CPUC Workshop - 2020-11-18
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California Public Utilities Commission
Follow its sittingsSpeaker 4
We'll have a stretch break roughly, think around three. Next, the Board will discuss the overall themes we saw while reviewing the PLU wildfire mitigation plans. Next, the Board and the municipal and co op associations will have discussion about next steps in wildfire mitigation planning. And before we close, we'll certainly have a time for public comment or Q and A. As Ms.
Stockton mentioned, if you'd like to get your comment to us anytime during the meeting, you can join via WebEx and use the chat function. Our staff will read any comments in the chat out loud. Finally, we hope to adjourn the workshop by five p. M. Or earlier.
I'd like to thank the publicly owned utilities who are presenting today. We appreciate the time you took to put your presentations together. And more importantly, we appreciate all the actions you've taken to help protect California from wildfire. Now before we dive into the POU presentations, it's my pleasure to introduce Alice Reynolds, the Senior Advisor to Governor Newsom for Energy Issues and the Wildfire Safety Advisory Board. Ms.
Reynolds?
Speaker 5
Thank you, Marci, and thanks also to your staff for so ably putting this together. It's interesting that in normal times we would all be sitting in a room together, but we are somehow able to
Speaker 5
all stay safe in these strange times. So I just wanted to recognize how the efforts of your staff to pull this all together and allow us to continue to do our important work during these times. And I am really pleased to be here. It's a pleasure for me to be able to participate in this meeting. I've been tracking the activities of this Board literally since the inception.
But I've not been able to see it in action yet. And so I'm hoping to stick around for a little bit of the meeting. I did want to recognize the commitment of each of the Board members, Your expertise, your dedication, thoughtfulness to these issues is so very much appreciated. Wildfire mitigation is something that affects every single Californian in one way or another from our health and well-being to the impacts on our economy as was made unfortunately very clear this fire season. So your efforts are really more important now than ever.
And I just wanted to start by thanking all of you for all of your work, your continued work, and you're really bringing all of your expertise to the table on behalf of the state. And then getting to the subject of this workshop, I also wanted to thank the publicly owned utilities and the electric cooperatives who are participating. This forum I think is a little bit unusual because it's not like the normal CPUC process where the CPUC regulates the investor owned utilities. We're actually in this forum reaching out beyond the jurisdiction of the CPUC and hoping to bring the best practices and the thinking and all of the work that the publicly owned utilities and electric cooperatives are doing for the purposes of sharing best practices, sharing the information with partners and helping the state as a whole tackle these really difficult issues. I know that that's a challenge probably more so for each one of you than it is for the large investor owned utilities because you're obviously not monolithic.
Each one of your territories is very, very different. And so I just wanted to state my appreciation for the work that has already been done and the continued work. I'm really looking forward to a productive workshop today. And I think that lots can come out of this by all putting our heads together. And I thank the Board for organizing this and make it happen and thank all of the participants for showing up and bringing what they have to contribute to the discussion today.
So with that, I will turn it back over to Marci and looking forward to a productive afternoon. Thanks everyone.
Speaker 4
Great. Thank you so much, Ms. Reynolds. We really appreciate you taking the time to be with us today. Okay.
Certainly it should go without saying my thanks are out to the POUs and co ops for all of the work they did. And as we read the submittals, we were very pleased to find there are portions that are simply excellent. We reached out to the utilities that we thought we did a particularly really good job on some of their sections and asked them to share aspects of their plans with all of you today. So we're going to start with the presentations and a man at least with me needs no introduction. We're going to start with Brian Wilbur, Director of Power Transmission distribution of Los Angeles Department Of Water And Power.
Brian, are you there? Somebody has to turn Brian on.
Speaker 1
Ma'am, it looks like his line is disconnected. We'll watch for him to call back in.
Speaker 4
All right. Given that, we're going to move to the second presentation and we will fit in, Brian, when the technical difficulties have been solved. It's certainly my pleasure to introduce Janet Lonacher. She's the Assistant General Manager of Electric Services with Anaheim Public Utilities. Janet?
Speaker 7
Thank you, Ms. Edwards. And I'm hoping that I can get the video back up. It was working before. What was what was the name?
Don't want to delay.
Speaker 7
Thank you for the opportunity for Anaheim to share our wildfire plan our elements of our wildfire plan with the board today. And I would like to start first with slide number two to give you a little bit of background about Anaheim. So Anaheim Public Utilities or APU includes our electric utility that is 125 years old as well as our water utility that is 140 years old. And we serve a diverse population of 360,000 residents as well as 20,000 businesses. Right.
There I am. So like many communities, we've been hit hard by the ongoing pandemic. But before this year, we welcomed 25,000,000 visitors annually to our major destinations, which included Disneyland Resort, the Honda Center, our Angel Stadium, and our Anaheim Convention Center. Our service territory is 50 square miles, and the wildfire prone areas are in the easternmost portion of the city, including which includes housing developments, retail, and undeveloped canyon areas. APU is one of a dozen departments that serve the city, and we collaborate closely with our Anaheim Fire and Rescue and the Anaheim Police Department on major emergencies.
We also house the city's emergency operations center at our Edwards Utilities Complex yard, where we coordinate major events that include past fires like the Freeway Complex fire in 2008 and the Canyon Fire II in 2017. I'd like to point out that even though homes were lost tragically during these wind driven fires, There were no circuit outages or power line issues during either event. Next slide, please. As development spreads spread toward the Eastern part of Anaheim, we invested in long term solutions to make the community more resilient. On the left of the screen is our park substation.
This is the first fully underground substation in The United States, and as the name suggests, there is a park built above the substation. Substation utilizes gas insulated switchgear. That allows for a more compact footprint within an enclosed concrete structure. So this hardens our system against weather related outages, physical threats, and of course, wildfires.
Speaker 7
the right is our Walnut Canyon Reservoir, which holds 900,000,000 gallons of water that is treated before serving customers. The reservoir has been used on many occasions to support firefighting aircraft, and this photo is from the Blue Ridge fire that affected neighboring Yorba Linda just last month. Slide, please. One of the first keys to establishing our wildfire mitigation plan was to coordinate closely with the Anaheim Fire and Rescue to identify high fire threat zones. Anaheim fire officials have expertise in wildland fires, and our very own current fire chief has been incident commander in fires throughout the state.
The next step was overlaying overhead infrastructure, and we identified two segments that were in or adjacent to our tier three extreme zone. Because Anaheim is 98 underground in the fire threat zone, we have been able to minimize the ignition. In addition to the overhead line
Speaker 7
serving community, which includes water pumps and telecommunication towers who depend on electrical service from APU and our adjacent investor owned utilities, high voltage power lines and towers passing through Anaheim's fire threat zone were identified as well. We coordinate with all of these agencies with impacted facilities. One of the keys to monitoring have been the installation of our wildfire cameras through the Alert Wildfire Program in coordination with our University of California San Diego Scripps Institution. Four stations and eight cameras have been installed to date and have been instrumental in identifying early ignition, as you can see in this photo. That's our Gibson Canyon.
Next slide, please. Same cameras are used by both our Anaheim Fire and Rescue dispatchers and our own utility operators. So since we already collaborate on emergency calls, it makes sense to further collaborate on wildfire monitoring. The image on the right shows the Blue Ridge Fire captured by our wildfire camera. Slide six.
On risk mitigation, we identify the risk drivers using a bow tie method agency wide, using historic metrics and garnering community and city stakeholder input so it isn't all in a bubble. The measures are assigned to responsible staff for accountability, progress is tracked and reviewed annually for effectiveness. Here, the risk driver is a wildfire ignition by our equipment, and
Speaker 7
several mitigation measures that address specific circumstances, so not one size fits all. An example of this is our undergrounding. We've been undergrounding major roadways under our program since 1990, similar to the investor owned utilities Rule 20 program. However, in 2016, understanding that there is an increasing risk related to wildfires and other outage causes, we added a reliability criteria to be included into the program. It doesn't mean we underground everything, but it gives us a tool with which to make local decisions that are in the best interest of our community.
True to that effort is that we are now undergrounding a small roadway that is adjacent to a high fire threat zone as shown in this photo. This would not have otherwise been qualified under the previous program design. We held a community meeting with those affected residents who were grateful for the plan implementation. We evaluated another pole line that runs through a nature preserve, but the terrain made it difficult to underground. So instead, we de energized that line and use it now only as a backup circuit tie for reliability.
Risk mitigation is actionable. And in Anaheim, whether it's system hardening or operational practices, we put our plan in action. Slide seven, please. A large component of our power monitoring and restoration process is our coordination with our Anaheim first responders. So typically, Anaheim Fire and Rescue is the lead agency at our local emergency operations center, and they will help to determine when it's safe for our crews to return to a fire damaged area.
In the aftermath of the two thousand seventeen Canyon Fire two, which resulted in a large scale evacuation, we planned for a large number of residents coming back to their homes following the incident and might find their power is out. Well, in this circumstance, fire personnel for safety reasons often shut off the main breaker at the home when dealing with fires, but the residents may assume that it's a utility power outage. So we anticipated this, and rather than waiting for calls for service, we proactively dispatched our field staff to verify the status at the home prior to the first responders allowing residents to return. So as important as power shutoff protocols is, the power restoration process is equally as important. In most cases, it's about ensuring our customers and our stakeholders are aware that the power is back on and providing our contact information if they still don't have power.
However, it's also about recovering from the damages incurred after a wildfire. Following the Canyon fire, our Anaheim City Council approved a utility rule modification that upon a declared emergency, APU may waive certain charges or fees related to restoring service, such as temporary service, service connection plan checks, design and engineering and inspection and related administrative charges. Next slide, please. That concludes my presentation. I'd like to thank the Wildfire Safety Advisory Board for their thoughtful review of the many plans submitted by our California utilities.
You have a tremendous responsibility, and we hope that our efforts in Anaheim highlight that municipal utilities each have different ingredients of wildfire mitigation, but the statewide plan is enhanced by local planning, proactive investments, and collaboration by first responders. Thank you all.
Speaker 4
It's a very good job, Janet. Thank you so much. And please tell your general manager thank you for me as well.
Speaker 4
All right. Brian, have we managed to subvert your technical difficulties there?
Speaker 4
Yep. As a reminder, this is Brian Wilbur, Director of Power Transmission and Distribution, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Go ahead, Brett.
Speaker 9
Thank you very much, Marcy. Apologize for the technical difficulties. I'd like to say it was a problem here, but it was more than likely a disconnection between the keyboard and the chair. First of all, I'd like to thank all of the POUs that one of the things that this whole mitigation plan and putting all this together, one of the big benefits that we've had is a chance to get to know each other and to work together on some of our common problems, some of our common solutions and bouncing a lot of things off each other. It's been a great experience that way to get the collaboration from all the POUs.
And it's something we should be doing all the time on everything anyway. So this has really helped a lot. I also want to thank the Wildfire Safety Advisory Board for their review of our plan. We had a lot of items we wanted to go over. I'm going to touch on just three main things, and that's the identification of the enterprise wide risks, including vegetation, drought, weather, things like that.
Our past metrics and our grid system hardening measures, such as pole replacements, transformer replacements, alternative materials and things of that nature, and also the assessment of our accessibility to terrain for first responders. So next slide, please. So just a quick overview LADWP, we have I don't know whether it's an advantage or disadvantage of being the big fish in the small pond here. We are the large municipality here for as far as the rest of the POUs. We have over 1,500,000 customers in Los Angeles, another 5,000 and more than 5,000 in the Owens Valley, four seventy eight square miles in Los Angeles, another 1,800 square miles in the Owens Valley, more than 7,000 miles of overhead distribution facilities and over 4,000 miles of overhead transmission lines and that covers five states.
