PG&E Needs Better Modeling!

The exact topography of the Sierra Nevada foothills matters when making these life-and-death decisions. PG&E has recently upgraded its meteorological capabilities, but given its desire to also target political donations, it may be a matter of too little, too late:

In each of these 1.24-mile squares drawn on PG&E’s map, the company runs hourly calculations to estimate the risk of a large fire being sparked by its power lines.

To do that, PG&E relied on a complicated algorithm of its own making, which blends data that includes its history of power outages, past wildfires, and fuel moisture.

The major shortcoming of the plan is that the wind speed, which is only one of the many data points used, is not actually measured in each of the squares.

In the case of the Zogg Fire, the nearest wind measurements to the place where the fire sparked came from grid cell 135-377. That grid square lies on flat terrain on the opposite side of the community of Igo from the hills where the fire started. 

The nearest PG&E weather station was located 3.5 miles away from the origin point of the fire, about 600 feet lower in elevation.