California Governor Gavin Newsom has had a lot on his plate over the last few weeks. His declared a state of emergency over the wildfires devastating the state and power shutoffs effecting many of those in areas affected by them are the key points that he is currently focused on.
When asked if there is anything that can be done other than get out of the way when hurricane-force winds are aiding fires spread by NPR, Newsom says, “No, and there’s a lot to be done in terms of prepositioning in anticipation. The sophistication of these analytics related to data collection and weather really has aided our efforts to suppress over 330 fires just in the last 24 hours that haven’t made national news. So you have these anomalies, these larger fires, but it belies the good work that’s done every single day in these extreme red-flag conditions with high winds that we are able to anticipate and are able to address in real time.”
When asked about lengthy power outages as well as the potential of customers deal with them for the next decade, Newsom says, “Yeah, that won’t happen. That is unacceptable.” He points the blame at PG&E because, “We’ve had a decade-plus of mismanagement of our largest investor-owned utility, PG&E – greed and complete dismissal of public safety. And as a consequence of that lack of investment, they’ve got a grid that is not modern. So as a consequence, the scale of these blackouts is so much larger. That cannot continue, and we have a specific strategy to help them help themselves get out of this.”
While the Governor doing the right things, many of his Republican counterparts say that the issue could have been mitigated had Newsom taken a different approach on environmental policies. Naturally forests are thinned by fires, however, with the restrictions on logging as well as the billions of dollars used for prevention every year have allowed forests to accumulate excess vegetation and dead trees, which are the fuel for many of the fires.
