[HN Gopher] Electrocuted birds are sparking wildfires
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Electrocuted birds are sparking wildfires
Author : dangle1
Score : 35 points
Date : 2022-06-21 19:58 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| djmips wrote:
| I guess some of it is nesting related. There are some solutions
| to this as shown in this article that talks about Ospreys getting
| electrocuted.
|
| https://www.audubon.org/news/as-ospreys-recover-their-nests-...
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| How much would it realistically cost to rebuild the electrical
| infrastructure so this doesn't end up costing places like the
| state of California even more in damages? I know PG&E is pretty
| much bankrupt over this but I really see this on the utilities
| companies to replace their 100+ year old infrastructure with
| something that isn't a massive catastrophic risk factor for
| everyone, man woman child and critter, anywhere near those
| buzzing lines...
| mistrial9 wrote:
| PG&E is not "pretty much bankrupt" over this .. in fact, during
| the Enron power scandal, public court documents uncovered a
| decades-old transfer of cash out of the PG&E books (highly
| regulated) into new holding companies that were purchasing
| income-generating assets around the US, like under-valued power
| generation in the deep South for example. This was expressly
| forbidden in every regulatory ruling and yet upper management
| at the time found a way to do it "legally". It has continued in
| patterns like that for more than thirty years. The recent
| court-induced liability for death, and criminal conviction of
| PG&E, are only now changing systems in place for decades.
|
| You have been "had" -- source: attorney consulting on the Enron
| proceedings at the time of the blackouts
| bob1029 wrote:
| Too much.
|
| One option is to bury all those lines. This is possible in
| theory, but not in practice. If you did this, then you also
| have to worry about all the future issues with power lines you
| can't see or maybe even find anymore.
| pvaldes wrote:
| And covering arsonist traces
|
| Last week: "we, the government of Castilla will rebeal against
| prohibition of chasing wolves following other rebel local
| governments" (Wolf is a protected species, so what they were
| saying is: we don't want to follow the law).
|
| A few days later. Casually, the biggest wildfire registered to
| date in Spain started in the area with more wolves of Spain, a
| well known place that had a big touristic appeal, lots of deer,
| and with registered basically no wolf attacks to cattle.
|
| But lets blame the timber for wildfires that start in the tongues
| of politicians. Breastfeed the crazy, harvest what you sow. It
| happened every single time in the last years.
|
| So currently there is some pressure to blame... for example, the
| birds that drop dead in the firebreak under the line. Because
| firebreaks are superflammable it seems. Better than fix the
| wires.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| It is climate change rapidly drying out areas that previously
| were not as dry. So you have decades of excess carbon in timber
| that the land can no longer sustain. You don't have to get into
| scenarios involving wolves, Castilla, and arson.
|
| Same as the birds, it so simple: the stochastic cause of the
| fire is irrelevant. It could be a spark from a line, a
| electrocuted small animal, a squatting vagrant making dinner,
| or even lupine hating Spaniards... but that happened before all
| the time, and it didn't result in the most massive and intense
| wildfires in human history.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| Climate change, that is causing extraordinary, anomalous heat and
| drought, is resulting in previously unremarkable incidents like
| birds being electrocuted triggering massive wildires.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| At an apartment where I lived many years ago, I was doing the
| laundry one afternoon (each unit had its own washer and dryer)
| and the washing machine started slowing down and speeding back up
| and slowing down again, and finally stopped. I checked the lights
| and they were off too. So I called the office and reported the
| problem.
|
| After power was restored later that day, the maintenance guy came
| by to see if things were OK, and he explained that a squirrel had
| chewed into the power line.
|
| It did freak me out a bit that in the washing machine's behavior
| I was indirectly seeing the death throes of the squirrel.
| [deleted]
| nostromo95 wrote:
| I did some work at a utility company a few years back where I
| had access to a database of every historical outage across the
| system along with such info as the diagnosed cause.
|
| Thousands of outages were caused by "Wildlife (Squirrel)"--more
| than once it crossed my mind that this file was the last record
| of those squirrels' lives on Earth!
| recursive wrote:
| Surely the only record. Most squirrels don't get even a
| single record.
| nostromo95 wrote:
| Truly those squirrels were blessed.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| My family members on a rural volunteer fire brigade have put out
| a few fires caused by a brushtail possum being electrocuted on a
| pole mounted transformer and then fleeing to nearby trees in
| panic while on fire.
| bombcar wrote:
| I know that there are problems with burying high-tension lines
| (they give off heat, basically) but around here most of the
| normal "household power lines" are buried and it greatly
| reduces snow load problems, downed branches, and critters
| eating them.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| I hear this pretty much every time that it's brought up
| around Europeans, and I was thinking about what it would take
| for us to change this. I think the biggest issue is that
| you'd have to somehow get the private property rights sorted
| out in order to dig up thousands and thousands of people's
| front yards, and that's probably the biggest factor in why we
| keep on letting this happen to ourselves. It's kinda like the
| biggest challenge is NIMBYism (Not in my backyard-ism) but
| front yard instead.