So being the big fish here, we have a lot of interesting aspects with our service territory. Next slide. Even though we cover a large area, most of our in basin is urban centric. In the Owens Valley, it's very rural out there. Our transmission lines that travel over five states, but where they go through California, one of the big advantages that we have with our transmission lines, it's not a lot of forest area that it's going through.
Speaker 9
of desert area. And that's Scrub Rush, that's Joshua Trees. So it's not that high fire threat zone. We do have a few areas, very few of Tier 3, a little bit of Tier two. So realistically, inside L.
A, we have about 8% of our distribution and transmission lines run through a Tier two area, less than 1% through Tier 3, right? In Owens Valley, it's 1.3% in Tier 2 and really nothing in the Tier 3 area as far as our service territory goes. So most of our Tier three stuff is out of our service territory. It's just going through those Tier three areas on our transmission line. So LA is also a little bit unique in our Tier two areas.
It's not the rural secluded areas. Our biggest Tier two area through the Santa Monica Mountains is our high rent district. It is our it's Bel Air, it's the Hollywood Hills, it's Brentwood. It is a very influential people that live there that have a lot of connections and a lot of phone calls get made from there. So our Tier three area is not quite that out of the rural area that a lot of the POUs have.
Next slide. So in developing our wildfire, just like you heard from the previous presenter, that whole bow tie effect on how we identify the enterprise wide risks. So when we went through this, we went there was really the bang for our buck really falls under three of the main risks that we have. So we analyzed all of this and there's a lot of things that we're moving forward, but really the best bang for our buck is our vegetation management, our inspection and maintenance and our grid hardening. Next slide.
When it comes to our vegetation management, this is one of our big projects and we've just now signed on we have a new contract in place that's under the process of getting approval to increase the staffing of the contractors that we have and a more inclusive plan. When wildfire really became a big issue in the state, we lost a lot of our tree trimmers to the IOUs. And that influx of everybody going out, making money up in Northern California devastated our system. So it's been hard getting our contractors back in place, getting our core numbers back to where they need to be. We maintain a database of more than 400,000 trees.
We prune more than 185,000 trees a year. We do annual evaluations. We inspect every transmission distribution line every year. And then we do mid cycle inspections in our high fire threat districts. So a lot of issues that we have with our tree trimming is I go back to that in our Tier two area.
And that's those residents that are in the hillside communities. It's a little bit tougher to go in there and start hacking trees on private property beyond what the regulations are. And what we're trying to do in our vegetation management program is going beyond that four foot, that eight foot rule and to really clear wider distances. And so in making that effort, it's become a little bit of a battle with the private citizens and everybody has their own priorities. So it has been a challenge, but we do have our tree trimmers, we have our supervisors, our certified arborists, so they are on staff and we typically trim a little bit farther out than most of the regulations require.
For our inspection and maintenance, this is the other big deal. We have 125,000 transformers. We have over 300,000 poles. It's getting the maintenance done on this required a little bit of extra effort. Our in house inspection and maintenance groups had to be expanded in order to get to meet our inspection needs to look at where we're going to harden our system, right.
With our system that big and our resources where they are, we really have to identify where our immediate problems are. We have an equity metrics issue also. Our power system reliability program involves our entire service territory and such a small percent being in those Tier two areas and being able to concentrate what the most needed points parts are in those Tier two and Tier three areas. Next slide. Like I said, the big bang for your buck here is hardening the system, right?
How do we stop circuit problems? How do we stop outages? How do we stop short circuits, arms breaking, wire coming down, hardening our system is our best bang for the buck. Undergrounding is the solution, but not in the rough terrain areas. There's a lot of issues that we can't do.
We can really get the most of what we can with our money on hardening our system, right? Number one, that's alternative poles, steel poles, fiberglass arms, beefing up the structure that we have. It's increasing our spacing of our wires, increasing our wind loading, right? We surpassed we went from the 56 mile per hour wind loading to an 80 mile an hour of wind loading and all of our Tier two and Tier three areas. So this is our big concentration.
It's moving forward with alternative poles, alternative material. Next slide. The other portion of that is changing the wire that we're putting in. We're increasing our conductor size, but tree wire has now become the norm, right? Everything that we're putting in, in our Tier two and Tier three areas, we're putting in TreeWire.
This brought on a lot of different hardships that we had to prepare for also, right? TreeWire is a little heavier, right? It's a beefier construction. We need stronger poles. We need stronger materials, right?
It's a different practice. The work on these poles with tree wire takes a little more time, a little more energy and a little more money. And so all of these things really are a big part of what the changes that we're making for. The other one is the avian protection. One of the most interesting things we found with our increased avian protection is where we were just isolating our conductors from steel poles with our avian protection, because that's originally what the problems were, right?
Birds getting into that inside conductor on a pole and touching the pole causing a short circuit, right? And falling to the ground on fire, starting a fire. That's but what we found is we also have our construction standards and how we did our bonding and grounding on our arms on the outside phases also became an issue where birds were still getting across over the insulators into our grounded lines or our grounded bonding on our poles. So we had to make a big change in our construction standards on how we do our general construction. So it wasn't just the alternative materials, it was changing the way we do our regular work.
That's been a change that we've done also. Next slide. The next part I want to get into is really what happens before and during an incident. We have a strong collaboration now with LA Fire Department, with our Office of Emergency Management, with CAL FIRE. All of these pieces come together, not only preparing for a wind or event or a heat event or a red flag event, but also during a problem.
When we have a fire, when a fire breaks out for whatever the cause is, it's really about how we respond. The next slide. So, and in that response, we're back to one of the bigger issues that we have, whether it's a transmission right of way, whether it's just our access road to our lines during a fire, this is a fire road. And the maintaining of these roads is critical because it's not just for our use for maintaining our lines, but this is where the fire department is going to go to battle the fire if there's a fire at that place. And this is one of the big things that we really have to concentrate on in collaborating with these other entities in the city.
In Los Angeles, we have a lot of conservatory groups. We need to move forward with a focus on environmental stewardship to where we're also protecting the landscape. We have many of our pole lines go through the California Coastal Commission. If any of you have worked with them before, right, there's a thousand permits that we need to go through and a lot of hoops to jump through just to go ahead and change out poles that were that are eighty, ninety years old that we need to get in to do. So it takes a lot of work, takes a lot of focus and it takes a lot of collaboration with those entities.
The Angeles National Forest, the Topanga State Parks, getting our permitting done, getting this done ahead of time when we can identify where our assets need to be changed has been a big challenge, but it's something that needs to be done. And it's not just about maintaining the roads for us, it's when there is a fire event, no matter what the cause, we need to be able to have those roads open for the fire department to come in. Next slide. So the last little piece I wanted to go through is really the situational response. We do not do PSPS here at Water and Power.
We are reactive to the event when it happens. And there's a few reasons behind that. One of the big issues that we have moving forward is during a fire event is we need to be able to keep our pumping stations going, right, to help the fire department fight the fire. So we need to keep power onto those pumping stations. So we work directly through our Office of Emergency Management with the fire department during an event.
The other portion of that is trying to stay ahead of where that fire is and not necessarily shutting off preemptively, but reactive to what the needs are. During an evacuation event, it's very important that we keep streetlights on, that we're able to keep houses on, that we're able to keep the traffic signals on, so we don't have mass chaos during an evacuation process. So we dispatch our crews and we have our management personnel in our Office of Emergency Management working with all of these groups so we can shut off strategically ahead of the fire where needed so we don't contribute to the hazard, but also to maintain some calm during the storm when evacuations are taking place and to help the fire departments when they go through.
Speaker 9
Excuse me, last slide. Those are the main things I wanted to go over. There's a lot of things in our plan that I'm very proud of. I think that we've really kind of nailed some of the bigger problems that we've had and wean them down to something that's really workable for us. We've made some huge strides, but we have a lot of strides to go.
We have a large service territory, a lot of old equipment and a small workforce that we lose to the IOUs quite often. So it's a big deal for us to keep going with this. I put our contact information on the last slide. If anybody wants to review our plan, it's available. It's on our external website also.
So thank you very much. I'm welcoming any questions at the end here and thank you for letting me present today.
Speaker 4
Good job, Brian. Thank you. In particular, I really like the grid hardening. Okay. And with that, we're going to move to Terry Crowley, Healdsburg Utility Director, and that's obviously in the city of Healdsburg Utilities Department.
Terry, do we have you?
Speaker 6
Yes, believe so. So good afternoon, Board members. Thank you again for allowing us to present to you and allowing us to provide some of this time. So I'll jump into this a little bit of background. So next slide please.
So, the City Of Hillsboro, we're a small publicly owned utility. Service territory is only four square miles, serve a population of about 12,000 customers or 12,000 people and then 6,000 meters. 60 miles of distribution line, 50% of that is underground, 7.5 miles of overhead are in the Tier two fire area. So that's what our focus is with respect to wildfire mitigation. One substation and then we are dependent on PG and E for transmission source.
So PG and E decides to do a PSPS vent at the transmission level, we lose power to the entire community. So that's a little bit something we'll go into a little bit more on the communication side. And then we have 13 full time employees to manage all of that. So it's a challenge and we have a lot of staff that wear a lot of different hats but keeps us busy and out of trouble. Next slide please.
So, far as background in wildfire, this graphic here shows the City of Hillsborough service territory in the center there outlined in black. Around us you can see historical wildfires. The yellow area is the most recent Kincade fire. This map is from 2019. So it's not quite updated with the recent fires of the current year.
So to the west of Healdsburg was the Walbridge Fire. So that was an additional area, pretty significant burn area. And then, also the Glass fire that burned into Santa Rosa was also an impact for us as well. So we are surrounded by wildfire. So it's a very real event for us and for our community.
And again during the Kincade fire, town and many of the towns in Sonoma County were evacuated due to that. We have about 1,400 our 6,000 meters that are in Tier two fire areas. So, it's a good portion of our customers that would be affected by any of the work that we do in the Tier two areas. Next slide please. So, notifications.
We are a small city, but we do have the ability to contract with other entities to provide automated calling and other sources like that or services like that. Customer notifications typically start with education. We want to educate our customers about the potential of PSPS, educate our customers that we can't guarantee power at all times. So outreach and education is something that we start on and continue throughout the year. Customer notification is a collaboration between city departments.
So as a city, as a publicly owned utility, we have good coordination with the local fire, local police, city manager's office and other utility departments such as the water and wastewater departments. And then we for most customers, we work on automated phone calls. So those would be provided to the average customer and we try and do a prerecorded message in both English and Spanish to make sure that we reach every segment of our community. Critical facilities, police, fire, communication providers, other utilities, hospitals, etcetera, those we typically will provide a phone call as well as an email from the city. Again, it's a small city, so we have pretty good relationships with each one of these entities.
And so we'll try and reach out to them ahead of time and give them as much notice as possible on any potential PSPS event. Access and functional needs customers, we started this summer reaching out and trying to collect as much information as we could on that segment of our community. We'll do automated phone calls as well as follow-up calls to confirm that those customers actually did receive the message. So we've tried to draw a bubble around that group and really try to focus in and make sure that they're getting as much notice as possible with that. One of the challenges to all of the customer notifications is timing.
And so there's kind of a cadence in these events that leading up to a potential PS Best. You'd like to provide your customers forty eight hours notice at the minimum. But being a transmission dependent utility, timing is challenging. If we don't know what PG and E's plans are, we can't really relate that to our community as far as what effect may be for a PSPS event. So we're trying to work with PG and E to improve that and improve our customer notifications at the same time.
So next slide please. So system inspections and one of the things that we think is the best or best mitigation measure that we have is to provide routine inspections and inspections often. So prior to any fire season, we go out, we do visual inspections. We do visual inspections on our entire system every year. And in the fire area, we're paying a little bit more attention to vegetation clearance, the condition of the wood poles, cross arms, other support structures.
