- State regulators, knowing that old transmission lines could set off wildfires, proposed a safety rule in 2001 that would have forced Edison and other utilities to remove abandoned lines unless they could prove they would use them in the future.
- Under pressure from utilities, the state Public Utilities Commission approved a revised rule in 2005 that allowed utilities to keep abandoned lines in place until executives decided they were “permanently abandoned.” One such line, out of service since 1971, is suspected of igniting the Eaton fire on Jan. 7.
- “If we knew then what we know now, perhaps we would have come to a different conclusion,” said former PUC president Michael Peevey.
After an investigation by The Times found Los Angeles had failed to publicly comply with a 2019 law requiring it to analyze the capacity, safety and viability of its evacuation routes, Councilmember Traci Park filed a motion that would force the city to comply. “The Palisades fire underscored just how vulnerable our hillside communities remain,” the motion states. The fire — along with Tuesday’s tsunami advisory — “reaffirms the urgent need to comply with [the law] and update the City’s emergency planning to reflect current realities.” Former state legislator Marc Levine wrote the 2019 law, Assembly Bill 747, after hearing about the horrific scenes of gridlock on the streets of Paradise, Calif., over the radio during the 2018 Camp fire. The law requires local governments to include these evacuation analyses in the the safety element of their general plans, which serve as the blueprint for long-term development of cities and counties. Yet, the city’s safety element includes no such analysis. “The fact that local government leaders would not do as much as they can to protect human life and safety is just shocking to me,” Levine said this month, upon learning of both the city’s and county’s limited efforts to analyze their evacuation routes.