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the insurance situation is fucked because the state government has to keep the prices artificially low to keep homeowners happy, or be voted out for someone who will. Insurance companies are not allowed to project future risks when pricing plans (they may only look at historic risks). Rate increases (for auto and home insurance) must be approved by the state. Huge correlated risks (like Pacific Palisades burning down) are, basically, uninsurable. The state cannot long protect people from higher premiums. I don't know if we'll see ""price gouging"" for people living near the wilds or some kind of scheme where people in SF cross subsidize people in Pacific Palisades.
There's a good chance that this fire is caused by PG&E fuckery. The standard redditor response is to demand nationalizing PG&E so that they would invest more in maintaining their power lines. Would that really work? I kind of doubt it. PG&E is already a quasi-state run enterprise - it has to run basically every decision by the California Public Utilities Commission, including approving company budgets and rates. The frequent counterarguments are that the governor/the cpuc are in the pockets of PG&e, and maybe that's true, but I don't see why this couldn't happen if PG&e were nationalized.
The ultimate question has to be, where is the money going? I can't really make heads or tails of their quarterly statements to figure out how much money is going to salaries vs operations but they earn 1.3B a quarter and they serve 16 million people, so they're making $30 of profit per month per person. It's not nothing, but the average customer pays $300 a month. A 10% discount would be nice, but we're not talking about major changes here. Meanwhile, burying power lines costs $2 million dollars a mile. There's 90 thousand miles of lines (I don't know how many are high voltage lines in fire prone areas). Who's going to pay for that? Well, pg&e has only one source of income, and that's the ratepayer - that's not going to change if it's nationalized.
The common theme here is that the math is simply not mathing. It seems that for a while California has been able to outrun reality by kicking the can down the road(defer maintenance to keep prices down, defer fire prevention to save costs and the environment, keep insurance prices low since fires are rare) and now the gods of the copybook headings are here for their tribute.
And burying powerlines in earthquake-prone areas creates more problems.
Does it actually? I guess maybe if you're burying them across a fault, but probably that causes problems for overhead lines too.
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