|
| The other comments talk about technical challenges but at
| least you guys aren't massively on fire every year. You would
| think that would be compelling or something right?
| MandieD wrote:
| I currently live in a suburb of a large German city, in a
| neighborhood packed with row houses and low-rise
| apartments. My father lives in west Texas in a neighborhood
| with maybe 50 households, each on their own 1-10 acres, 30
| miles from the nearest town.
|
| What is the per-household cost to my utility to maintain
| the buried lines for my neighborhood, versus what would the
| per-household cost be to my father's utility to bury the
| lines to his little neighborhood?
| homero wrote:
| But those can't be inspected or repaired easily and they
| corrode in water
| vel0city wrote:
| There are other issues other than just the heat of power
| lines. The earth itself has effects of the electromagnetic
| waves on the wire, burying the lines changes the capacitance
| of the system. This means there are a lot of other design
| considerations to the whole system that need to be accounted
| for and handled other than just burying the cables in the
| ground.
|
| You're then also massively increasing the cost of the cable.
| The overhead lines use the ground as the ground while buried
| cables need sheathing. You're also then increasing cost from
| all the insulators and protecting of the cable to bury it
| compared to just having the wire exposed.
|
| Things aren't too challenging when you're only talking a few
| kV, but once you're dealing with 35kV+ transmission lines
| things start getting complicated and messy.
| mwint wrote:
| How'd they figure this out? Eyewitnesses?
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| On occasion, also a dead possum at the source of ignition.
| One memorable example, the possum jumped from the power pole
| into a nearby hedge, so the fire started at the top.
|
| Pretty much all wooden power poles in NZ have metal bands on
| them to try to prevent possums climbing them, but it's not
| 100% effective.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| in California, currently famous as a wildfire center of the West,
| the local power company (12 million customers?) was required to
| run power to rural areas long ago. About 40,000 miles of power
| lines in California are using cable quality from the 1940s, which
| are illegal to use now in any way. But the cost to replace those
| lines directly is not eligible for rate increases to customers,
| so they stay as they are. Yet cutting trees is a cost that is
| eligible for pay rate increases to customers (roughly, legalese
| warning).. so more and more trees are cut. Surprise! (not)
|
| Meanwhile "look birds are doing it" is in the headlines..
|
| There is a political panic about this in Sacramento so in 2022,
| there are some changes, but the details of the wire quality are
| in this report:
|
| A Study of Risk Assesment and PG&E's GRC ; Liberty Consulting
| Group 2013
| latchkey wrote:
| We have a transformer up on a pole at one of our datacenters.
| Bird landed on it, fried itself and took everything offline. The
| side effect was that it fried a bunch of cmos batteries in the
| servers. We've since put a fake eagle up there.
|
| BIRDS AREN'T REAL
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| > The side effect was that it fried a bunch of cmos batteries
| in the servers.
|
| That's...not how that works. You had a bunch of dead CMOS
| batteries, and then a power failure.
| latchkey wrote:
| They literally had visible fried marks on the batteries and
| machines would fail to boot until the batteries were
| replaced.
| twawaaay wrote:
| It is not possible for a CMOS battery to get fried this way
| and the machine be still able to boot.
|
| For a CMOS battery to get "fried" a number of components
| would have to fail catastrophically. There are typically
| layers of protection that fail open and a much higher
| voltage needs to be able for them to get shorted which is
| what would be necessary for high voltage to reach CMOS
| battery.
|
| Now, I am not saying that CMOS batteries weren't hurt. I am
| saying that it is inconceivable that you would get number
| of servers that had CMOS batteries hurt and then boot up
| fine when they are changed for new ones.
|
| Your store does not check out.
| latchkey wrote:
| > it is inconceivable that you would get number of
| servers that had CMOS batteries hurt and then boot up
| fine when they are changed for new ones.
|
| Hate to break it to you, it happened regardless of your
| ability to conceive things, or not.
| Diederich wrote:
| Yup.
|
| I've dealt with the fallout from 'disorganized' power
| failures in datacenters before. I don't know exactly what
| goes on, but I know that a notable but relatively small
| fraction of our servers had real deal hardware problems
| after, many not booting up at all. Many fried power
| supplies, many cooked batteries.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| They need to send in some ducks and elephants.
|
| Q: Why do ducks have webbed feet?
|
| A: To stamp out fires.
|
| Q: Why do elephants have flat feet?
|
| A: To stamp out burning ducks!
| perihelions wrote:
| Related old thread:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8577812 ( _" Bat bomb"_, 40
| comments)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I was hoping Olga might net a mention. She does.
| happyopossum wrote:
| How has this not been a problem for the ~70 years leading up to
| the dates in the story? Many of the power lines here in CA have
| been around since the 40s, yet birds are only now catching fire?