And then whatever we find in there, try and review and prioritize those pending maintenance tags that we can get those things done in the fire threat areas sooner rather than later. We don't like to see tags go past twelve months. So we'd like to get that stuff done and try and keep our system in tip top shape. Additional visual controls are performed before any red flag warnings. So the intent here is that we really want to take a look at the system before the winds come in and after the winds leave to really understand how the system is performing.
And I think the best way for us to do that is to really put eyes on the line before and after each of those events. And it helps us identify where we have vegetation that's falling. Eucalyptus tree is pretty typical that you'll see a lot of bark falling off those trees. And so we can kind of identify those areas as something that we might want to do additional mitigation work or additional grid hardening work. Next slide please.
So vegetation management, I can't tout this enough. I think this is one of the biggest things that you can do to improve your reliability and reduce the risk of wildfire. So we on an annual basis contract with a tree contractor. They have a twelve month contract and they're required to maintain clearance throughout that entire contract. So it's not just a one time thing where they come in and trim once and then they're done with their contract.
They have to maintain that clearance. To help mitigate the risk and improve our reliability, we ask for clearances that exceed G95 requirements. So typically on a primary we'll ask them to trim seven feet and maintain no less than four feet through the contract period. So if you have a quick growing tree they're going to have to go out there several times in the year to maintain that four feet of clearance. We also make sure that we trim our secondary from pole to pole maintain three feet at the time of trimming and then no less than one foot of clearance on our secondary, keep that stuff clean.
Service drops, we also make sure that there's no contact and six inches of clearance around there. We also try and clear around the poles and streetlights and guide wires as well. And again, like I said, the contractor is required to maintain those clearance throughout the contract period, not just a one time thing and then it goes there. And so and then the other thing too, I've mentioned that with the vegetation as we do look at those inspections from the contractor as well as having our own staff go back and look at those that work and make sure that everything's in clearance and proper for the event. Then leading into a red flag warning, that's one of the bigger things that our staff is looking for to try and prepare our system for that.
And so just that's really quick brief overview of those key points of our wildfire mitigation plan. Again, thank the Board for allowing publicly owned utilities to present and kind of tell our story of how we're mitigating wildfire risk and look forward to any questions that may come up at the end of the presentations.
Speaker 4
Excellent. Thank you, Mr. Crowley. Sure appreciate you being here and bringing that information forward. Next, we have Mr.
David Hernandez. He's transmission and distribution engineering manager for the beautiful city of Burbank and Air Water and Power Department. David?
Speaker 12
Good afternoon, board members. David Hernandez, manager of Cheney engineering. Similar to the other presentations, I'll be sharing some specific aspects of DWP wildfire mitigation plan. Slide, please. The city of Burbank is mostly an urban environment with about 17 square miles.
It's located about 12 miles north of Los Angeles, California. We have approximately 54,000 electric meters. And a peak load of three twenty two megawatts. Next slide please. The next few slides include a brief overview of the risk assessment and priority levels included in our wildfire mitigation plan.
Burbank has a tier two fire threat area as shown on the map here. We don't have any tier three in our city limits. Now as part of its site evaluation, EWP in consultation with the Burbank Fire Department and a third party consultant reviewed the site topography, vegetation fuel, overall history of fires in the tier two area, and we identified what areas really posed a greater risk or greater hazard for the ignition and spread of a wildfire, as well as finding out areas where road access was limited for our fire department. Next slide, please. We identified the type and amount of electrical equipment and overlaid that on this map here in our tier two area.
In particular, it was really helpful for us to find out where all the overhead facilities were located as overhead equipment tends to pose a higher risk of ignition than underground equipment. About 5% of our overhead wire in VWP's electric system is located in the Tier 2 area, and all of these circuits in the Tier 2 area are four kV. Next slide, please. BWP reviewed historical risk driver events and we found that we had about 50 risk driver events over a fifteen year period dating back to 2005. And while BWP's electrical equipment has not been known to ever cause the ignition of a wildfire, we recognize that knowing the type and frequency of these risk driver events in our tier two area This will help us know where we can further minimize the risk of wildfires by our equipment.
Slide please. After our assessments, we prioritized areas that posed the highest risk of ignition and spread of a wildfire. Our highest priority area, 2.1, is an area that exhibited a significant amount of vegetation fuel, included a lot of overhead facilities, and had some limited road access. Next slide, please. BWP has implemented several mitigation measures that have reduced the risk of wildfires of our equipment igniting a wildfire.
I'll cover some of these highlighted activities shown in this slide. Now we've performed intrusive pole inspections on every pole within the Tier 2 area. This helps us to identify and prioritize a deteriorated pole replacement. Based on the results of our inspections, each pole is given a rating that determines the priority and schedule of its replacement. Since 2018, EWP has replaced 45 deteriorated poles in our Tier 2 area, which is about seven percent of the poles in that Tier two area.
Next slide please. EWP also performs pole loading analysis anytime we replace a pole. In addition, we performed pole loading analysis for each pole on our highest risk circuit in the tier two area. This resulted in one pole needing replacement and another pole needing additional guiding. In order to reduce the frequency of transformer fuse operations and transformer failures, we reduced our criteria in the Tier two area such that transformers with more than 150% overload would be replaced.
In 2020, we replaced 26 transformers in the Tier two area. Slide please. While most utilities have implemented the best practice of blocking their reclosers during a red flag warning condition, VWP also increases the sensitivity of its protective relaying inside the substation, which can significantly reduce the amount of arcing energy during an electrical fault, thereby reducing the risk of wildfires. Next slide, please. Lastly, BWP is considering several other mitigation measures such as covered conductors to reduce wire contact event, replacement of explosive fuses to eliminate orking during a fuse operation, build reclosers to minimize outage restoration times by isolating only the tier two portion of a circuit after an outage, and falling conductor protection to detect a broken conductor and de energize it before it falls to the ground.
Next slide please. That concludes my presentation. Thank you for the opportunity to share these aspects of BWP's wildfire mitigation. Thank
Speaker 4
you, Mr. Hernandez. In particular, I like the proactive nature of your transformer replacement program in Tier two. Thank you again for being here. Next, I would like to introduce Mr.
Joe Gill. He's the Assistant General Manager of Turlock Irrigation District. Joe?
Speaker 13
Thank you, Board, for allowing the district to come and present our elements of our plan. I'll be going over a number of items here that were requested to bring to the Board's attention of the efforts that we placed, details of our profile of our territory, mitigation measures that were implemented in 2019 and 2020 and future, along with how we evaluate the mitigation measures are basically our metrics that we developed. But before we begin, I'll give you a brief overview of the district. We were formed in 1897, one of the first irrigation districts in California. We're located right in Central California.
We're six seventy six square miles, about 100,000 customers that we serve. And we have a peak of five seventy one that we recently just hit this summer with our heat wave coming through and we are a balancing authority within California. Next slide please. So one of the aspects that we wanted to highlight here is how we evaluated our service territory and in particular for the CPUC's Tier two and the SRA. We actually took both areas, both elements and overlay that over our service territory, identified all our substations and transmission lines and put those in perspective and took the most conservative approach for implementing our mitigation measures with both the Tier two and SRA requirements.
Next slide. As we went down to each section of our territory, as you kind of soften the Ezra map, our areas are impacted at the tips of our service territory. And what you're seeing here is considered our West Side. This is divided by our Santa Clara County line. For those that are probably very familiar with it, this is the area that we had to contend with the SCU Lightning Complex Fire.
And we had a number of our territory sorry, services that were highlighted and you can see on the map there in magenta color, there's our distribution line. We actually really had to go out and repair all those facilities during this fire that we had to contend with. But all the mitigation measures that we have implemented were very effective going through that event. But that's how we identified all our areas here for this particular zone. Next slide, please.
And that goes to the other side of our territory. You can see that there's two different layers as I mentioned and this is what really highlights at the tip of our service territory, you can see where that's an orange color. That's what's identified as the Tier sorry, the high risk Tier two and the light orange is the SRA. And as I was mentioning that we took both areas and identified them as a high fire risk for the district and took the most conservative approach. So we went well beyond of what the CPUC requirements were here just to ensure that the wildfire mitigations are impactful and also our customers are well aware of what actions we're taking for mitigation.
Next slide. For also identifying the profiles, really needed to see what type of vegetation management needed to be taking effect. We looked at both sides as I mentioned for our territory, whether it's grassland, riparian, what it may be. So what type of tree trimming activities need to be taken and also if there's any grass brush or even fire breaks that need to be taken in consideration, we're all evaluated based on how we identified our service territory. Next slide.
And that goes for the West Side, as we mentioned to the SCU complex fire is high brush grass was in this area. And the profile in this area is much different than any other. We do it with the canyons and high winds in this particular area, which helped us evaluate what mitigations need to be impactful here based on the brush in this territory. Next slide. So as we identified the territory, we looked through what areas and what type of mitigation could be taken in the particular years.
In 2019, we trimmed approximately about 2,400 trees and even removed a number of those. Along with that, utilized the aspect of removing all our nonexempt equipment that includes fuses, lightning arresters, switches and installed equipment such as fault tamers or SME20 fuses, which are areas that we can actually include or utilize in those fire zones. We also changed our work practices and the work practices include removal of non reclosing as many IOUs and POUs have implemented, but also our work methods where we would avoid working in the red flag warning zones. But if a priority one maintenance would be required, the wildfire mitigation measure requires us to utilize a water buffalo to take up there with the crews so we can suppress any fires or anything could contend with the work happening out in the field. One of the biggest things that we were advocates of is working with our landowners, making sure that they understand their responsibilities and ensuring that they knew what vegetation management that they need to contend with within their homes.
And also the big thing is coordination and I know you'll hear it from a number of POUs here coordinating with Cal Fire was instrumental in developing our program and making sure that we have a good open line of communication with them to ensure what we're presenting is adequate and it supports their efforts in the event of fighting a fire. And then lastly, it's public meetings. We've held a number of public meetings, making sure that all our customers are aware in those particular part of the territory, the efforts that the district is taking. Next slide. And so in 2020, this year, we did increase our patrols and the fire zones that we have identified for the district.
Intrusive pole testing is one of the items that we've actually completed this year, went through and looked at each area and now put together projects to complete those, use of fiberglass poles or steel poles depending upon the area. One of the things that we really looked at that was an issue is replacement of conductors, in particular copper. Copper is one of the areas in our territory that we've had for a number of years that suits well, but it's prone fall if there's an incident that occurs at the if a bird gets into a line or there's a high fault current that occurs. So we really identified those areas. And then lastly is to making sure our power control center has operations of their non substation reclosure field operations of
Speaker 13
And in future years, the drone is one of the items that we're going to be into. We currently have a drone program, but we want to enhance that drone program to include inspections within that area, include infrared inspections and then considering undergrounding and utilizing additional tree wire in certain areas and then adopting some of these smart grid technologies that are out there currently. And that's really going to be instrumental of getting more information back to our operators to ensure that we can operate the facilities appropriately and ensuring that there's no fires that are being caused by them. Next slide. And so this goes into our metrics of how the mitigation measures that we've implemented and what can we do to ensure that the measures that we have are actually effective.
And so there's a number of items that we've listed here for staff to continue to report on whether we have vegetation caused outage, what is the source of that information, where we get it from the field. And from that point on, was that during a red flag warning? And that kind of puts down to yes, it was or it wasn't. And what impacts did we have regarding that the mitigation that was put in place. And then evaluation would come down for us to say, let's just say we trimmed say 2,000 trees for example.
And how effective was that in that particular area. If we had a fire that occurred in that particular area, what other measures can be implemented? Should we need to spread herbicides, additional herbicides around pole, our firebreaks within each pole. So the metrics that we implemented, we felt that it's very helpful for us to identify projects in the future and how we can currently and also in the future advance our wildfire mitigation program. And that concludes the district's presentation.
