been a privately owned utility since they started, and since their inception, they’ve been negligent. They poisoned groundwater with hexavalent chromium (the basis of the movie Erin Brokovich is based on their actions), blew up San Bruno, have now burned Sonoma County twice, burned down the entire city of Paradise and numerous other small towns, etc. (Check the Wiki for the full list of their PUBLIC crimes.) 

(While I was researching all of this I was also reminded of the brownouts we had in the early 2000s when the utility grid couldn’t support everyone so they rolled outages through the state. Yep.) 

At its core, this is largely about the fact that because it is a privately owned utility they sold stock. They had investors. And they put the pay/bonuses of the executives, the stock dividends, and profits above safety. For decades. They’ve been negligent for decades. Our infrastructure is failing because they didn’t do their jobs because of the way they’ve chosen to spend their money. (They paid investors instead of trimming trees, for example, and execs tried to give themselves $16,000,000 in bonuses to bribe themselves to do their jobs instead of paying out to the people whose homes/lives they’ve destroyed.)

They’ve filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy twice in the last couple decades (largely due to the suits they’ve faced for liability due to damage/death they’ve caused.) 

They’ve diverted money meant to be spent on burying the high voltage transmission lines to other projects and/or left it unspent.

Their solution to the fact that their infrastructure is garbage is this “PSPS” (Planned Safety Power Shutdown) system which has unreliable, inconsistent information. They turn off power in “at risk” areas for days at a time with no exact time for them to turn it back on. It impacts millions of people, puts disabled people at extra risk, complicates evacuations when fires do start, and hurts poor people who can’t afford to replace lost food. ALL this does is alleviate them of liability when fires start. It doesn’t help anything or anyone else. It’s a horrible solution. (A bandaid on a bullet wound is the analogy that has come to mind.) 

And the 2019 fires? The ones burning right now? They’re started by PG&E too, despite the outage. 

PG&E as it exists cannot continue. It’s too large, too unsafe, too broken.  Now, I’m in an odd position relative to many other Californians because I’m a member of the IBEW and many Linemen and Utility Workers who are employed by PG&E are also members of the IBEW. I know that this is a good Union job that pays our bills, gives us benefits, pensions, etc. I want to see them (the workers) hold onto all of that, while I also want to see the executives and the company itself held accountable for the deaths and destruction they’ve caused. 

If you want to talk more, please feel free to message me. I’ve infodumped a lot here, but I hope it helps people get a better picture of what’s going on.