
The Environmental Committee works to protect the watershed and to educate the public on forestry issues, erosion control, hazardous waste, recycling, and other issues. We also monitor government policies and procedures.
PG&E is a high priority for the Environmental Committee due to its massive and destructive felling of trees to prevent wildfires when unsafe, unreliable, antiquated equipment is the fundamental cause of the fires. From working on legislation and a new Franchise Agreement for PG&E in the County to in-depth research and analysis to support work with agencies affecting PG&E and helping folks protect their trees from PG&E’s contractors, this keeps the group busy. We work with a State-wide Utility Wildfire Prevention Taskforce on these issues.
Your help is needed.
Visit https://endpowerlinefires.com for more information.
River & Road Clean Up
with Save Our Shores
Annual Environmental Town Hall
Felton Community Hall
First Saturday of the month
Second Saturday if the first Saturday is a holiday weekend.
10:30 am at VWC Office at Highlands Park Senior Center
On Zoom and in-person. Email for Zoom info.
Meetings are open to the public.
Call 338-6578 or email for information.
Become a Member
or Make a Donation!
COST-BENEFIT ASSESSMENT* OF PG&E’S EXPENDITURES FOR VEGETATION MANAGEMENT v. BENEFITS OF INFRASTRUCTURE IMPROVEMENTS
The massive system failures in Texas these last days, has awakened the nation to how our Utilities are vulnerable. From the Big Freeze we heard words such as “It is as bad as California”.
Texas, also, has a history of Utility failures. Out of cold frozen nights, broken pipes and rotating power outages, comes the word that they didn’t perform:
And it applies to us. For over one hundred years, PG&E’s treatment of thousand after thousands of miles of their distribution system has been in opposition to Modernization. Think about it, the greatest change of their primary solution to any Wildfire-Safety-Plan, has been more Vegetation Management. And over those miles and years, their modernization solution to fire ignition has been changing from a tree ax to a chainsaw.
Their bare lines exist, as a testimony to their lack of foresight.
In the enclosed paper, we will show that working on vegetation is no excuse for ignoring modernization of an antiquated system while achieving only a 5% reduction of causation of wildfire, which is not economically justified, and falls far short of making PG&E’s circuits safer compared to other operators.
Southern California Edison’s approach to a modern system is not only better, cheaper, but also significantly safer, and PG&E should, without doubt, follow SCE’s lead and drop Enhanced Vegetation Management and install covered conductors which address almost 90% of known initiators.
Here is the pdf of the *Cost Benefit Assessment.
COST-BENEFIT-ASSESSMENT-March-30-FINAL