agreed. on the east coast they have made an effort to prevent power outages by aggressively trimming trees back from power lines which has helped a lot.
on the other hand I had the pleasure of recently taking a vacation through central California and up US 1 coast line. The hidden secret of California is that most of their 36 million residents live in the cities. There is so much open land in between the cities that is barely populated. trimming back the trees and building the needed fire breaks would be a huge and very expensive undertaking .