COBB— Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) Spokesperson, Melinda Rivera, who works in local government affairs for the company, took part in this month’s Cobb Area Council (CAC) meeting Thursday. “She graciously offered to come and speak to us about projects going on here in Cobb,” said CAC Chair, Cathy McCarthy.
“We’re doing a walk with the county to look at restoration and what the county wants us to do for pavement restoration,” said Rivera.
According to Ethan Bell, who works in enhanced vegetation management and is a supervisor for PG&E, regular maintenance, such as the routine compliance clearances around electrified conductors, as well as dead dying trees near the lines or poles or guidelines, will not mitigate routine projects. “We also have the ability to work with emergency trees. If there are any pending immediate emergencies, we will fill those and treat them as an emergency tree. Dead and dying trees and minimal clearances will still get addressed,” he said.
“We have quality personnel on the field in the form of internal PG&E folks. They are largely focused on tree working, safety and safe working practices, but they also are out there working with the inspection teams as well. We also have taskforce leads and other more highly elevated qualified arborists and foresters on our teams to help assisting with the general inspection, so when we have areas where we want to take a closer look at, just let us know and we will coordinate to get the right folks out there to do a walkthrough with their property owner. We can look at the trees, look at what the prescribed work was and go from there,” said Bell.
The company representatives talked further about their efforts undergrounding in the area. “We’re not undergrounding the whole mountain right now. It’ll be a little bit of undergrounding, but a lot of overhead system hardening – it could be a pole replacement, it could be new cross arms. We’re doing tree wiring on the overhead wire. We’re trying to mitigate the risk as much as possible for ignitions. We also have the work that started last week and will continue until next year. We’ve already wrapped up a lot of the work on Socrates Mine Road and here in South Lake County first and Cobb down Canyon Road area. PG&E crews started to work in other areas of Lake County. We’re also going to be starting to look at the Scotts Valley area. It is a lot of miles,” he said.
Bell added the utility company is looking at where there are areas with the highest fire risk, focusing on certain equipment and certain areas where they have line closers that need to be worked on. “We want to do that work first. As we start to scope future years, as we get like three or four years out, we’re probably going to come back and start looking again, after we see how the undergrounding is working for certain parts where we’ve underground the conduit. We’ll start looking at the scoping again and seeing what areas are next.”
Property owners that need tree work done can send an email to treesafety@pge.com or call 877-295-4949.
