Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) held an open public meeting Tuesday about wildfire safety efforts within the region and community resources available to keep the population safe. The event was hosted by PG&E’s regional leadership team, including regional vice-president Ron Richardson and moderated by regional senior manager for PG&E North Coast team Austin Sharp.
“As we head into wildfire season, the message today is: we really encourage everyone to prepare for natural disasters or emergencies by building a disaster supply kit for you, your family or your business. Be sure to include food, water, medication, flashlights, first aid kits, a list of emergency contacts and more tools to keep you safe. Also, don’t forget those four-legged friends. Make sure that you have what you need to keep your pets happy and healthy in this time of stress as well. For more information on how to prepare for an emergency, visit safetyactioncenter.pge.com,” said Health and Safety director for North Coast, Corey Zeigler.
“We’re doing a lot more maintenance, a lot more work out there to remove the risk. We take our vegetation management crews and we try to do all the work at one time while we’re in that area. We have a team that’s working together to do everything we can to see how we can connect customers. We’re working very closely with low-income housing projects. We’re reviewing the outages to see what opportunities are out there. The team is actively looking into challenges today,” Richardson said.
“We are making the electric system safer and stronger for our customers every day. Since we launched our community wildfire safety program, we have reduced 90% of wildfire risk from our equipment. We have accomplished this through a combination of ongoing safety programs, short term and long-term improvements and situational awareness tools. We don’t just rely on one of these measures. They all work together to provide customers with multiple layers of protection. In addition to the safety layers, we are partnering with top innovators to stop catastrophic wildfires,” said Sharp.
“To better predict and respond to severe weather threats, we built and installed our own network of high-definition cameras and weather stations. In 2022, we reached our goal of 600 high-definition cameras installed throughout the service territory, allowing us to see more than 90% of the high fire risk areas we serve in the North Coast area. We installed 37 weather stations and 27 high-definition cameras in 2022 all along the north coast region. You can also see cameras and stations installed in areas surrounding the community by visiting pge.com/weather,” added Tom Smith, senior manager for PG&E Customer Emergency Planning and Operations team.
“Trees are a big source of wildfire risk. We prune or cut down more than 1 million trees that present a hazard and we do more pruning where we’ve had a high volume of vegetation caused outages. When there are outages, we look for potential causes, like tree branches falling into lines, targeted areas and do trimming of those in addition to the normal patrols. Together, this work really reduces wildfire risk and improves reliability for our customers. If any safety work is planned on your property, you can expect an advanced notification from us by text or email. For more information about any vegetation management work, you can always visit pge.com/trees. We’re reducing wildfire risk by strengthening poles and installing stronger covered power lines. We’re prioritizing undergrounding in areas where we can have the greatest impact on reducing wildfire risk and wildfire safety related power outages for customers. In 2022, we placed 23 miles of power lines underground in the North Coast region and there are 153 undergrounding miles forecasted in the next two years in the region. More program information can be found at pge.com/undergrounding. And for more information on the status of any outage and the overall restoration process, you can always visit pge.com/outages,” he said.