Speaker 4
Excellent. Thank you very much, Ms. Gail. We truly do appreciate that. Next up, we have Bradley Kresge, the General Manager, Surprise Valley Electrification Corp.
Speaker 14
Hi, this is I'm actually DJ Northrop. The Member Service Manager with Prize Valley Electric. I'm the presenter today. Brad is on the phone in his office so he will be available for any questions for the Board or from the Board later on.
Speaker 14
No problem. Next slide. Next slide please. Surprise Valley Electrification Corp. Is a private nonprofit electric cooperative founded in 1937 and energized in 1938 to provide reliable electric service to the member owners at the lowest rate possible.
SVEC's service area extends north to Summer Lake, Oregon, South to Rayvindale, California, West to Dade, California and East to Via, Nevada. The area highlighted with the blue lines on the map is a joint service territory that SVEC shares with Pacific Corp. The total area served is 7,650 square miles. As of 11/12/2020, the cooperative serves 6,729 electric meters. Out of those accounts, 5,535 are residential and commercial meters and eleven ninety four serve agricultural irrigation pumps.
SVC service area falls within the service boundary of Bonneville Power Administration making us the only California cooperative that can purchase wholesale electricity from that federal power agency. Next slide. Out of the 2,158 miles of total overhead transmission, distribution and underground lines, SVEC only has four sixty four miles of line or roughly 21% of our system fall under the Tier two fire zone category. SVEC has 0% that falls under Tier three category. Next slide.
This is a high level map of SVEC's assets throughout Modoc and Lassen Counties. This map shows our entire electrical system where it spans in regards to the Tier two fire zones. Next slide. SVEC has an extensive inspection program for our transmission distribution and underground lines. SVEC also inspects every single substation monthly to make sure everything is operating as it should.
All inspection reports are submitted to the California Public Utility Commission every year to be in compliance with GO95, and GO174. Next slide. SVC prioritizes our maintenance on a three level scale. Priority one is considered an immediate hazard and needs to be taken care of as soon as possible. Priority two is considered a non emergency repair and will be prioritized by urgency within one year where practicable.
Priority three is also considered a non emergency repair and will be noted by the inspector on the urgency of the work needed to be completed within two years. Next slide. SCC implements GIS or geographic information system. With this system in place, it allows us to work side by side with CAL FIRE, Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and other agencies. We can share the exact location of our entire system, allowing them to see where natural fire breaks may occur due to our established right of ways.
In return, the fire agencies can share with us the location of the fire and their crews. This allows us to determine if a certain area may need to be de energized to prevent any utility fires from happening. Next slide. One major resource to Surprise Valley Electrification Corp. Has been the California Department of Corrections Devil's Garden Conservation Camp.
SVEC works alongside the Modoc Fire Safe Council who works directly with the CDCR. The CDCR staff and inmates have not only been a huge asset to us, but to the local community as well. The CDCR crews were able to open back up our existing right of way underneath our overhead power lines. This allowed SBEC to then get a dozer to reestablish the roads. The benefits of having this fuel break is easier access for us to maintain our infrastructure, hardening our system by upgrading our transmission poles and to prevent a utility fire as well as cutting down on outage times.
The benefit for all other agencies is knowing that the fuel break is in place in case of a wildfire. Without this very much needed resource of the Devil's Garden Conservation Camp, SVEC would fall behind in our wildfire mitigation plan. The CDCR is a very much needed fuel break solution for the entire state of California. SVEC would highly recommend all utilities look into using the CDCR or partnering up with a local fire safe council. Next slide.
I've included here some pictures of the CDCR crews cleaning up the right of ways by removing new and old growth juniper trees. Next slide. Once the juniper trees have been removed, this allowed SVC to get in with the dozer to reestablish the existing road along our transmission line once the crews were finished. Next slide. FCC hired a contractor using masticator to remove the brush along a county right of way preparing for a new stronger distribution line to be built to meet California Public Utility Commission codes.
Next slide. SEC hired a year round tree trimming crew to keep our right of ways cleared while maintaining fire clearances as described in our wildfire mitigation plan. They work year round, Oregon, California, they clear transmission distribution, very handy. Next slide. This is just showing in our wildfire mitigation plan the clearances that we require for the fire crews for the Devils Garden Cal Fire.
This is what we expect. Next slide please. Thank you for having us, choosing us. I know we're a small cooperative in big state. So to get included in this was very important for Brad and myself.
Speaker 2
you so much. Chair Edwards, did we lose you? All right. Well, let's just move on to our last presenter of the day, please, Laura Anghui. Oh my goodness, I might have killed that.
Interim Chief Growth Strategies and Operations Officer for SMUD. I apologize, Laura.
Speaker 4
My apologies as well, Laura. My phone came unplugged. Please continue. Thank you. Okay.
Thank you.
Speaker 1
Can you hear me? Am I on? Sorry. Yep. Okay.
Perfect. I just didn't see the video going so I wasn't sure. So good afternoon. Thank you and then to you and to the entire board. I'm Laura Ongwai, the Interim Chief Grid Strategy and Operations Officer for SMUD.
Next slide, please. So, are the comments that we received back from the Wildfire Safety Advisory Board and the areas that we were asked to focus our presentation on. So, the first is around our risk assessment and the identification of programs that mitigate each risk and the second is our vegetation management program and then last is our infrastructure inspection programs for identification of potential hazards. Next slide please. So, SMED is located in Northern California and we provide electric service to our customers within the Sacramento County and a small portion of Placer County.
If you look at the eastern portion of our service territory, the area in yellow is the state responsibility area and in later slides you will see that this area actually borders the CPUC High Fire Threat District. We have roughly 640,000 customers and serve a population of about 1,500,000 people. Next slide. For the development of our wildfire risk mitigation plan, we conducted a risk assessment similar to the rest of the utilities that have spoken today to identify the key risk drivers and their impacts. We identified existing programs and procedures to help mitigate the risks and then we looked to see where we had gaps.
We also surveyed the industry for best practices. We reviewed new and emerging technologies to determine what additional activities if needed were that we needed to include to further mitigate our wildfire risk. Next slide. Our plan also takes into consideration our geographical risk and we prioritize work streams within these areas. On the left hand side is the CPUC high fire threat map.
The black outline within the center of that map is MUD service territory and you can see that our service territory is not located within the high fire threat district. However, we do have hydro generation and transmission facilities that are located within the high fire threat area for our Upper American River Project or the UARP, which is located in Eldorado County and that's slightly east of our service territory. We have about 130 circuit miles of transmission lines within the high fire threat districts. In addition, we have about three miles of distribution lines located in that area to provide power to those generation sites. On the right hand side is CAL FIRE's high severity zone map, which is based on all ignition risks and not just based on electrical facilities.
On the CAL FIRE map, we do have one area within our service territory that is deemed higher risk based on the conditions of that area. It's a small area in the red just Southwest Of Elk Grove. The area is a residential neighborhood that contains about 100 homes. And they were built in the middle of a eucalyptus grove. In the neighborhood, there's a lack of defensible space from these trees.
It's also filled with tall dry grass. There's limited routes in and out of this neighborhood and we do have overhead facilities located within this neighborhood. You can also see that although our service territory is outside of the high fire threat area again, the eastern portion of our service territory, which is the state responsibility area, borders that high fire threat district. As we've developed our plan, we have taken into consideration the geographical risks within the UARP, the SRA that borders the high fire threat area and then the Eucalyptus Grove that was deemed high hazard by CAL FIRE and we've prioritized our mitigation efforts within those areas. Next slide.
Foundational to our mitigation efforts is our vegetation management program. We're using LiDAR technology to augment our boots on the ground vegetation inspections to identify trees that need to be removed or tree work that needs to be completed. We're using LiDAR, which is Light Detection and Raging technology, to more accurately measure the distance between our assets and vegetation and other objects. From the helicopter during the LiDAR survey, there's about 300,000 to 500,000 laser pulses per second and that reflection is then captured by a sensor. The distances and wavelengths are then used to create a three d map, which is about six to eight centimeters of accuracy.
We do this for both the distribution and the transmission facilities located within the UARP and our lines located within the state responsibility area. Many of the locations in the UARP are hard to get to this, so this really helps with augmenting, again, our vegetation management inspections and our planning effort. Next slide. So, this LiDAR mapping is completed during the LiDAR inspection process. The trees in red are detected grow ins.
These detections are field verified by our veg management team to determine the final work needs, which is either pruning or removal. The images allow SMUD's vegetation management team to make operational decisions and quickly identify work areas. Next slide. The trees in yellow have been identified as overstrike trees or trees that are tall enough to strike the conductor if they were to fall. We've done a lot of outreach with the landowners to allow clearances beyond our normal right of ways.
This has been highly successful given the current wildfire environment. We've completed the LIDAR vegetation inspections each year since 2017 and are planning to complete this again in 2021. Next slide. So, is an image of some of the work that was completed this past summer to show the extent of our vegetation management program in the high fire threat areas. You can go to the next slide.
And this is the before and after picture again. You can see on the left hand side, there are trees within the right of ways that are potential grow ins. There's also potential overstripe trees as well. And then the picture on the right is the after picture which shows that these trees have been removed. Next slide.
The LIDAR imagery here was taken within our service territory within that state responsibility area. The video shows the grow in and the distance to the lines and again helps to quickly identify and prioritize the vegetation management work that needs to be completed. Can skip to the next slide. This slide is specific to the Eucalyptus Grove. Again, the Eucalyptus Grove is that an area that's located within our service territory that was deemed higher risk by CAL FIRE based on the density and flammable nature of the trees within that area.
On the left hand side are the before and after vegetation management pictures of the Eucalyptus Grove. Also in this area, we are working with our customers to gain additional clearances similar to what we did with the landowners within the UARP and to gain clearances beyond our normal right of ways and to minimize the potential of fall in. On the right hand side of the slide, it shows the per customer cost comparison for vegetation management work and it compares the average vegetation management cost per customer within the Eucalyptus Grove, which is shown in grey against the average customer cost for customers that reside outside the Eucalyptus Grove within the rest of our service territory, which is shown in blue. You can see that we're spending a good deal more per customer within the Eucalyptus growth, but this is intentional based on the characteristics of that area. Next slide.
This is our splice assessment program and splices can become a point of failure. The program is designed to assess the integrity of our transmission conductor splices. The picture in the middle shows the X-ray machine that is used to take an image of the splice. Inspectors then evaluate the splice image to determine the internal condition of the splice to identify splices that need to be repaired or are close to failure or need to be replaced. The image on the right is an in line splice connector corrector that strengthens the splice when it's needed.
We started this process in 2017 and we will complete all of the inspections of our transmission slices in the UARP by the end of this year. Next slide. The SMUD contracted with Kiwit to pilot the use of drones to capture high resolution images of our transmission assets that are located within the UARP to augment our inspection processes. These are sample images from another project that we're taking about 30 feet away from the energized lines. The image is from a 100 megapixel camera that's mounted on the top of a drone.
On the computer, the image can be zoomed in to identify loose or missing cotter pins and other hardware. You can also see the wear at different connection points such as C hooks. Once the images are captured, they're processed through an artificial intelligence platform that is using image recognition software to identify defects. Since the AI platform is fairly new, we're also doing 100% QA of all of the photos. We're using VOLT, which is visual online lineman team.
Defects that are missed by the AI platform are then fed back into the AI platform to help with the training of the application in detecting additional defects. We just completed the first phase of our pilot, which is about half of the towers located within the UARP. The images are currently being processed and we'll have those results soon and we plan to finish the rest of the assets located within the UARP at the beginning of next year. Thank you. Next slide, I think that's it.
Speaker 4
Wow. I have to admit, Laura, some of the graphics are downright cool. Thank you very much for that.
