This is a place of extremes, where climate change has wreaked havoc across hundreds of thousands of square miles, pushing wildfires from the hills to the beaches, and where lawmakers have pledged to source 100 percent of the state’s energy from renewables by 2045. It's a long time to wait for people worried about losing their homes or their lives in an instant.

California has always burned, but it hasn’t always burned like this. In 2017, the state saw its largest wildfire ever. Then in 2018, it happened again. Tens of thousands of homes burned, more than 100 people killed, whole neighborhoods and one entire town all but destroyed, in the space of less than a hazy year and a half.

But fire is not purely a force of nature. People start fires—with a discarded cigarette butt, a poorly extinguished campfire, and also, though rarely, arson. And now, more frequently, fires are the result of an old, frail electric grid, failing under the pressure of a growing society and more extreme, climate-changed weather.

As the next fire season looms, Californians are wondering where the next fires will rage—and if there’s anything they can do to stop them. And retrofitting that crumbling electric grid is probably their best chance.

It’s not just Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), the largest utility in California, which has admitted its aging power lines likely caused the devastating Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise. Infrastructure across the country is crumbling, and we haven’t made the investments and reforms necessary to keep things running smoothly—or, at times, running at all. The US is categorically quite bad at maintenance. The most progressive states may be looking toward some greener future, but there seems to be little interest in shoring up the crumbling present.

When the grid fails in other ways, in other places, we get multi-state mid-summer blackouts, or impressive city-wide light shows, with transformers arcing into the night sky. But in California, the stakes have risen sharply.