this is a multi source problem. pgp failure is one facet. lack of land maintenance is the other . if the land were maintained the fire would have happened and been less catastrophic
Wow this is great thanks ! How do they distribute liability to the various failure modes? I think itβs dishonest (and problematic) to put all liability on PGE
I don't think there's one way. This isn't a codified law, for exmaple, it's just a model of failure analysis.
In my experience, we use the 5 Whys [1] as a technique to drill down to 'root causes'. However, along the way you'll identify a whole heap of compounding factors, each of which may change the degree of severity or indeed completely avert the issue.
In this particular instance, in isolation you can say that the hook failed and caused a fire, but it took several additional factors to make it as bad as it was:
1) Lack of maintenance (which in itself has a whole tree of causal factors)
2) Excess buildup of flammable material
3) Particuarly dry/hot weather conditions
4) Lack of firefighting resources due to other mitigating circumstances
5) Encroachment of living premises into dangerous areas
etc. etc.
I don't really know how the US courts might handle allocating liability, because I'm not located there, but I don't think there's one particular way to do it. I do however think that trying to retroactively allocate liability to this specific incident is probably the wrong way to look at it.
Instead I think the better apporach is to say that PG&E were delinquent in their responsibility of ensuring safe equipment, and regardless of the actual consequence they should be judged on that. For example, there are established processes to assess risk, and those risks include both a likelihood and consequence. All of that is then taken in combination to understand the total risk of something. The then have a legal obligation to ensure things are safe, and they broke that so punishment should be based on that. This would hold, whether the dereliction of duty was realised through a disaster or only identified from a near miss.
Similarly, you could assess that the government was delinquent in its duties to perform backburning, etc.