Speaker 4
Alright. What we are going to enter into now is kind of a Q and A portion between the board and the presenters. So if we can ensure that all of the presenters are connected and can hear the board. I'm going to start since I can only see four people at a time. I'm going to start with our esteemable vice chair, Ms.
Diane Feldman. Thanks, Chair Edwards. Can everyone hear me all right?
Speaker 4
I just want to thank everyone. Am I on audio? I'm having an epic tech failure today. We can hear you. Bear with me.
Great. Thanks, Marcy.
Speaker 4
the panelists and since we're short on time and long on questions, I'll just jump into mine. And it's directed to all of the participants because it was something we noticed And actually, I'll go to I'd like Healdsburg to kick it off, and then we can go to the other POUs and the co op. Healdsburg, in your WMP, we noticed that you talked about how PG and E's PSPS impacted you. And we also noticed that in the other WMPs, there was a discussion of the utility specific PSPS for the publicly owned utilities, but really no discussion of or very little discussion of how the IOUs PSPS would affect the service territory. So, Healdsburg, could you please indicate why you included that?
And then perhaps just one of the others could indicate how you see that the IOU PSPS discussion being important or the importance of it in your WMG?
Speaker 6
So thank you for the question. We are transmission dependent on PG and E. And so if PG and E decides to shut down their transmission line, that would use power to our entire community. So it's not just areas of Tier two that we would look focusing on, but the entire community. So all of our fire stations, police, hospitals, care centers, everybody at that point loses power for the duration of that event.
So the challenge is we have this obligation to notify customers. PG and E doesn't have that visibility to who our customers are. In some senses they would see us as an individual transmission customer, not necessarily a community of 12,000. And certainly work with PG and E to try and help that understanding over the past twelve months. But that's the challenge that we have as we have this obligation to notify our customers of these pending PSPS events without that collaboration and upfront working with PG and E to understand what lines transmission lines are in scope or out of scope for any particular event, it challenges us in our planning processes.
So that's why we have that as one of the issues for our customers to kind of be educated about how the transmission provides power to the city even though the city is distributing that within our service territory.
Speaker 4
So, thank you. So just because there's a lot of questions, I would like Mr. Wilbur from LADWP to respond.
Speaker 9
So kind of a can you hear me okay? I want to make sure my sound is on. Okay. Yes. So kind of along the same line.
So we have our own generation, we have our own transmission. So we're not as affected by system wise by the PSPS from the IOUs. Where we are effective is more or affected is more facility wise. So we have communication systems that are fed by Edison, water pumping stations that are fed by Edison. And so we get a lot of notifications from them when they're doing a PSPS that we're going to lose power to those facilities.
But essentially, it's more like we're a regular customer where we lose our facilities. Our transmission is not very much affected by that.
Speaker 4
For now, Diane, does that answer your questions? Do to that remind the we do have the ability to reach out also to the POUs outside of the workshop if we are not able to get to all the questions. I'd like to move to Board Member Christopher Porter.
Speaker 10
Thank you, Chair Edwards. Yes, my question is directed at Anaheim Public Utilities, Janet Lonecker. About the Park Substation, I'm very interested in the planning elements that went into identifying even before this became a statewide issue that, that would have been an actionable, sustainable, prudent action to build it and what went into it? How did you actually plan to capitalization for it? What was the thought process?
Speaker 7
Sure. Thanks for the question. And yes, as I said, our substation is unique since it was the first in The United States. There was a lot of drivers for the Park Substation and the reason it was built underground. Some of those drivers were aesthetics, Some of those drivers were for hardening the system.
And the way we approached that was really very much community oriented. We did what sounds like a charrette with the community to get input. We needed this station to be located because it was a load center. But where we were going to locate it was really input we received from our stakeholders and the community and what were some other needs that the community needed in addition to just the reliability of the substation. And that's where the park came into play.
It's an area that is surrounded by neighbor neighborhoods, by residential. So there was going to be a noise factor that was impacted here. There was also very much family area. And so therefore, there was a need to have a park in the area. So we put all these elements together to come up with really a win win solution for the utility, for the community, and on top of that, for hardening the system.
And because it is in the East Anaheim wildfire area, we have the added have the added benefit of it being wildfire proof. And so that's really how it came about. As far as the design, we it was a design build project and we were involved in it from the start. And of course, Marcy was at the helm at that time. And so she was able to see the entire project come to fruition.
And but I think the main point here is we did get input from the community on what was needed and stacked that on top of what our need was from the utility and reliability perspective. We have other substations in Anaheim where we did a similar fashion getting community input. And a couple of those substations, our Harbor substation and our Anaheim Ation, both built after Park substation really reflect the architecture of the area. And that again was so that we could enhance the community and so it wouldn't look like an industrial looking substation that it would deflect the area surrounding the community and
Speaker 4
Okay. Thank you very much. And thank you, Janet. Moving to Board Member Block.
Speaker 15
Great. Okay, I have kind of a theme question since I know we don't have tons of time. My theme question, which has a bunch of short specifics for different service territories, is the things that I was really excited to hear about and want to learn more. I mean, the way I view the POUs in general is that they've got some flexibility to explore different ways that they manage their service territory that other POUs and the IOUs can learn from. So I guess my first question would be to surprise Sally.
You spoke of the GIS data and collaborations that you used to work with the Forest Service and CAL FIRE. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you go about that process and what your timeframes are when you do that?
Speaker 14
So typically when we have a wildfire breakout in our service territory, We have a very friendly relationship with a lot of the local members of CAL FIRE Forest Service. I mean, they can pick up their cell phone and call me directly and I can do the same for them. It's just nice living in the smaller community that we know everybody and we're just a phone call away. So when a fire breaks out in a certain area, I can jump on our GIS mapping through ESRI and I can pull a certain area of our service location and create a shape file. And what I usually do is when the fire season starts out, I will put our overhead distribution, transmission lines, our poles, where our consumers are, all that information is in that GIS.
I'll save it on a couple of different thumb drives and then I will actually drive and hand deliver it to the different agencies so they have that ready to go in case the fire happens to jump overnight and I'm not available at a phone call. They have that ready to go.
Speaker 15
That's really great. And I appreciate the smallness of the community making that sort of an easy manual process. The CPUC is pulling together a data schema and structure for doing something at a bigger scale for the IOUs. So I think it would be really great to talk with you offline about how you do that and ways that we can show how others are already doing that sort of work. So thank you for that.
And so I'm assuming I should be going quickly, right?
Speaker 15
Also, thank you very much, surprise, Valerie. So Sherlock, I love the fact that you said you look at the effectiveness of your treatments. Have you formalized any of that process?
Speaker 13
Yes, we have. As we've gone through and started to evaluate the efforts that we did in 2019, we've definitely seen some effectiveness on the tree trimming and the removal of certain equipment. So obviously, over time, as we get the data in, we'll be able to better analyze what it is, but we're starting to get a little bit more information due to, say, avian contacts and those particular areas that we can add into our matrices.
Speaker 15
Great. I think I might have a thousand questions after that, so I'll leave it at that, and I might reach out to you later.
Speaker 15
then I'd like to ask Smud. Think that you were you the two things I found particularly interesting in your presentation were really identifying tree species issues and having a basis for that in your management. And some other POUs make reference to that in their mitigation plans, but we haven't seen a whole lot of that. So there's a lot of strong basis in research about how there's different flammability and risk issues for different species, but it hasn't been really well identified. So I appreciate that a lot.
And then so maybe you can just touch on that, how you go about identifying beyond the one eucalyptus growth? And then you talked about using AI on your UAV imagery. Are there ways that you've learned from that process? And are there opportunities, you think, for sharing that kind of AI work with other utilities?
Speaker 1
Absolutely. So, on the identifying of the tree species, we do have arborists that work at SMUD. So, that's part of the planning process when we're doing our vegetation inspections ahead of time. So, they do a lot of work to identify which species have more risk involved with them. And I can get you in contact with our manager within vegetation management if you have additional questions around that as well.
For the AI piece, think there is absolutely lessons learned there. We don't have the results of that work yet. We just completed just a few weeks ago the first drone flights and so the images are still being processed right now. So, we're looking to see what types of results we get. Again, now, we're looking at just augmenting our inspection processes at this point in time, but then trying to determine based on the results that we see how often we want to use this technology.
Speaker 15
That's really great. I think a lot of people are trying to discover ways that they can use that technology. A lot of it is proprietary and vendor based and I think there's some way we could probably orchestrate the way people are sharing and learning that technology so that people aren't reinventing the wheel over and over. Plus, there's a lot of science behind that that can also be leveraged. So thank you very much.
I will leave it there, Chair Edwards, for now.
Speaker 4
We will facilitate your outreach to the meetings on your specific questions. We will make sure we get them answered. Thank you, Board Member Block. Moving to Board Member Mader.
Speaker 11
Thank you, Chair Edwards. First, I want to say how impressive the work that most the POUs, but in particular, the POUs that are here today was. It was very impressive. I'm going try and keep my questions and comments very short. First off, for Healdsburg, Mr.
Crowley, what was the decision regarding lightning arresters, whether or to remove them from your facilities that are in the High Fire Threat District area?
Speaker 6
So we discussed removing them and what we did is we actually found a certified lightning arrestor for the area and so we're changing everything over to the compliant lightning arresters rather than removing them. I just wonder personally and professionally that if you remove those lightning arresters are just creating a bigger hazard. And so we actually found something that was certified as compliant for a fire area and we purchased those and we're in the process of getting them installed.
Speaker 11
That's great. Yes, because you've got to balance the reduction in the risk of a fire start with potentially damaging a large amount of your overhead facilities, right? Exactly. For SMUD, Ms. Anguay, SMUD's plan lists fire season is going until October 1.
I think that we can see just from like what up until like a week ago that climate change is kind of doing a number on when fire season ends. Is there any consideration to moving that date to so that you stay on the fire season setting when they all the evidence around us shows that perhaps that might be best?
Speaker 1
Absolutely. That's a great question. So we did just update our wildfire mitigation plan for 2021 and we did update the language around wildfire season to be consistent with CAL FIRE's ruling of when fire season actually ends. So, we'll base it on when we receive the first set of rains that help with not having such a dry eye condition. But yes, we can do.
Speaker 11
Great. I wanted to call out that you have specific attainment dates on the projects that you were doing in your plan. I thought that was very valuable so that in years future we can go and look and see how things are being accomplished. When I saw the particular one of those particular projects was the elimination of expulsion fuses in your four kV in your high fire fire disc area. Are you also looking at lightning arresters in those areas?
Speaker 1
We are looking at lightning arresters as well within that. I think there's CAL FIRE exempt lightning as well and we're looking at changing those out too.
Speaker 11
Great. I'm going to truncate all my questions to one more or rather a comment on TID's plan and I just want to commit in TID for looking at the specific geography of their territory in the western side of their territory. You actually look at the slope of the ground and how that can possibly contribute to the speed and spread and enhance the risk of a wildfire start in those particular areas. I think it goes towards a concept that the Board has been recommending, trying to quantify risk on topography. And I want to commend that work.
It's been unique in all the plans that I reviewed and look forward to developing that further to be able to provide a risk profile that could help all the utilities to better understand if a fire starts in their area, in that specific area, what the potential consequences are, so it can inform where to prioritize mitigation.
Speaker 13
Yes. Thanks. I appreciate that. And just a spin off of what just happened, the SCU Lightning Complex Fire was very beneficial to understand the slopes of that area where we're contending with of how quickly that fire was progressing. Thank you for that.
I appreciate it.
Speaker 4
Very nice. Thank you, Board Member Mater. Moving to Board Member Seifert.
Speaker 17
VICE Hi. Yes, thank you. Yes, I just want to say I really appreciated all the presentations. I learned a lot. I could probably ask a whole bunch of questions.
