We wore rubber gloves to sort the rubble, but there was not much rubble to sort. The air smelled of sulfur, and mostly only dust lingered, as if a great storm had picked up the walls and roof and furniture and lifted everything away.

Like the 2017 fires in Northern California, the cause of the fire that burned our neighborhood, according to the government database, is still under investigation. One source is more likely than others: On that day, strong winds whipped power lines that hung over dry brush.

A power line can start a fire if it breaks in the wind. It can start a fire when a tree or a branch falls across it, or when lines slap together, or when equipment gets old and fails without anyone noticing. In 2015, fires started by electrical lines and equipment burned more acres in California than any other cause. Power lines sparked fires that set records in New Mexico and fed a blaze in Great Smoky Mountains National Park that entered the city of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and killed 14 people in 2016. In recent years, they have consistently been among the three major causes of California wildfires.

Hurricane-force winds periodically shriek off the Pacific and rattle California. Wind strong enough to break a power line spreads fire fast. This past October, when I sniffed the air and found that California was once again burning, I looked around and saw many wires thatching an orange sky. I was visiting my aunt in Northern California, 50 miles from the fires. We sat inside and watched the noon sun dim.

My childhood home didn’t burn the year Cassie’s did. But it should have. Dry leaves lay in piles beside the wooden walls. The volunteer fire captain’s house across the street burned, although he maintained plenty of defensible space. And so I wait, even now, for the next windstorm.

In the months after my neighborhood burned, I waited fearfully, which means I waited angrily. In particular, I hoped power companies would put their lines underground. In 1995, fire-related costs ate up 16 percent of the U.S. Forest Service budget. By 2015, half of the budget was devoted to fire. Some of us wondered how safe our power can be when utility-company profits drive power operations. PG&E has been found guilty of negligence before in wildfires, and some of us point at negligence and greed again this time.

There’s a precedent for fire occurring alongside an infrastructure that drives economic growth. From 1870 until the 1920s, most major fires in America were caused by locomotives. We fixed that problem, says Stephen Pyne, a firefighter-turned-historian. “New laws were enforced, fines and lawsuits applied economic pressure, engines were compelled to replace coal with oil as fuel, suitable spark arrestors were invented, rights-of-way were cleaned of debris, lines were patrolled.” And so locomotives started wildfires for decades, but not forever.