![]() ![]() (Butte County Department of Public Works) The photo was taken about six hours before the fire was discovered. Trouble on the power line is suspected of touching off the Dixie Fire on July 13, 2021. A PG&E worker making his way up Camp Creek Road in Butte County was initially unable to proceed to the suspected source of the trouble because a road crew was repairing damage to this bridge. Unable to cross the bridge for the time being, the PG&E worker turned around and drove all the way back down to Highway 70, then another six miles back toward Oroville to a spot where he'd get better radio reception. Pack said the bridge deck had suffered "multiple failures," likely due to an oversized vehicle that had used the span. Josh Pack, the county's director of public works, said the crew was working to repair "significant damage" to the one-lane span that had been reported on July 9. "They told him, nah, it's going to be at least a couple, two and a half hours" before they'd be done with the work. Describing the character of the route the worker traveled, Ramsey said, "There's an old statement, 'They're barely passable - not even jackass-able."Įight miles up the road - still well short of the power line segment with the apparent blown fuse - the driver encountered a roadblock: a Butte County public works crew repairing a bridge. The trip up the steep, winding road would have been slow under any conditions. ![]() Then he had to drive about 10 miles up Camp Creek Road, a one-lane dirt road that passes the spot where the a PG&E transmission line started the Camp Fire early the morning of Nov. To get there, he had to drive back down Highway 70 to the community of Pulga, where the route crosses the river. ![]() The site of the potential problem was just a quarter-mile from the dam as the crow flies, but it would take the worker hours to reach it. Once at the dam, Ramsey said, the worker needed to scout for the source of the power problem.Īccording to PG&E's account, he spotted what appeared to be a blown fuse on a power line across the Feather River and hundreds of feet up the canyon's precipitous slope. First, though, he had "other things to do - higher-priority tickets." Ramsey estimated the worker got to Cresta Dam about 10:30 or 11 a.m., as much as four hours after the power problem there had been flagged. "They put in a ticket - not a high-priority ticket, just a regular ticket, for a lineman in Chico to go check on it," Ramsey said. Ramsey said in an interview earlier this week that PG&E issued a "work ticket" after a remote monitoring system detected the problem at the dam. That's just one in a series of delays and obstacles that together may have turned a minor incident into an inferno that has raged through the northern Sierra Nevada forests for 10 days. In a series of statements, including public comments from the utility's CEO, PG&E has blamed the delay on the worker's difficulty accessing the remote location where a tree had fallen on a power line and ignited the blaze that turned into the Dixie Fire.īut one of the prosecutors investigating the company's possible role in starting the Dixie Fire, which had burned more than 100,000 acres as of early Thursday, said the utility did not consider a power outage it had detected in the area early on July 13 to be a high-priority issue.Īs a result, said Butte County District Attorney Mike Ramsey, the worker assigned to investigate the outage did not arrive in the area until as much as four hours after the the problem was detected. With PG&E's announcement earlier this week that one of its power lines is under investigation as the cause of yet another destructive Northern California wildfire, attention has focused on the company's account that nine and a half hours elapsed after the first indication of trouble in the Feather River Canyon before one of the company's field workers reached the spot where a small fire was beginning to spread. ![]()
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