My god people have short memories.

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People who live in my state, California, are engaging in gleeful schadenfreude over the massive electrical grid failure in Texas. These very same people, when I point out California's electrical woes, have responded flippantly with "what are you talking about? My lights come on".

In 2019, poorly maintained power lines caused a wildfire (The "Kincade Fire") in wine country that forced 180,000 people to flee their homes to seek safety, destroyed famous wineries, burned down almost 400 homes and office buildings, and did untold damage to Sonoma County.

The year before, in 2018, our electrical grid started the Camp Fire, (the largest wildfire in American history), burned down 19,000 homes and offices, reduced the entire town of Paradise to ash and killed 84 people. That same year in the southern part of the state, the electrical grid started the Thomas fire, which destroyed a thousand homes and resulted in a landslide that killed 22 people.

In 2017, the electrical grid started a fire in Mendocino County (the "Redwood Fire") that burned down 540+ homes and offices and killed 9 people.

In 2015, a fire started by the electrical grid burned 800 homes to the ground in Calaveras County.

In 2019 and 2020, in order to avoid our electrical grid burning down more of our state and killing more of our citizens, power was cut to millions of people, for days at a time, on multiple occasions. There is no plan in place to prevent this from happening in the future, and we should expect multi-day stretches without power (for millions of people) to be the norm.

This is only a very, very abbreviated list of disasters and deaths caused by the electrical grid in California in very recent years.

The staggeringly short memory of Californians smugly pointing fingers in the Texas electrical disaster boggles the mind.

And I have just recently been reminded that while not an electrical situation, a decade ago a California power company, governed by the California Public Utilities Commission, blew a leafy, suburban neighborhood in San Bruno to hell and killed 8 people. The reason this event had slipped my memory was the long, long list of deaths and destruction caused by the poorly maintained electrical grid (since then).

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