Los Angeles (AFP) – Across California, thousands of miles of overhead power cables run through cities, countryside and forests. It only took one tree to fall on one of these lines to start a devastating fire this summer.
With its fragile and aging infrastructure, America’s most populous state is in a race against climate change, far from won.
Every summer, the people of California know it: they risk being plunged into the dark. As soon as the red fire warning flag is hoisted, preventive cuts can deprive thousands of people – even millions – of electricity.
In recent weeks, residents of Los Angeles were also sometimes ordered to turn off their air conditioning, turn off the oven and unplug their appliances, in order to avoid a grid surge.
The fifth largest economy in the world, California suffers from obsolete equipment, some electricity operators having long been accused of putting their profits before public safety and the modernization of their network.
– Emergency –
To reinforce this security, the private electricity supplier Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) rightly announced with great fanfare this week its intention to bury more than 16,000 kilometers of power lines over the next ten years, in order to prevent its installations do not cause other fires to start.
Patti Poppe, president of the operator that supplies electricity to millions of residents of northern and central California, said the announcement was originally scheduled for several months, but that she “couldn’t wait.” , after the group was implicated in the start of a new fire in mid-July, the Dixie Fire.
According to a preliminary investigation, this destructive blaze was caused by the simple fall of a tree on a power line.
Worse, the Dixie Fire burns just a few miles from where a PG&E power line sparked the deadliest fire in recent California history in 2018: 86 dead and 18,000 buildings destroyed around the city of Paradise.
State Governor Gavin Newsom who had previously accused the operator of “greed and mismanagement” this week demanded that PG&E and other suppliers “be held to account” and invest in their firefighting strategy.
– Agile infrastructures –
Is burying electrical cables the miracle solution?
This will indeed reduce the risk of fires, so that fewer cables are damaged due to extreme heat, and will give this operator an opportunity to modernize his equipment at the same time, estimates AFP Mikhail Chester, professor of sustainable engineering at Arizona State University.
But, he warns, climate change is progressing for the moment much faster than infrastructure is being redesigned.
If 2020 was the worst year in modern California fire history, 2021 is indeed very likely to break that record.
“To cope with climate change, we need to make infrastructures more agile and more flexible in order to be able to respond to changes as quickly as they occur”, underlines the expert.
This goes well beyond the framework of the Californian forest fires. In the face of hurricanes, tornadoes or extreme episodes – events that are increasing because of global warming – millions of Americans will otherwise be forced to learn to live in the dark.