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| ...and the reason they're sparking wildfires is because there's
| excess tinder due to human interference with the natural wildfire
| cycle, and that tinder is very dry because of human-induced
| climate change.
|
| We're also destroying the food sources and habitat for birds.
| MandieD wrote:
| As long as Americans consider themselves entitled to city-like
| services wherever they can clear land to build a house, there's
| going to be a problem.
|
| Most modern rural Americans are not active participants in
| agriculture, which was the case back when the federal
| government originally subsidized rural electrification. It's a
| lifestyle decision for a large portion of the current rural
| population, and one that those of us who accepted smaller
| houses or apartments with little to no land generously
| subsidize with our similar electric rates and low fuel taxes.
| UIUC_06 wrote:
| > To better document this fowl play, Taylor Barnes, a biologist
| at EDM International, an engineering consultancy firm in
| Colorado, collected data on wildfires across the United States.
| He and his colleagues used Google Alerts to monitor fires started
| by birds between 2014 and 2018, using keyword pairs: "fire" and
| "eagle," for example.
|
| So their "research" consisted of casual Googling? They didn't
| even cross-check any Fire Service, insurance, or other sources
| about the causes of wildfires?
|
| > says Antoni Margalida, a conservation biologist at the Pyrenean
| Institute of Ecology who has studied the impacts of wildfires
| caused by birds and other fauna in Spain but who was not involved
| with the work.
|
| and then they quote a guy who "has studied" it in Spain but
| wasn't involved with this. Then they quote two other studies from
| four years ago.
|
| What was Sabine Hossenfelder saying just the other day about
| science journalism and why it's so bad?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| In the paragraph immediately following the one you quote:
|
| _The scientists then discounted any speculative reports, only
| keeping those with evidence of a bird as the cause. These could
| include a photograph of a burned bird carcass at the fire's
| ignition site, or a statement made by an expert, such as a
| firefighter, detailing the presumed cause of the fire. Finally,
| they checked to see whether any particular environment was
| especially susceptible to these fires._
|
| From TFA.
| UIUC_06 wrote:
| Your point is, they were careful to winnow down the data?
|
| Yes, but they _started_ with a faulty data collection method,
| so if anything, they were probably understating the problem.
| Also not comparing their results to those from other methods
| of fire investigation, which surely are also being practiced.
|
| Kind of like looking for your lost keys under the street
| lamp, because the light is better there.
| openknot wrote:
| >"they were probably understating the problem"
|
| The authors' claim wasn't to give a comprehensive figure of
| the number of electrocuted birds that caused wildfires, in
| a specific region over a specific time. Instead, their goal
| was to establish that electrocuted birds is a significant
| reason for wildfires, rather than very rare events.
|
| This is useful because, even without a comprehensive
| figure, the article still provides convincing evidence for
| companies that may consider upgrading systems to prevent
| bird electrocution. For example, from the article:
| "Electric utility companies can insulate wires and install
| spikes to discourage perching; they could also build
| structures that allow for safer perching on transformers."
| openknot wrote:
| There is nothing wrong at all with the segments of the article
| you quoted. The main premise presented in the article is that
| electrocuted birds are a plausible cause of wildfires, in
| addition to human activity (the article specifically reports
| that human activity is the primary cause of wildfires).
|
| The authors' methodology to find online reports was valid. They
| used alerts to collect online published reports of electrocuted
| birds, and then manually checked each report to discard any
| that were speculative or lacked hard evidence. After this, the
| authors found 44 reports of electrocuted birds causing
| wildfires. At most, your strongest critique is that the methods
| could have been more comprehensive to find additional reports.
| That is technically correct, but it doesn't invalidate the main
| premise that wildfires caused by birds do happen, and are not
| one-off phenomena (via the 44 reports from the described
| method).
|
| >"and then they quote a guy who "has studied" it in Spain but
| wasn't involved with this."
|
| It is responsible and encouraged behavior to quote someone who
| wasn't involved with the study. This avoids bias where the only
| interviewed people are affiliated with the study, and are more
| likely to talk it up. Interviewing uninvolved experts in the
| field opens the door to possible critiques.
|
| >"Then they quote two other studies from four years ago."
|
| Four years isn't inherently long ago enough to be irrelevant.
| This is especially true when the premise is that electrocuted
| birds have been a significant cause of wildfires, not just one-
| off occurrences.
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