It’s hard to feel sorry for the California utility PG&E. Consider that its equipment sparked 17 major fires in 2017 alone, according to a Cal Fire spokesperson. Last year, it was responsible for igniting the Camp Fire, which killed 85 and destroyed almost 20,000 structures. The problem is typically wind, which jostles electric lines, raining sparks onto parched vegetation below. Officials haven't found that the utility violated state law in all those cases, but it's clear that electrical infrastructure plays a vital role in curbing California's wildfire threat.

So just cut the power when it’s particularly hot and dry and windy, right? If only it were so easy.

In fact, that calculation is downright torturous. Cut off power and you risk the ire of the state's Public Utilities Commission: Skirting the danger of starting a wildfire could end up bricking medical devices and critical infrastructure. A utility exists to constantly provide power—to make money, yes, but also to keep society humming along.

“Turning power off proactively in an effort to prevent wildfires is not a decision we take lightly,” says PG&E spokesman Jeff Smith. “On the other hand, leaving power on when there are conditions that are prime for potential wildfires, there are also risks associated with that.”

Facing new scrutiny of its abysmal safety record in the aftermath of the Camp Fire, PG&E twice last weekend cut power to communities facing extreme fire danger, known as a public safety power shutoff, or PSPS. In all of last year’s fire “season,” which is increasingly becoming a year-round phenomenon thanks to climate change, the utility called one PSPS. The decision to call for this year’s first two shutoffs came just weeks after the PUC set new guidelines for how utilities like PG&E should go about this without jeopardizing the safety of the public.

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All well and good, but this more proactive approach will never on its own solve the Golden State's wildfire crisis. “California is built to burn, and it's built to burn explosively,” says Stephen Pyne, a fire researcher at Arizona State University. “If people left tomorrow you'd still have fires that are going to blow to the Pacific Ocean. That's just a reality.”

OK, so given we can’t depopulate the entire state of its nearly 40 million inhabitants, how do we fix the wildfire problem? And what made it so bad in the first place?

Power lines aside, the state plays host to a cabal of conspiring factors that make it a tinderbox. One is forest mismanagement—California simply hasn’t been clearing enough brush, which builds up year after year until it burns spectacularly. In recent decades, cities have been encroaching more onto the wilderness, putting them literally in the line of fire. This is particularly true in corridors where autumn winds accumulate, fanning flames. And all of this falls under the umbrella of climate change, which has made California autumns drier, leading to more dried vegetation for those seasonal winds to bake and then shower with embers.

“I think we were all caught somewhat unaware about how severe the impacts of climate change have been and how quickly they have manifested,” says Peter Lehman, founding director of the Schatz Energy Research Center at Humboldt State University. “It's a new world for the power companies. Climate change has really changed the dynamic.”

That’s the new normal in a state crisscrossed with power lines. We can’t stop electrical equipment and high winds from disagreeing with one another, but PG&E can get better at proactive shutoffs to silence that bickering. There’s also precedent here. Beginning in 2013, the San Diego Gas & Electric Company has done 13 public safety shutoffs, and says it hasn’t had a major fire. They’ve got an in-house meteorology team monitoring 177 weather stations for temperature, humidity, and wind speed to divine the fire threat.