But I will keep to two short questions in terms of time that also center around a theme which is mapping. I think it's impressive that Turlock considered and I know another lot of other POUs considered not only the CPUC maps but also the CAL FIRE maps and some other maps. And so I was just curious when you were comparing the two different maps, did you see much of a difference in the way the delineation was on the landscape? And what were those differences? To what extent did the different types of maps actually carve out different areas?
Speaker 13
Yes. I can speak on this. Is Joe Gil from TID. When we made the delineation, the topography and the area were pretty much essentially the same for our area. We had to do is kind of be a risk based analysis of that of those proposed locations.
And if we were to expand on our wildfire territory, our fire territory, would provide a little bit more of a safety for our servers for our customers. So as for that, we did make that risk based assessment of increasing our territory for identifying fire zones was prudent for us to do based on what we've had and analyzed based on all the Esri maps that we've overlaid on our service territory. But so yes, it was more so being prudent about the ability for us to protect our customers against any wildfire issues.
Speaker 17
Okay. So yours was more specific to your customer base and Cal Fire's was more specific to the
Speaker 17
Is that the short answer? Yes. Okay. And then also just because I am trying to get a sense of, you know, how these different zones are being defined, I was curious for Surprise Valley when you you know not a whole lot of your land was in tier two and I was just curious what the what the land cover type was in the area that did not make it into the into the tier two zone.
Speaker 14
So everything up here is kind of like a high desert. It's just low grass and sagebrush. Everything that we designated as Tier two is kind of a mountainous Juniper tree kind of infested area. That was pretty much it's not super thick, so we didn't have anything that we classified as a Tier three risk. We worked hand in hand with a representative from CAL FIRE that had lived in the area and knew it very well.
So he came in and worked with me to designate what was CAL FIRE, their description of tier two and tier one. So it nice having him here to work through that project.
Speaker 17
Yes. Yes. Interesting. Okay. So it was largely sort of a vegetation type thing with the low grass and juniper.
Yes. That makes sense to me. Thank you.
Speaker 8
Yes. Thanks, Chair Edwards. So first, I want to commend all the presenters here because it's there's something in every one of your plans that actually stood out that, you know, made it rise above at either parts of the plan or the whole plan. So I appreciate the work and some of the explanation that was put into some of these presentations. So I did have two questions, but one of them was answered with Board Member Brock's question with regards to artificial intelligence.
So the only other question right now I mean, I have a bunch of them, but the one that kind of stood out and comes back up to me quite a bit is the from Mr. Wilbur with the Department of Water and Power. In your presentation, you made a comment about DWP doesn't do PSPS events, that they're more reactive. And I'm just trying to get a feel for that. I quite I understand why the reactive and the issues behind shutting off power, other safety things that go along with that.
But just kind of curious, I mean, is every in DWP's system, is can everything be switched around? Or is it just just a little more expansion on that, of
Speaker 9
Let me go ahead and clarify that a little bit because what I mean that we don't do the PSPS is we do it situationally. So if it's a red flag day and the winds are at 50 miles an hour, and we're not going to arbitrarily shut off at that stage. If it goes beyond what's reasonable, so we'll take each incident and evaluate it separately. So we don't have that same criteria that, all right, it's a red flag day, we're going to automatically shut down. What we will do is if winds are going up over 90 miles an hour, well, then that's going to trigger us to go ahead and be reactive to that particular situation.
If we have massive mudslides, right, then we are going to shut off based on that situation. If we have an earthquake, we're going to shut off based on that situation. So maybe I was a little hesitant in saying that we don't do PSPS specifically. We just don't do it the same way that most of the IOUs are doing now, where we have this criteria where we automatically shut. We're more reactive in identifying what the specific situation is.
So if we know the winds are going to go up, right, then we're going be ready to do something to mitigate the hazard as needed. It's just not that same trigger point.
Speaker 4
I would add, Board Member Armstrong, if you would allow a moment of tidbitsing. Part of the difference is that DWP, despite being our largest municipality, only has a four sixty eight mile square service territory. And in fact, their territory with respect to the extreme fire areas is even smaller. And you compare and contrast that with the 25,000 square miles that the IOUs are, it's much easier for DWP to keep eyes on what's happening within their territory.
Speaker 8
Yes. And I appreciate that. Again, it was just, I guess, the reactive comment kind of was like, well, reactive to what? That was what I was trying to get at. Right.
Speaker 9
The other part of our situation too is we're able to sectionalize off those areas very effectively. So when we do our block our reclosures, so the protocol that we do in preparation for or on a red flag day, we're able to really sectionalize off that area. So we can block our reclosure, so we can really take a close look at what's going on when it's going on. So we're able to have that luxury, like Marcy said, of having that small Tier two area where we can focus our attention on when there is the risk.
Speaker 4
Great. Thank you, Brian. Thank you, board member Armstrong. I'm do a little forecasting for you. We're about to enter into a stretch break.
It will go until about five minutes after three I will remind the board members to please mute your phones when you take that stretch break. When we return, the meeting will now be conducted by board member Porter. He'll be leading the board through a discussion with respect to the draft guidance document. It is very important for the POUs
Speaker 4
well as the co ops to listen to the discussion between board members. And if you hear misconceptions or if you hear information that you feel you have a different take on, this is why a lot of this is in draft. We are still in progress of soliciting your input. We will not make an action on that draft guidance document until sometime in December. So with that, let's see.
Jamie, is there anything else we need to tell people before we take the break?
Speaker 2
can turn off your video, make sure to turn it back on. Don't log out because we might have issues unless you're having technical issues. So, yeah, meet your phone and we'll see you back here right at 03:05, 03:05 and stretch break, get the blood moving, head to toe, arms up and down, stand up, grab some food, grab some water, and we'll be back at 03:05. And please don't forget to mute your phones. Things happen during breaks, and if we hear you, it'll be weird.
So please mute your phones. Thank you very much. We'll see you at 03:05.
Speaker 10
All right. As we start another module of this workshop, I want to thank Chair Edwards and also my fellow Board members for the opportunity to facilitate an open dialogue about the proposed draft document. I need to note that this is our first opportunity to discuss as a whole body what insights we derive from the onerous and meticulous examination of the plan submitted last July. So due to the Begley Keene Act, we as members were broken up into small review groups and in those small BK groups, we met on a limited scope to discuss findings and recommendations. So as we start this discussion, I would like to on behalf of the Board convey an appreciation of the POUs for their diligence and willingness to participate in the process.
Understanding that this is our first attempt at fulfilling statutory obligations spelled out in AB ten fifty four along with compliance with Public Utilities Code 8,387. The public utility the publicly owned utilities and electric cooperative play a significant role in our fight against wildfire mitigation. They span the 50 submittals from the head of the state to the foot. We appreciate their efforts that went into developing these WMPs and the Board is honored to have reviewed the first wildfire risk mitigation plans and look forward to more extensive collaboration. This has been and will continue to be a learning experience for us all, definitely so.
As I said before, we were broken up into smaller review groups and this is our first opportunity to share with one another our thoughts and comment and have a clear discussion on what each group found while examining the WMPs. But before I start there, I'd like to turn first to Vice Chair of Feldman and ask, how did the Board approach the 2020 WMP review process under AB ten fifty four statutory responsibilities?
Speaker 4
Thank you, Board Member Porter. As with the industrial utilities, we had to create the review protocols and processes. We were appointed as a Board just about a year ago, and we had our first meeting in January. So we're new at this. And we again, I want to echo the appreciation for the collaboration and patience in figuring this out.
We really wanted to approach this in a way so our product would be both specific as well as useful in terms of guiding the 2021 recommendations. For the 2020 WMPs from the publicly owned utilities and the electric cooperatives, many
Speaker 4
you relied on a template which was a great start at how to standardize information and yet make it utility specific so we could understand what each of you was doing. We also created categories or a category setting template so we could look at what your size was, where you were located, how many customers you had. And we've provided that template in our suggested recommendations as a format to use going forward to help take out some of the descriptive language that was necessary. I think that what we are really looking forward to is having this advisory, this general advisory opinion and our recommendations serve to lay the foundation for 2021. We do not see this as the beginning and not an end of that process.
And we will be working with you in the next few months to come up with a 2021 template. And we can we'll talk more about that later in this workshop. With regard to the specific elements, as Board Member Porter indicated, each of us has was appointed to the Board with our own expertise in the sector and we were divided into our Bagley Keane Group. Each Bagley Keane Group reviewed with its subject matter experts reviewed those sections of the WMP and developed the recommendations. And we came up with five general categories consolidating all the statutory requirements and we will go next to discuss each of those categories.
So I'll turn it back to you, Mr. Porter.
Speaker 10
Thank you, Vice Chair Filman. As Vice Chair Filman mentioned, we divided them up into five pointed categories, customer impact, the grid hardening aspect, bed management, also looking at more data collection and how that was utilized. Also the risk assessment and the WMP structure, which I think is more than five, but I think I added one. So in that, starting that conversation, customer impacts, recommendations here focused on how POUs are impacted by IOUs, Investor Owned Utilities, public safety power shutoffs and how POUs notify customers about such emergencies. I want to start with again, in that BK, I was with Vice Chair Feldman and I'd like to ask and continue to ask, how did the POUs and co ops interact with the IOUs regarding the PSPS events?
What did you glean from the WMPs overall?
Speaker 4
Thank you. As I indicated in the Q and A period we just had, that was something our group, our PK group was interested in. And we need visibility, we want visibility in the next WMPs on how the information from the IOUs for PSPS events is communicated. So that is something that's going to be a point that we watch for because we did not it wasn't transparent to us or apparent to us. It wasn't transparent to the WMPs or apparent to us how exactly the PSPSs affected each of the POUs and electric cooperatives.
So the explanations from the representative from Healdsburg as well as from LADWP was very helpful. And we want to make sure that we understand how the customers of the POU are being notified of the PSPS. Is it only through the IOUs or is there a separate channel of notification through the POU? And that will also spread into how the emergency communications are made and whether there's a distinction there. So that's some of the information that we were looking for and would like to see better explained in 2021.
Speaker 10
Thank you. Also, I think piggybacking on that, what I saw that was important to me is understanding the POU's dependence on the IOUs interconnection. How much of the anticipated load does that intertie pickup? Understanding that could lead us to asking more questions about do they have plans for temporary generation or is there a way that they could sectionalize if they do possess generation, whether it's limited or not. But definitely, what type of communication as you mentioned, what type of communication line do they have with the IOUs?
Are they capable of creating some type of additional source of load protection? Is there a way for them to keep whatever essential services that they have going and can the IOU help with that. If we saw more of that, I think we can get a better understanding of exactly how dependent across the state POUs are on the inter ties or the interconnections with the IOUs.
Speaker 4
And if I may, another dimension to this is that all the representatives on the panel today mentioned, I believe mentioned it or alluded to the fact that the automatic recloser function is no longer necessarily part of your protocol during wildfire season. So that was something that's come to you as a practice, and you explained in the WMPs how the manual resetting and visual inspection was on. So this is part of that, just making sure we see what the process is to turning the power back on? How are you affecting critical needs for your vulnerable communities? And also, I believe that we'll find that there's a close relationship between your elected governments in the municipalities and the publicly owned utilities and cooperatives.
But if there's a require if something emerges where there's a requirement for a separate communication, we'd like to see that. So thank you.
Speaker 10
Okay. Let's move on to grid recommendations, which was one of the areas of focus. That BK group was Chair Edwards, myself, Board Member Mater and Board Member Armstrong. And so the first question I have is, how should utilities with lower risk contribute to wildfire mitigation such as utilities that are fully urban locked or not in any Tier one, two or three high fire district zones. How should they contribute with those plans?
