Who is held accountable when a major utility doesn’t maintain its distribution systems so that the places the conveyances (pipes and wires) run through are safe for the people living there, and who pays for their mistakes?
The city of Lompoc has owned the electric utility serving city residents since 1923, however Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) owns the transmission lines that bring power into town. The city owns and maintains the distribution system within the city limits.
While there have been short interruptions of power over the last eight decades, none have caused serious damage to surrounding property. When compared to PG&E or Southern California Edison customer outage rates, Lompoc’s offline averages of an hour or less are dramatically lower.
This could change substantially soon, not because of anything the city’s electric utility is doing, but because of errors and omissions by PG&E. Instead of repairing and maintaining its transmission lines on a regular basis, PG&E has chosen to simply shut off the power during high fire danger with as little as 24 hours’ notice.
And, unlike the one-hour average outage, the city staff says that these outages could last for several days until the weather event is over and because it would take a considerable amount of time to safely re-energize the lines.
So, what does that mean? Almost everything in your house and workplace relies on electricity. All commercial establishments will be without power. This includes not only the city of Lompoc, but also every customer within the area served by those transmission lines. In other words, the whole city and large parts of the North County could go dark when one of these outages occurs.
This would be more than an inconvenience. It would be a major disruption of life as we know it.
Besides the disruption of normal life, the cumulative monetary loss from food damage, loss of business, and loss of income would be several hundred million dollars. In addition, persons who rely on medical aids requiring electric power could become seriously ill or even die during the outages. Phones would not work unless connected to hard-wired systems, and your cellphone batteries would drain in a couple of days, so you couldn’t call for help.
Many people are unaware of the hazards associated with cooking on open fires or operating generators in their garages or close to window openings. Not only is there a fire hazard, but carbon monoxide poisoning is a distinct possibility. The city of Lompoc has an informative guide for using home generators that includes many safety tips on the city electrical department’s website: cityoflompoc.com/home/showdocument?id=1084.
To try and be somewhat proactive, the city of Lompoc is offering to pay building permit fees associated with installing an emergency generator for any customer who asks for it. I was unsure of the Santa Barbara County Air Pollution Control District rules, so I asked; the answer was that if the generator was less than 50 brake horsepower, you didn’t need a permit.
When this announcement was made, Councilman Jim Mosby, ever vigilant at micromanaging costs, asked if a policy like this should have come to the council first for approval. After a short discussion and staff concern that the urgency of this matter necessitated immediate action, he made a motion to bring the matter to the council for approval. This would have delayed action for several weeks.
But he needed three votes in order to get his request approved. Surprisingly, he only got a second on his motion, but couldn’t get the third vote, so the motion failed.
What’s clear in this whole scenario is that both PG&E and SoCal Edison have been negligent for many years concerning the maintenance of their transmission lines. Over the decades, tens of thousands of fires have occurred as a result of their policy of accepting the risk associated with operation of their power distribution systems.
It was only after losing entire communities, including numerous fatalities and the resultant claims for billions in reimbursement, that they created another potential disaster. This time, instead of community-sized losses, the losses will be spread over wide regions along the path of the distribution lines.
Who will compensate families and businesses for the hundreds of millions of dollars lost? Perhaps any attorneys reading this article would be willing to provide some generalized advice or initiate a class action lawsuit on behalf of the public.
The governor and state Assembly approved a bailout plan for PG&E. What about the taxpayers who must pay for both the bailout and for any losses they incur when the lights go out for several days? I thought that elected officials were supposed to represent all the people, not just individual companies.
Maybe it’s time for local elected officials to weigh in on this issue. Some strongly worded letters sent to the governor and state elected officials from elected bodies such as community services districts, boards of supervisors, and city councils concerning the potential impact to their constituents would explain the monetary losses that would occur when the power is shut off for several days.
Just shutting off the power isn’t a reasonable solution.
Ron Fink is a resident of Lompoc. Send your comments through the editor at clanham@santamariasun.com or write a letter to the editor for publication by emailing it to letters@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Aug 1-8, 2019.
