A state bill that would have required Southern California Edison and other investor-owned utilities to take steps to avoid causing catastrophic wildfires died in Sacramento on Friday.
Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez’s (D-Pasadena) district includes Altadena, which was devastated by the Eaton fire in January.
She introduced SB 256 earlier this year to make power infrastructure more safe and less prone to starting wildfires, citing reporting in the Los Angeles Times about some investigators and experts’ concerns that a decommissioned power transmission line in Eaton Canyon may have been the fire’s ignition site.
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That reporting also revealed that Edison knew that some of the electrical towers under investigation were long overdue for critical upkeep and were classified as an “ignition risk” in company records.
Her legislation would have required Edison and other investor-owned utilities to make a plan to remove decommissioned power lines across the state.
It would have also boosted “California’s electrical infrastructure and wildfire resilience by improving wildfire mitigation planning, enhancing emergency response efforts, undergrounding power lines, and requiring closer collaboration between utilities, emergency services and local communities to prevent wildfires,” according to an email from Jerome Parra, a spokesperson for the senator.
Pérez called the bill, which she wrote, her top legislative priority this year, and said its failure was “disappointing” given the stakes of the issue.
“I’m very frustrated because, when are we going to have accountability? When are we actually going to start reducing fire risk and ensuring utilities are reducing fire risk?” Pérez said in an interview.
If Slick had just done the voter approved fire migitgation planning that would have gone back to a minimum of 1960’s land management a whole bunch of destructive fires would not have happened.
But then when you are the RSP (Radical Socialist Party aka Dem.) you don’t give a rats you know what about reality.
This bill might have helped but then again so would the failure called Slick would have helped.
RSP want’s expensive and destructive plans….and cannot see the reality in it’s collective face.
You voted for them…time to make them responsible.