Speaker 4
A lot of the discussion originally started in that as you read through some of these and you found utilities that met those characteristics of being completely urban locked or 100% undergrounded, we were looking for ways to be able to streamline their reporting requirements because when the state vote to statute, what they wanted was useful, useful and meaningful information. So then it took us on to this role of, well, are there areas that those who don't have to spend a lot of, you know, timemoney could be contributory to the broader effort? And one of them is this, it's not new, but it's got a lot of focus this last year, which are new term is black swan events. And it's those type of events where, say, you're in the middle of a flood. And I wish I had written down the explanation, but if there was one out in Back East where they had a tremendous amount of trouble, and for those among you that are utility people, they were routinely experiencing like N minus two conditions, not the second condition wasn't related to the electric supply, it was related to a broad issue that impacted the utility's ability to move around and serve customers.
So we were kicking around whether the utilities who are lucky enough to have a greater degree of fire protection might be able to assist in that analysis. We did talk about resource sharing, but there is a lot that takes place in the municipal community, mutual aid agreements, you know, shared equipments. We've all shuttled transformers at one time or another to somebody who really needed them. But I think there is a lack of familiarity if any of those agreements exist with between the POUs and the IOUs. I think that information would be very useful.
And finally, the kind of information that evaluates grid hardening, I forget which utility put it up there, saying you have this many of these, you plan on doing this many next year, and then it's based on your assessment where you found these four problems and you prioritize them. It just helps then to keep track of the fire mitigation is being, continue to be made a priority. You know, as an example, many of you are familiar with this phenomenon. You will sell a rate increase to counsel and you'll cite things you're going to do with the money and then something else happens during the year and that money is redirected. That's okay, but it's good to know that that's what happened and it was the fire determinations that fell into a lower priority.
It would allow us then to ask those questions. Would either Board members Porter, Mader or Armstrong have anything else with respect to the grid hardening?
Speaker 8
I can chime in a little bit. So what I was looking at when I did this is I kind of
Speaker 8
So what I was looking at is the utilities that as I reviewed their plans in the section of credit hardening, it was more of what they the research that they did to make sure that they weren't in a high fire threat district you know, and what the actual risk was versus the mitigation measures. So if there was very little risk and very little mitigation measures, I mean, noted that they were following the general order requirements for hardening, and there were some that actually were in those areas that didn't have high risks, and they were still looking at hardening measures. I think as a Board, what we're tasked to do is address the utility caused wildfires. And if there is no risk, I didn't put a whole lot into assessing what they have. What I kind of always look at the Anaheim model a little bit because it's you figure 98% of their system is underground at very low risk, that 2% of their system, they were able to identify that and what type of medication measures they were using currently and what their plans were for the future.
Those were some of the things I was looking at. And that's a small scale of it because it's only 2%. You go to Healdsburg where there's 50%. You know, being able to see what assets they have in those high fire threat districts and, you know, what the exposure is and what their mitigation measures were. So that's what I used as I was evaluating each plan.
Speaker 11
So when I looked at these plans and I looked at the risk quantification efforts that were done and many of these plans noted that their assets were underground or mostly underground. I look at them in two buckets. One, the areas that were in the high fire threat disc areas and the assets that were not in the high fire threat disc area. And I think that what we've experienced in these last four years is that fires have started for reasons that were not anticipated at the time by the various utilities, either there would be investor owned or utility owned. And while I think it is legitimate for one of these wildfire mitigation plans to assert that none of the service territory is in a high fire threat district area and it is potentially taking up resources that we could use to help to look at plans that are looking at assets in the high fire threat district area.
So I echo Chairman Edwards' thoughts about maybe we have we quantify buckets of risk where there are different types of reporting. I still think that the basic assumptions that CPUC maps are accurate or that they quantify the risk accurately, that every single entity should not assume that. There should be some questioning nature, that there be some sort of challenge personnel that are assigned to challenge the assumptions and in order to try to anticipate something that could be would lead to a black swan event. So that for assets,
Speaker 11
be looked at. Now for instance, utilities that had their underground facilities in high fire threat district areas, there's a very low likelihood that there could be a fire start as result of the utility assets in those areas. Yes, can see that absolutely. But it's still possible, for instance, for a utility for a truck to back over a pad mounted transformer and if there's particular topography at that particular area, it could ignite in a high fire threat area and pose a threat to the community. Those are the kinds of things that even we should just not just assume there's no risk because it's underground.
It's very low likelihood, but if the consequence is high enough, we should spend some time trying to identify those. I don't think that that's really the job of this board and think that the recommendation is going to be from this board that the utilities themselves engage in that effort. And we would like to see some analysis of that effort on the part of the utilities in future wildfire mitigation.
Speaker 10
Yes. And I want to echo exactly what Board Member Mader is talking about. I have two points. One is, it impressed me that TID took an assessment of their risk profile and they elevated that to a higher level and created their mitigation plans, tracked it all the way through. There were more than a dozen utilities that were 95% or more underground facilities.
Corona had three overhead facilities or pieces of infrastructure that they have to deal with and it is the intertie or interconnection with Southern California Edison. However, they did understand that they had several above ground transformation assets that could be at risk in the high fired zones where they had residential or they were actually feeding the pump station. So looking at that, we would like to see or at least I would like to see all the utilities, even that dozen or more that we would consider urban locked or having slim to no chance of impacting the state with a wildfire such as Alameda, Port Of Stockton, Port Of Oakland, who ultimately the risk igniting a wildfire is slim to none. However, they would ignite a structure, but expanding their risk profile and then creating mitigating programs and strategies there. The other is talking about resource sharing.
Even those dozen or more utilities are still part of the community of the municipal utilities. And looking at how they share those resources, whether it's manpower, whether it's equipment, whether it's data, whether it's lessons learned or whether it's money. That is something that we would like to at least I would like to see in the next W and Ps. So did you have something to say, John? John, you're on mute.
Speaker 11
Getting to myself again. Okay. So, but to be specific, my specific recommendation is that the study of these black swanovits, the potential for a low probability, high consequence event and trying to find where those are, I really want to see the onus put on the utilities themselves because they're the people that know their territory and just they should set their organization to challenge their assumptions all the time. I think that we all need to do that. The potential consequences are so high.
I think it's worth some time to do that.
Speaker 10
I'd like to move on to veg management category. This includes descriptions of treatment plan, scientific qualifications, safety compliance and innovative approaches. This BK was Board Member Armstrong, Board Member Seifert and Board Member Block. I'd like to start it off with do you have any comments about what would you like to see in the 2021 updates regarding the interaction with CalOSHA regulations and POU management of contractor compliance with safety. And I'm going to ask that of Board Member Armstrong.
Speaker 8
So thanks, Board Member Porter. So the as we reviewed 50 of these plans, there was several of the plans that just basically referenced general orders. We follow this order, we follow that order. And in a high fire threat district, you could probably when I start looking at the compliance perspective of this but if you reference a General Order 95 Rule 35 in a non high fire threat district, it gives a it says that a tree can grow within, say, we use the 12 kilobytes language, it allows a tree to grow within 18 inches of that 12 kilobytes. By rule, the workers that actually have to go out there and cut those trees, they're not allowed to get within 25 inches of they're not considered qualified electric workers.
They're considered qualified persons. So they're not allowed to get into that encroach any closer than 25 inches, even if the tree is closer than that. And as I evaluate some of this stuff, the thought is when I look at Healdsburg where they say they cut every tree no matter where in the system doesn't get any closer than four foot, That is a good, practice for the individuals that have to go out there. Now you can ask any of these utilities, POUs, everything. If they were to drive up on a job and they saw one of their linemen, their QEWs, within 18 inches of a power line that isn't covered and don't have any protective devices up there, what would they do?
And it would shut down the job. You know, it's an unsafe work practice. But it seems almost acceptable to say that, you know, a line clearance true trimmer that has less training than a qualified electoral worker can actually cut or manipulate a branch that's closer than CalOSHA requirements. So when I see a wildfire mitigation plan that just says we comply with this, it's what I'd like to see is more detail into them understanding the difference of both, or not that branch can be removed while the line is energized, do you have to de energize the line, do you have to have a qualified electorate out there doing that work. I think it's best practice or better practice if we just move those minimum requirements out to what the requirements are, the safe working distance for the individuals that have to cut those trees versus the proximity to the power line.
So that is one of the things that stuck with me for quite a while. And every time I see somebody just referencing a general order standard, I kind of wondered, is there do they understand the aspect of who's cutting the trees? Do they have people on that are managing this? Do they understand what it takes to do that? Are they relying on contractors to do everything?
So that is just a concern that I have that I think needs to be addressed either through the general orders or through these wildfire mitigation plans. If people are referencing a standard in the general orders, you've got to take into account, again, the safety of the and this falls somewhat into the safety culture, but falls into take into account the safety of the individuals that are put out there to cut those trees.
Speaker 10
Thank you. Board Member Seifert, what is the best way to deal with urban fuel in your lines on private property? I think that's something you want to talk about.
Speaker 17
Yes. I you know, thinking about what we were listening to today, thinking about Board Member Mater's comments, I think I might extend it even broader to talk about mapping in general and basically, which area is which and why. And so this gets to issues that have to do with private property. It has to do with issues in terms of defining what are the high fire threat zones, what are the different maps, what are the rules that go into designing these maps, and and and even into a recommendation that we generally had, which was the provision of maps in the wildfire mitigation plan so that we could actually visualize what the territories looked like relative to the environmental conditions on the ground. And I say all of this because I am a geographer, and I spend part of my career coming up with fire I do fire risk mapping as part of my job, and so I'm aware of the uncertainty that goes into it.
And talking sort of, you know, complementary with the black swan events, I'm also aware that there's a lot of stochasticity and randomness in fire behavior and fire admissions. And so you can you can, 99 out of a 100 times, have the fire behavior go a certain way, but it doesn't always go that way. And so I think, in general, it would be helpful to have an understanding of exactly what are the methods that have been used to create the different types of maps and how they affect the different practices in vegetation management in those areas. And then in addition, what are the considerations for the areas that don't fall into the tier one or tier or the tier two or three areas. And so I do know and I've heard from a lot of the POUs that, you know, that have explicitly mentioned there are there are complications in terms of the landscaping that's on private property.
Today, when when LA was talking about, you know, I know what the native vegetation like is a is like in Los Angeles, and it does not involve trees. And so they mentioned how they treated or removed 400,000 trees. That's a lot of trees. And so I it's just one of my questions was where were all those trees, you know, aside from some of the the oaks around? I'm guessing these are a lot of non native trees that are around high fire hazard zones.
So I'm sort of just tying a whole bunch of themes together in a general recommendation to provide more detailed information justifying different methodological decisions in terms of vegetation management.
Speaker 10
Okay. Thank you. I do have one last question and it's about what would we like to see in updates regarding the POUs incorporating fire science into their WMPs for the same POU. Board Member Mader?
Speaker 11
Thank you. Board Member Porter, I actually did have a question I wanted to ask the vegetation management Bagley Keane. I have not been able to talk to you guys about this, and it's been killing me. But in particular, when reviewing the City of Glendale's wildfire mitigation plan, the city of Glendale explained that they have some onus upon the end customer on making sure that their property is safer and is appropriately the vegetation is appropriately managed in order to minimize the amount of risk that could cause that could potentially feed a fire that could affect others. And I was interested in your thoughts as to the social utility, idea that those receiving the service should take some just prudent- like for instance keeping your trees 20 feet apart from each other- in the city of Glendale keeping keeping dry grass less than four inches- you know it seems.
Like those are some prudent requirements And
Speaker 11
you see any utility for that, for recommendations for other areas as well?
Speaker 17
We had some discussion about this as well. You know, And part of what we were talking about is that the State of California, of course, mandates 100 feet of defensible space within high fire hazard severity zones. But, again, coming back to maps, those zones don't necessarily overlap with all areas in the State. And I think that defensible space, it's one of the topics that I study, you know, a lot in my research. And I think that there are some interesting considerations, one, in terms of who's doing it and what they should be doing.
