Wednesday, December 04, 2019

PG&E DINGED ON TOWER INSPECTION

by Bob Walsh

The 696 page report on the Camp Fire, produced by the PUC, has just come out. The report dinged them heavily for failure to do an actual tower inspection on the tower that is believed to have caused the fire in over 15 years.

The PUC report states that it is highly probably a defective C-hook allowed the live wire to hit the tower, throwing sparks that caused the fire. The lines had been inspected many times, both from the ground and from helicopter air inspections, but nobody had actually climbed the tower to closely inspect the insulating and attachment hardware since 2001.

Climbing towers takes time and costs money. I guess they figured it wasn't worth it. I guess they figured wrong.

2 comments:

Trey Rusk said...

Maybe the state can take it over. They might do a better job. Yeah, right.

bob walsh said...

Turns out the failure to inspect was a violation of PG&Es own safety protocols. If you have a safety program you really should follow it.