Private Mismanagement of Public Infrastructure
This series reviews exemplary failures in the private management of public infrastructure. Private management of public infrastructure is common in modern democracies, and failures, while rare statistically, can be spectacular. It’s not obvious if such failures are becoming more or less common, but there are plenty to study, and they provide a point of reference in our scrutiny of these companies. In the spirit of a software engineering postmortem, the goal of studying previous failures is to avoid repeating them in the future.
On 8 November 2018, about three months after the failure of Ponte Morandi, the Camp Fire in Northern California decimated the town of Paradise, population 26,218. The fire took at least 85 lives, destroyed 18000 structures, and was the deadliest US wildfire since the Cloquet Fire of 1918.
The sun rose that day to dry 50 m.p.h. winds. Descending from the Sierra Nevadas, these ‘Jarbo winds’, named for the nearby Jarbo Gap, are actually heated by compression as the air is driven into lower, hotter altitudes. At 6:15am a PG&E high-voltage transmission line failed by Poe Dam, near Pulga, California. The Caribou-Palermo line, a 115kV transmission line built in 1919, showered bits of molten metal onto the super-dried vegetation below.
