The wildfire housing crisis
Swaths of northern and central California were put under a red flag warning early this week as strong winds topping 50 miles per hour descended on the region. The Alisal Fire erupted in the Los Padres National Forest near Santa Barbara on Monday afternoon. It burned some 4,000 acres by nightfall, prompting evacuations along the Central Coast and shuttering part of Highway 101.
Pacific Gas and Electric, or PG&E, California’s power utility and the biggest electricity company in the United States, shut off power to thousands of Californians in advance of the winds in an effort to prevent its electrical equipment from starting more fires. One of the company’s transmission lines ignited the deadly Camp Fire that razed the town of Paradise in 2018 — an incident for which PG&E plead guilty for 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter. The company is likely responsible for this year’s Dixie Fire, too