A federal judge overseeing Pacific Gas & Electric’s criminal probation said Tuesday that he is considering requiring the utility to be more aggressive about turning off its electricity lines near tall trees, a plan that could double the number of power outages for some Northern California counties over the next decade.

The proposal outlined during a two-hour court hearing is the latest effort to prevent the utility’s equipment from sparking more deadly wildfires by reducing the likelihood that trees could fall into the utility’s long-neglected electrical equipment. U.S. District Judge William Alsup is overseeing PG&E’s safety precautions as part of the utility’s criminal probation after its natural gas lines blew up a suburban neighborhood south of San Francisco in 2010.

California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara on Monday announced a new partnership between the California Department of Insurance and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Administration to establish statewide standards for home and community hardening aimed at reducing wildfire risk, protecting lives and property and making insurance available and affordable to residents and businesses.

Predictive modelers told California regulators on Thursday that the state’s antiquated rules for calculating wildfire risk when setting property insurance rates discourage innovative mitigation measures that could ultimately reduce losses.

Nancy P. Watkins, a principal and consulting actuary for Milliman, said during a webcast on “home hardening” hosted by the state Department of Insurance that California is one of only three states that doesn’t allow insurers to use catastrophe modeling to determine wildfire risk. Rates must be based on historical losses.

Watkins said that is a “very simple” method of ratemaking. “It’s kind of like expecting the Rocky Mountains to be flat because we just drove through Kansas and Missouri,” she said.

Given that business-as-usual is unlikely to return soon due to the coronavirus pandemic, U.S. property/casualty insurers will continue to face challenges related to virus-related insurance losses and premium volume declines in 2021, according to Fitch Ratings.

The operational and risk management challenges of managing workforce flexibility, limiting risk aggregations and reducing claims exposure through clarity of policy terms will endure beyond the pandemic and become “new normal” longer-term drivers of the industry, contend analysts James Auden and Christopher Grimes, authors of “The Next Phase: U.S. Property/ Casualty Insurers.”

California’s earthquake early warnings will be a standard feature on all Android phones, bypassing the need for users to download the state’s MyShake app in order to receive alerts, the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services said.

The state worked with the U.S. Geological Survey and Google, the maker of Android, to build the quake alerts into all phones that run the commonplace operating system. The deal was expected to be announced Tuesday.

By now, all states and local municipalities are back to work in either a full or limited capacity. For most businesses, this is a welcome sign, but reopening does not occur without some risks. Employers and employees will now need to consider both new and old risks before reopening their doors. For a business to successfully open, the organization will need to prioritize three goals: 1) reduce the likelihood of transmission within the workplace, 2) resume and maintain business operations, and 3) continue to promote a healthy and safe work environment. These three goals are unachievable without developing a thorough, comprehensive business resumption plan and addressing the potential business disruptors.

First Street Foundation, a nonprofit agency, is making accurate climate change-adjusted flood scores available for every property in the U.S. today. There are government-produced maps showing 8.7 million homes and properties at significant flood risk—and it turns out those may have underestimated the amount of real estate at risk by 67%. Or, in other words, an additional 6 million properties face a significant risk of flood.

Before these individual property scores were available, there was no easy way for your average homeowner or buyer to understand the flood risk associated with specific properties. That’s particularly problematic because climate change is causing flood risk to increase; there are more extreme rain events and coastal flooding than there used to be.

Unions representing 17,000 workers at Walt Disney Co.’s Disneyland Resort in California have told the state’s governor they are not convinced the theme park will be safe enough to reopen by the company’s July target date.

In a letter to Governor Gavin Newsom on Thursday, the unions said they had been in discussions with Disney since mid-March when Disneyland was closed to help curb the coronavirus pandemic. The resort in Anaheim, in southern California, houses the Disneyland theme park and the California Adventure Park, both of which the company aims to reopen July 17.

(TNS) -- After TSA rolled out a series of new measures Thursday to encourage social distancing and stop the spread of COVID-19, Acting U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf said the agency is considering checking temperatures and thermal imaging to help screen for the virus.

Wolf, a Plano native who toured Alliance Airport in Fort Worth for a look at shipping infrastructure, said it is a possibility that passengers will be screened for elevated temperatures before they board planes.

As in 1918, New York may use staggered work hours to keep subway safe

As New York City makes plans to reopen in the coming months, officials are dusting off the playbook from the 1918 flu pandemic, when businesses were ordered to begin their work days at staggered times to prevent the subway from becoming a vector of disease.