Wildfires, Crippled Response, and Evacuation Nightmare

For five miles, this line would thread the Temecula Creek corridor through the populated south of the city. ^{[5] [4]} When a wind-driven fire reaches homes like these, the knockdown comes from the air. But firefighting guidance treats high-voltage lines as an aviation hazard aircraft must keep clear of, so a 500 kV line strung the length of the creek draws a no-drop zone over the exact streets it runs past. ^{[1] [3]}

On the ground, the line does worse than block the planes — it holds the firefighters back. The rules force crews to abandon a direct attack within 100 feet of a transmission line until it is de-energized — and no one on the fireline can do that. A 500 kV line isn't switched off at a pole: it is fed with live power from substations at both ends, so only SDG&E's grid-control center can open the breakers feeding it, lock out the automatic reclosers that would snap it back to life, and send a crew to physically ground it — and until the company confirms all of it, the wire has to be treated as live and lethal. So as a fire bears down on these streets, the crews holding the hoses can do nothing but call SDG&E and wait for someone at a control desk miles away to free them to fight. That wait is the same for any energized line — and longer for a 500 kV line fed from both ends, which no local switch can kill. It was real at the January 2025 Eaton Fire: even for ordinary neighborhood wires, crews were told over the radio that, per their Southern California Edison contact, the lines were “to be considered energized, even wires that are down,” and that the utility “currently do[es] not have a plan to mitigate this issue tonight.” ^{[7] [8] [9]}

And if a fire does push toward these neighborhoods, getting out is its own ordeal. When SDG&E's 2007 Rice Fire burned the back-country just west of here, up to 45,000 people were forced to evacuate — proof that mass flight from this terrain is history, not hypothesis. ^{[11] [10]}

To make matters worse, Temecula's south side funnels onto a handful of shared arterials, and evacuation researchers warn that fire-prone communities with too many homes for too few exit roads face steadily rising evacuation times and dangerous bottlenecks. ^[13]

This line also makes a fire more likely, adding a fresh ignition source to a high-wind corridor the CPUC already maps for elevated-to-extreme fire threat. ^[15]

And the risk can be put to a number — by SDG&E itself. Its own wildfire model already calculates the expected ignitions for every segment of line in fire country; it just hasn't published the figure for this one. The public should demand it. ^{[18] [19]}

This is not hypothetical. Regulators concluded the 2007 Witch, Guejito, and Rice fires were all caused by arcing from SDG&E's own lines in Santa Ana winds, burning some 334 square miles. SDG&E paid about $2.4 billion to settle, was refused when it tried to bill ratepayers for roughly $379 million more, and agreed to a $14.4 million penalty. ^{[20] [15]}

One of those fires, the Rice Fire, burned right here — started by a limb falling on an SDG&E line the company had been told to trim and hadn't. It scorched 9,472 acres, destroyed 248 structures, and drove up to 45,000 people from Fallbrook, De Luz, and Rainbow — the same Very High fire-hazard back-country this line's approach would cross. ^{[11] [10] [6]}

California's environmental rules are built for exactly this: the CEQA checklist asks whether a project would impair an emergency evacuation plan, and names infrastructure “such as … power lines” that may exacerbate fire risk. The review must squarely analyze this line's ignition risk and its effect on fighting and fleeing a fire — not wave it away. ^[21]

And here is the sharpest injustice: none of it had to land here. When the grid operator put this line out to bid, four companies competed — and three of the four drew routes that went around the populated areas. The winning bid was the only one that runs through an urban area, and the operator picked it knowing, in its own words, that an urban route “poses a risk of public opposition” — largely because it was the cheapest. ^[22] So the fire these towers could spark, the air attack they would block, and the evacuation they would choke are not bad luck. They are the foreseeable price of deliberately threading a 500 kV line through the one place people live.

And the line does not even serve them. By the grid operator's own account it was planned for San Diego, the Los Angeles basin, and remote desert renewables — not Riverside County. ^[23] Temecula's rural west side already sits in the Very High fire zones insurers are fleeing, where “last resort” FAIR Plan policies have grown more than 500%; a new ignition source worsens the exact risk that decides whether homes here can be insured at all, while the line's cost is spread statewide. Residents would carry more fire risk, higher premiums, and part of the bill — for infrastructure that delivers them nothing. ^{[24] [25]}