as you know, i used to participate in the suppression and utilization of wildland fires. so i have paid a bit of attention to such lawsuits, and criminal charges after fires.
a short history of wildfires in the USA is that after the initial settlement use of fire to clear land, the main human ignition source of large wildfires was the railroads, as the steam powered engines belched cinders, sparks, and the red-hot brake shoes on downgrades started countless fires along the tracks. the railroads employed fire wardens to patrol the tracks first with handcars and later motorcars between trains during high fire danger periods. When one escaped, settlers suing the railroads, whose monopolies extended into the courtrooms, was relatively unheard of. Flash forward to the 30's, and then the source of many wildfires became electrical power transmission lines as rural america was electrified by the REA, etc. Approaching the 60's and 70's, suing deep pockets became blood sport, with so many lawyers roaming the land that you couldn't take a leak without hitting one. Power lines starting fires started making its way to the courtrooms. I remember one such case against Montana Power Company in the 70's very well.
One result of this is that in forested areas in particular, power companies spend huge amounts of money clearing branches and vegetation away from power lines and corridors so as to "immunize" themselves from negligent fire starting.
But something else was also going on. The suppression of small, slow moving fires became effective, particularly with the advent of aircraft detection and suppression activities. Which meant one thing... that the fuels began to accumulate that previously were removed by periodic light fires... things like the "western parklike stands of timber" were the product of light fires that kept the understory cleared of fuel accumulations that burned cool enough that large, thick-barked trees survived them easily, most people did not understand at first that fire suppression in a fire-driven ecosystem was like putting your finger over the end of a garden hose... you can do it easily at first, but as the pressure builds, eventually there is a violent release.
Fires started become larger on the average, a trend which is still happening, and is exacerbated even more by the extension of the mediterranean climate regime to more and more of our lands due to climate turbulence.
One of the largest fires i was on in the 70's was started by a hiker burning his toilet paper after use in a wilderness area. He meant well, but hundreds of thousands of acres burned. People wanted his head. Indeed, when a fire start is proven to be by a particular person, even if not arson, if some one dies fighting the fire, murder/manslaughter charges are often brought.
Fires in the west are generally larger because of the fuel loadings and dry conditions. The hazard is extreme in many areas. one spark can take out a whole county.
My problem with the lawsuits about starting a fire is that, barring intentional arson, is that the ecosystems here are no longer fuel limited as bio-accumulation has been allowed to occur, and have become ignition limited. so one spark, instead of burning a few acres until it bumps into an area without much fuel due to earlier burning and petering out, goes for tens of miles.
I mean, no one went after Mrs. O'Leary's cow after the Great Chicago Fire, what they did was institute fire building codes.
In the case of our public lands, fire ecologists and land managers (such as yours truly) have long understood why the fires were getting larger, hotter, and more destructive (peoples instinctive seeing wildfire as destructive was largely incorrect back when fire was allowed to be a part of the climate and the fires only were a selective pressure on the vegetation, not an all-or-nothing conflagration) so we allocated as much as we could to fuel treatments to prevent wildfires from even being able to destroy much of anything in most conditions. A portion of all logging receipts went to what was called "brush disposal". Then congress decided to help us by raiding those trust funds, while allocating less to appropriated monies for fuel treatment, and then curtailing vegetation activities via the Northwest Forest Plan, a well-meaning but disastrous attempt to associate logging with habitat destruction... wildfires now destroy more critical habitats than logging even was capable of, we protected fire dominated ecosystems to death, and guaranteed that a large portion of the local economy was destroyed)
Now the protected timber burns and salvage is not even practical due to the timber deteriorating because of the time it takes for the process of being able to salvage it... for the price of a postage stamp, groups delay salvage of valuable dead timber until the timber value is gone (it checks, etc. within a year or two) so they always win, and the value of the timber could be utilized to rehabilitated the burned areas, instead, it is left as fuel for the inevitable follow-up fire, for here, when you have fuel accumulated, it is only a matter of time before an ignition occurs.
I guess this is a sort of long-winded way of saying that it no longer makes a lot of sense to always focus on how the fire starts. I think the cause should be determined, to see if it was a malicious act, but barring that, unintentional starts do not warrant the level of outrage that they get. I remember one fire where a guy was mowing his lawn, the blade struck a piece of flint, and the fire ran to 76,000 acres, and he was ordered to pay several million dollars in suppression costs, when in my mind anyway, part of the culprit was continuous fuels being allowed to accumulated for miles and miles.
So while the lawsuit against the power company in the australian bush makes people feel good and the "deep pockets" are reached into, people should understand that most everyone, (except arizona1) pay the power company and suing them for damages (particularly if they have a favorable record of vegetative powerline maintenance) is sort of like taxing everyone for the fuel and weather conditions.
One solution is the use of bio-accumulation for power generation (i sold hundreds of thousands of tons of chipped up fuel to Honey Lake Power at $65 ton, the economics are there, or at least was there prior to cheap natural gas due to fracking, but that is another story).
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