Fire and power

LACEY - The Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission held a virtual post-fire-season update with three utility companies; Puget Sound Energy, Avista Utilities and Pacific Power Thursday morning.

“I know as late as October, we were dealing with wildfires in the state of Washington and this has become something of the new normal and it is imperative that our electric utilities make sure their infrastructure is safe and that their customers are safe during the risky fire seasons in our state,” said UTC Chair David Danner said in his opening remarks.

The meeting allowed a representative from each utility company to give a presentation about how they prepared for fire season, what they faced this fire season, community outreach and education and plans for preparing for the 2023 fire season. UTC commissioners Danner, Milt Doumit and Ann Rendahl were active in asking each representative more in-depth questions about information in their presentations.

Puget Sound Energy kicked off the presentations. Michelle Boll, Wildfire Mitigation Program Manager for PSE explained that this year they focused on patrol and repairs to the electrical system, engaging with customers through newsletters, bill inserts and their website to educate them on wildfire mitigation strategies and improved operational procedures.

Through these focus areas, Boll said, 40 line repairs and 2,040 trees were trimmed as a result and they received 1716 unique page views on their wildfire landing page between April 1 and Oct. 15. Some of the updated procedures they implemented this year included reducing the risk of ignition during heightened fire weather conditions by using tactics such as limiting the use of line testing and disabling automatic reclosers.

PSE participated in five emergency management county hazard workshops and several town hall-style meetings.

“These workshops also gave us the opportunity to engage with our partners about the concept of public safety power shutoffs,” said Boll. “ I would say the top takeaway we learned in the town hall meetings is that identifying robust communication methods to use before and during a PSPS (is) critical. So, in all, these town hall meetings we felt were quite valuable. We learned (the) specific needs of each community.”

Avista Utilities Wildfire Resiliency Manager David James presented about their experiences this year. James noted that they have worked closely with the Washington Department of Natural resources and have utilized what they have learned.

“We attend all of their weekly fire briefings and we’re really using that format that they’ve instructed us on in our own operating districts so we have our own weekly meetings to talk about the fire risks in our areas,” said James.

James also said he felt that Avista has done a really good job of building relationships with not only state agencies but federal agencies as well.

“Our analysis indicates that 2,750 miles of our distribution grid (are) in high fire threat districts, so it’s a significant portion, it’s 35% of our system is in high fire threat districts,” said James.

Part of their effort to reduce pole fires is updating power poles to steel and replacing wood cross arms with fiberglass cross arms.

“When you replace wood with steel, you're improving the overall reliability. The chances of a steel cross-arm failure is almost zero,” James said in response to a commissioner asking about if their purpose of replacing poles is preventing fires or just protecting equipment. “The driving focus is to replace those wood poles with steel where we’ve had historic fires and that’s our basis. We look back 50 years and then overlay that fire map with our system and in those areas where we see recurring fire activity, those are the areas that we’re targeting for conversion.”

James went on to explain that while they don’t have specific numbers on how many times a pole fire becomes a ground fire, they know it is a risk. James said it is a risk they feel is unacceptable and why the push from wood to fiberglass and steel is at the top of their priorities.

Allen Berreth, Vice President of Operations, presented for Pacific Power and spoke about how their parent company, Pacificorp, has been able to collaborate on fire mitigation plans in Washington based on their experiences with wildfires in the other states they service such as California and Oregon.

Berreth said their mitigation plan includes three main areas, situational awareness, system resiliency and responding to events quicker.

“We meet with the various utilities and bring and share the lessons learned, experiences and all that to make sure that nobody is reinventing the wheel and that we’re leveraging so the utilities can get the most experience and if we can learn from them, the better off we’ll all be,” Berreth said.

Rendahl asked that the three utilities communicate and coordinate with the commission as they develop their plans so that the commission can be better prepared if something happens.

The presentations as well as other case-related documents can be found on the UTC website under docket #210254.

Rebecca Pettingill may be reached at rpettingill@columbiabasinherald.com