Sharon McNary

Mayor Eric Garcetti called the agreement historic, but that might be a stretch.

The new rules affect only large investor-owned utilities like Southern California Edison and Southern California Gas Company, not city-owned providers.

In Pasadena, the Hahamongna Watershed Park behind Devil's Gate Dam is a hidden gem of a hiking area, filled with trees and plants.

The Devil's Gate Dam reservoir is choking on sediment, and heavy rains could cause the dam to malfunction and overflow, putting homes and a freeway at risk of flooding.

The upgrades are expensive: Covered power lines, fiberglass utility poles and tiny weather stations. The expected payoff? Reducing how often power lines start fires.

Not that many years ago, state and local fire officials considered adopting a policy to train residents to stay and defend their homes from fire. A disaster on the other side of the world killed the idea.

It happens in every big wildfire. Officials issue mandatory evacuation orders, but some people stay behind and try to save their homes. Sometimes they succeed, and that raises a policy question that firefighters would rather not confront.

Investigators have not yet determined the cause of the Woolsey fire, but one of the things they're looking at is a brief outage Nov. 8 at a Southern California Edison substation in Ventura County that occurred two minutes before the fire was reported nearby.

Edison admits its power equipment was involved in the Thomas Fire. But it says it won't take full blame because CalFire is barring the company from examining power equipment confiscated in the post-fire investigation.

The typical homeowner would pay $83 in a new tax levied on land that sheds water, raising up to $300 million a year to fund projects to catch, clean and store stormwater to use later.