Heading into wildfire season, everyone is encouraged to prepare for natural disasters or emergencies by building a disaster supply with food, water, medication, flashlights, first aid kids and a list of emergency contacts.
That was the safety advice from Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) Company Regional Safety Director John Gilginas, during the Virtual North Coast Town Hall for Humboldt, Lake, Marin, Mendocino, Napa, Siskiyou, Sonoma and Trinity Counties on Wednesday.
“When we think about the North Coast area, 49% of our overhead electric lines are in high fire threat area,” said PG&E Vice President of the North Coast Region Ron Richardson. “With any work that’s being done around your neighborhood or whatever, say a tree that you want to plant or a fence (that) blew down during the storms, allow us to get out there to identify where those electrical or/and gas lines are.” Richardson added the utility is seeing a 25% reduction on outages this year, which company officials take it to mean that they have done the work to try and prevent those from continuing to happen.
Richardson also mentioned a 20% reduction to customer accounts overall and an improvement of 18% in response from PG&E personnel. “We also have helicopters that are staged in the North Coast and we can get those in the air to expedite that patrol. Once we see the outage, we have to do a full line patrol to make sure everything’s safe before reenergizing,” he added.
Principal Program Manager on PG&E Customer Emergency Operations Joe Segura said that typically “we see peak wildfire season run from May to November. This year, we are tracking more along the lines of late June, early July for the start of our peak wildfire season. That is a welcomed release that we will take any day. A later start to peak wildfire season is a good thing, but big fires are still a possibility throughout the remainder of the year. The locations where risk is high may change from where we traditionally see fire risk due to all the increased vegetation growth brought on from all of the rain that we saw earlier this year.”
Offshore wind events in the fall can also present high fire risk conditions throughout the entire Pacific Gas and Electric Company service territory. “Our team is constantly monitoring diverse locations and situations to ensure the safety of our customers and our hometowns. We have an in-house team of meteorologists and fire scientists that work around the clock 24/7, 365 days a year, monitoring the incoming weather and making sure that we’re ready for what’s heading our way,” Segura said.
“Our continuous monitoring and updated forecasts allow us to support more precise Enhanced Powerline Safety Settings, enable and disable activities. That allows us to be enabled when (EPSS) wildfire risk is higher and then to return to normal settings to support reliability when wildfire risk is lower. We invested in technology like artificial intelligence and drones that help us to detect smoke patterns, indicate wildfire danger, automate fire detection and response. We also use machine learning to more precisely forecast and model potential fire spread. It is called the fire potential index, which helps to guide our operations and planning in targeted locations where and when fire danger is elevated,” said Segura.
“We’ve also built and installed our own network of high-definition cameras and weather stations to help us better understand and respond to the risk. Video cameras allow fast and accurate detection or confirmation of wildfires, which helps our Hazard Awareness and Warning Center. Operators assess the scope of resources that we need to respond as appropriate. Since we launched our community wildfire safety program, we have reduced wildfire risk from our equipment by about 90%. We’ve accomplished this through a combination of ongoing safety programs, long-term improvements and new situational awareness, tools and technology. These measures work together to provide customers with multiple layers of protection,” he said.
The company recommends customers to look for additional information on how to plan and stay safe during an emergency at safetyactioncenter.pge.com.
