Wildfire Safety

Reducing Risks

We are strengthening our system and working hand-in-hand with your community to deliver safe and reliable power to your home or business and to reduce wildfire risk. This includes maintaining the safety of our system and seeking out new best practices to be even more vigilant. We are working with local emergency service and community leaders to expand and enhance existing emergency response plans.

We're adding new safety measures and system enhancements, including:

Enhanced vegetation clearing practices

To minimize wildfire risk we need to remove the potential for trees to contact power lines.

Our enhanced vegetation management practices are focused on maintaining safe clearance distances around our power lines by:

performing vegetation inspections
tree trimming to manage overhang
removing trees within the right-of-way

Additional Inspections

We are proactively increasing our inspections in high fire risk areas to identify potential threats that need mitigating. This includes:

increasing inspection frequencies to twice a year (or more) on lines in high fire risk areas, with more detailed inspections every 3 years
mitigating concerns within 6 months
performing required asset updates within 12 -24 months

Investments to improve resiliency

To make the grid more resistant to fire, we are focused on ensuring that assets in high fire risk areas are up to current design standards.

Some of the ways we're doing this include:

repairing or replacing structure components that have been identified as damaged or worn
replacing or cleaning insulators where cracking or contamination is identified
installing bird deterrents to minimize possible contamination on structures where nesting is identified

We're enhancing our situational awareness by:

Field crews monitoring wildfire risk
Identifying and prioritizing higher risk areas
Continuous monitoring of fire threats to utility infrastructure

For areas at a higher risk of fast-spreading catastrophic wildfires, we are establishing a new fire prevention measure called a Public Safety Power Shut-off. A Public Safety Power Shut-off is a new measure designed to help keep people and communities in high-risk areas safe, by proactively shutting off power during extreme and dangerous weather conditions that can result in catastrophic wildfires. This measure would only be taken as a last resort to help ensure customer and community safety.

Staying safe in wildfire season is a major undertaking. While no one measure can remove all of the risks, we are committed to taking every possible step to ensure that your power is safe and reliable – in wildfire season and every season.