Another California Town devoured by Fire

Richard Mellor

GED

8-6-21

 

In early 2019, I decided to drive the 200 miles up to Paradise CA to witness for myself the devastating effects of the Camp Fire that destroyed the town. I was stunned by the devastation. It looked like North Korea after the US bombings or the aftermath of the Hiroshima blast though there were more trees standing.

 

I happened upon a victim as I was driving up there. I stopped and talked to him for a while and he told me that no one was even bothering to stop the fire it was so rapid, he said he had about 12 minutes to get out of his house. I shot some video as I drove through Paradise. According to the PBS show Frontline,  85 people died due to the 2018-19 Camp Fire and it took a mere four hours to destroy the town and overall around 30,000 people lost their homes.

Feather River Plumas County

 A few months ago Joanne and I went up to Plumas County and stayed in a cabin for three days. Just needed to get out of town. We stayed just outside Graeagle right alongside the Feather River, I posted some pictures to Facebook. It was beautiful and California is a beautiful state. But a couple of centuries of capitalist development has taken its toll, not only on the original inhabitants but also its natural beauty; its rivers, mountain ranges, deserts and coastline, all 700 miles of it.

 

Graeagle is a few miles from Quincy which is the Plumas County seat and for our three days up there we drove all around the county. I should stress that a California county like Plumas is not like a county in England. Plumas County is about 2,613 square miles.

 

We drove out of Quincy up the 70 to the 89 and a little north toward Greenville. Greenville is just over 100 miles east of Paradise at a higher elevation in the Sierra Nevada. Only two years after the destruction of Paradise, Greenville was destroyed by fire this week.

 

We tried to return to Graeagle taking the 172 west toward Antelope Lake. This route took me along Indian Creek through Taylorville and Genesee. This is also Indian Valley and the original inhabitants were the Maidu, who I assume didn’t call it “Indian Valley”. The valley appears to be ranch land and I assume a lot of cattle breeding as there were signs here and there encouraging the traveler to Eat Beef. We headed out of Genesee after I had a great sandwich at the Taylorsville store hoping to get to Antelope Lake and head south on route 176 to 177 down to Portola for an easy drive back to Graeagle.

 

Soon after leaving Genesee the road ceased to be a county maintained road and headed up in to higher ground toward the Lake. If the county road ends I don’t know what the remainder was but I began to feel a little uneasy. We had very little water, no phone signal and our little VW. I stopped the car and looked around me. In the distance down below was Indian Valley and a couple of large homes, I assume the homes of ranchers. But as I did a 180 there was nothing but parched ground and burned trees as far as I could see.

I couldn’t help wondering where the wild life went.  How many died and would we ever know? There has to be bears, coyotes, mountain lions, bob cats and of course all other critters up there. It was very sad to see and this, after I saw Paradise a year prior. I headed back and we went back to our cabin the way we came.

Now Greenville has gone. I have lived in California for 48 years and every year the state burns. It wasn’t always like this. I am not a scientist, I don’t keep watch on records and data, but I am awake and we are in a serious situation with fires here. This is a result of climate change and in particular our reliance on fossil fuels for energy. It is also connected to development and building communities in the forest and mountains as people want to retire or get away from urban life.

 

 

The most recent fire that just engulfed Greenville is called the Dixie Fire. According to reports in the media the Dixie fire was caused by one of the energy company’s power lines. Our energy company is Pacific Gas and Electric, a private company. The Paradise Fire was also caused by a power line, some of these lines are over 100 years old.

 

Given the ongoing disasters and an estimated 20 or more California wildfires being caused by PG&E equipment at the cost of some 100 lives, the company declared bankruptcy and emerged from it in 2020 after paying out $25 billion in claims. The company for years refused to bury power lines claiming that it was too costly. When private corporations say this we always need to consider what that means. It normally means it would hurt profits and repel investors.

 

The company reported recently that it will be spending up to $20 billion to bury some 10,000 miles of power lines to “reduce wildfire risk throughout Northern California.”, according to the Wall Street Journal, “….it’s too expensive not to underground. Lives are on the line.” says  PG&E CEO Patti Poppe.

 

“The proposed work constitutes only a fraction of the PG&E’s electrical system, which includes roughly 80,000 miles of lower-voltage distribution lines and 20,000 miles of higher-voltage transmission lines, many of which run through areas at high risk of wildfire” the Journal adds, so it’s really a covering one’s ass gesture in the wake of what is clearly a social disaster.

 

Pacific Gas and Electric is a privately held, investor owned utility regulated by the  California Public Utilities Commission and there have been whispers about the state taking it over. But that is not likely as a national health system raises cries of communism in the US and a considerable section of the population consider the Democratic Party, perhaps the most powerful capitalist party on the planet of being communist.

 

As numerous recent catastrophes have shown, including the BP oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, regulation does not curb in any significant sense, the madness of the market. In the BP example, regulators in the Obama Administration handed the drawing up of guidelines to deep water drilling to the energy companies who wrote their own rules, and in pencil would you believe.

 

California is often referred to as a one-party state as the Democrats have such a majority in the state legislature, mind you, a lot of the rural counties, Plumas county included, are Republican strongholds but the Democratic Party holding sway over the state has not created an environmental and worker paradise either. California has the most billionaires in the country. It’s better than Texas for environmental issues but that's not saying much, the market is still king as far as the two Wall Street parties are concerned.

 

PG&E should be taken out of private hands and in to public ownership. For many years the company’s infrastructure was known to be faulty and fires known to be caused by the close proximity of power lines with trees. Then we have repeated drought years like we are in now which exacerbates this problem. The Oroville Dam, and the collapse of the spillway that was  was known to be faulty a decade earlier is the market at work. It was public knowledge and the legislature knew it and did nothing. It could have have killed thousands of people.

 

In the last analysis, only public ownership by the workers in the energy industry and the consumers that use it will open a path to a safer and more environmentally compatible energy production. based on social need. As things are, maximizing profits for investors will always come first in a capitalist system of production.

 

California is just one of the many beautiful places on our planet. We cannot rely on market forces and the politicians and their backers who promote this system stepping forward to protect it.