But also there's defensible space that can be conducted to protect the structure on the house, which might be different than the defensible space to reduce utility ignitions for the lines going through because they're in different you know, my research has shown that the first five feet from the structure are the key areas for defensible space, but that doesn't apply to the line running through. So I think that there think it I was impressed that Glendale was relying upon that. And I think that in general defensible space in fire prone areas is a recommended practice for fire safety overall. I would just be interested and I don't know who would be doing it to sort of parse out or unpack the details in terms of how you differentiate what that defensible space objective is.
Speaker 11
Exactly. I you know, I'm familiar we're all familiar with defensible space around structures and that folks have some responsibility for that. But this is about defensible space for the utility asset on their property that may be more than 100 feet away from their structure. Say, keep that dry ground, don't let it go up to six feet. Keep it four inches or less.
Things, those seem like policies that could be very valuable and might be worthy of like examining where else they can be adopted. Total agreement. Yes.
Speaker 10
I'd like to move us on to the last category, again reminding everyone that the recommendations are on the or the draft is on our website. And it's the WMP structure. Recommendations here focus on including or providing certain details upfront of the POU. And that BK group was Chair Edwards, Vice Chair Feldman and myself. And since we're limited in time, Chair Edward, would you like to comment on whatever information you would like to see come up front?
Speaker 4
When were looking at the structure, particularly when you're reading the 50 plan, I didn't have sometimes sufficient roadmap within it. I mean, talked about the statutory connections per se, but because we hadn't really talked about some of the ways that we as a Board were looking at it, it was difficult to parse out some of the information. And I'm hopeful next time as we talk through it iteratively with the POU community that we can find a point of agreement that makes it a little bit more
Speaker 4
need. And this is not to suggest that you try to put a round peg in a square hole or the other way around. Either way. It's not to take away from the uniqueness of the response, it's more to develop the broader heading so that we know where to look. And particularly, we're going to start comparing plans year over year.
So to have a structure that's a little more clear will allow for that review. Who else was in there? Vice chair Philman, did you have anything on that? We were looking at the other dimension we were looking at is just what process. I'm an attorney so I'm very procedural.
Process do you go through getting your plans approved? And who is your governing body? Just so we understood that chain of review and approval. The other thing I think we were looking at is on the first page, we had developed a template of what I thought was fairly nonthreatening information, was just the size of the agency, the type of customer base. Did they in fact have equipment that fell into the fire, different fire tiers?
Were they subject to PSPS? Having that, I hesitate to use the word standardized because in our world that can be very difficult. But at least we can have that because we researched websites and we would pour through four or five other documents trying to find
Speaker 9
technologies that we think are critical to really reduce carbon in our economy. And the second?
Speaker 4
Oh, he's gone now. So that was really where we were focused on the structure is simplification in reading, the understanding the framework of the utility upfront and what was the action of demonstration of kind of both when they develop their plans, but also progress on their plans to their governing bodies.
Speaker 4
And I just want to quickly add that we're looking at this as a collaborative process that we have the initial, as I said at the beginning, we had the initial filings. We had a chance to look at them. These were some themes our draft had some themes that appeared to us. So I know we're going to have the next panel, but we're really seeing it as a collaborative effort and really appreciate everyone's participation to date.
Speaker 10
Thank you. Yes, absolutely. This is an opportunity for us all to get to know who each one of the POUs are. We saw that they are unique and there are no two alike. They may share some common issues, common topography, geography, obstacles, constraints to initiating any of the mitigating programs.
But this is an opportunity and we encourage them as though the others who presented today to reach out to us so that we can get a better sense of who they are. With that, I'd like to give it back to you, Chair Edwards, so that we can have our next module.
Speaker 4
Thank you, Board Member Porter. That was a very good job. I appreciate it. Before we enter into this next module, I do want to make a comment with respect to the publicly owned and co ops can be somewhat different. They can be privately owned but publicly owned utilities are just that.
And the fact of their size usually does facilitate much closer relationships with a lot of the emergency response actions, activities, and connections with the people who operate them. It's also worthwhile to keep in mind that these agencies do not have stockholders nor a profit margin. You know, the rates they go in go to maintain cost of service as well as to do enhancements, you know, repairs, capital work to their systems. And so it's no surprise that you will see that that's a large focus for them all. All right.
So I want to thank everyone as well as CMUA, SCAPA, NCPA, Golden State Power Cooperatives for their support in developing these very first WMPs. And thank you to CME UA for helping us with that first front page template. Okay, now we're going to talk about the next stage of the discussion. So we reviewed the plans, and we would like to find ways to build on the work that was done for this year in ways that are informative, not iterative or could be categorized as busy work. So we'd like to work with you to develop these templates for the 2021 updates.
Our current thoughts are covered in, I think it's section four of the draft guidance advisory opinion that we put forth last week. Again, this is not a complete document. We're awaiting your feedback, your commentary, and we would hope to go public with this, I think it is December 9. Okay, moving to the associations, we have Jessica Nelson, the General Manager of Golden State Power Cooperative Barry Malene, Executive Director of the California Utilities Association, Scott Tomaszewski, Northern California Power Agency and either Michael Webster or Randy Kraeger, and I'll wait to be excited by which one we get, the Southern California Public Power Authority. Can we make sure they are unmuted and their cameras on, please?
So, and I'm going to address this broadly, try if you can and not step on one another because I can only see four logic between grouping on risk profiles or or specific categories? And anyone can answer. Just start talking in a real be quiet. Alright. With that with that detailed answer, let me ask Scott Tomczewski of his opinion.
Is there value in breaking it apart in that way? Let me rephrase. Do we have Scott?
Speaker 19
Thanks for the opportunity and good to see you again. I think part of the challenge with how we categorize it is something that you have really identified and many of you have identified over the course of this discussion is that the unique nature of what we are makes it really difficult to throw us in categories of low risk, medium risk and high risk. In one respect, you can start with the Tier one, Tier two, Tier three classification, but then you have different utilities that fall in different areas. So you have that problem to deal with. You have the distinction between some utilities that might have some transmission system and others that do not.
So you have that to deal with as well. So it does become problematic. The idea of dealing with a blended risk profile while having portions of Tier two and Tier three, that may be something you can deal with. But at the same time, utilities are going to focus their interest on the things that best protect their communities. And so you might have a situation where vegetation management is just first and foremost.
And when you start to look at the groupings and you look at the and we'll get into the matrices and how we deal with templates, it becomes really problematic. So the focus for us almost becomes trying to find the things that work best for us and then we focus on those particular areas. So it's a start. It just becomes problematic. And my concern is that we end up putting ourselves in categories where there's a lot more behind the story than saying you're low risk, medium risk or high risk.
Speaker 4
No, and I agree. So noted. In part, is a lease day mechanism attempted to help teach the board about the TOU structures and about their priorities. And it's the reason we're talking to the community in a workshop environment. If what we think are not good gradations, but if you can think of others that are more logical, because there were a significant number of commonalities out of the 50 reports that you read.
So there needs to be some way of addressing both of those interests. If we could think about it and if you could keep it in mind as you frame your responses to the guidance document, I think that would be very helpful.
Speaker 18
Hi. In that categorization, I just wanted to ask a clarifying question. Are you looking at well I don't know that it I agree with Scott that it's difficult to just flat out categorize. However I think within the categories you might have directional utilities. I mean as you list in the report urban locked or underground maybe sort of a category utilities with sort of a you didn't really call them medium or high but well you sort of did.
A mix of wild land and urban and then utilities that are in the forest basically are a high risk that's what you label as high risk. And is the concept more that we get those utilities to talk to each other so that they are sharing best practices? I mean that's sort of I mean it's like I don't think that
Speaker 18
Right. Well maybe that's how we thought about a solution is getting those folks to talk more to each other in each of those general categories. Like I don't think we can categorize them or I don't think they can specifically categorize themselves maybe a few can. There's no question that a few can those that are 95 plus percent underground or those that are 95% of the forest but those are in the 20% range and there's a big group in the middle. So but I guess that so my question the idea that they that those folks that are in those general directional categories that they'd be talking to each other and sharing ideas with each other about what they're doing?
Mean is that what the Board
Speaker 4
To some extent though I think they do. You know, I believe the TOU community has one of the more dynamic information exchange methodologies. And maybe the more logical cut is the broad category in the top, but then a narrower definition of specific strategies that have commonality between municipalities. That's the reason we're bringing it up. I think your sector has a better idea how to go about this and to what extent it would be useful.
And again, we have experts on our board, many are experts in a more narrow vein. And so it's important to bear that in mind. What might seem to be to you an incremental point that might include five, you know, to them it's sort of a large overarching category. So I think it will work its way clear, but if you guys could think about it as you discuss this over the next period of time before you submit some of your remarks. Do we have Mike or Randy on here for from Scapa?
Are you unmuted? Did you decide to do something else? Alright.
Speaker 4
Let me see here. One of the issue and the question is to any of you is, I noticed when I reviewed a lot of reports, there's redundancy. And there's nothing that drives me crazier than having people say the same thing in three or four different pages because they were trying to necessarily be responsive to the statute. Like I had, part of mine was the one on the closers. I thought I knew what they did.
But after reading some of these plans, was very, it was difficult to start to draw conclusions as to the logic behind what some of the agencies were or were not doing along those lines. So they're, and I noticed in some of them there were, there was a bit on reclosers here and then four pages down there was a bit on reclosers there and then, so it would be helpful. And I wonder too, if from our standpoint, would
Speaker 4
help to add questions from our side to try to bring broader light to what is it we're trying to figure out? What is it we're trying to gain an understanding of rather than have you guys try and guess what it is that we're trying to accomplish? We talked about that. It's a question mode. And then what would lend itself to a template format is the learning from the twenty twenty piece.
What changed? You know, what did you learn within the scope of that specific year or what did you do more of or less of because the agency themselves became more familiar with the process and their own dealing with their own fire risk. I do want to invite the board if any of you have comments or questions with respect to this. And I believe it was out of chat but board member Siphon, you had a question regarding the risk assessment block that's in the previous section. I'm going to fall back to that at the end of this because I do know you have some important commentary.
So if you would be patient with me.
Speaker 4
It's anything I like. It's relevant. Okay. Do any of the board members have anything to either ask the associations or agencies with respect to next steps and to format templates, Q and A. I have one comment on why we were looking for this category setting and understanding that everybody is unique.
But we were hoping that by having some differentiation on risk or size or whatever, I guess it all feeds into risk, that we could help some of these publicly owned utilities have a more streamlined filing that and we should open this to a discussion off line when we go into our template formation conversation. But I wanted to indicate that it wasn't just channeling each or trying to channel several different types of utilities into one bucket, but rather to make it more convenient in doing the WMP. Okay, fair enough. Any other comments either on anything in that section really, the groupings or the templates from the Board?
Speaker 15
May I say a word or two? Please, please. So actually, I mean, I think this is a reasonable time for me to bring up one of the points that I want to talk about, which is, you know, I think to reiterate what you all my fellow Board members have described, that we're looking to understand the complexity of and the uniqueness of each of the utilities and trying to gather that information through streamlining the process. And as an example of that, the things that I was looking for were like what are the prevailing winds in the region, what are the vegetation and topographic differences between this particular utility and others? And how are those nuanced throughout even the service territory of an individual utility?
That uniqueness can be very complex. It's basically trying to describe the fire environment for every particular utility. I think we try to streamline the conversation about whether it's in or not in HFTV, and that we're making that a uniform category, but those details about age of vegetation on what type of topography and what type of wind speeds on an average day and then a high fire threat day or a particular Santa Ana or Diablo wind really define that for me. And so, you know, I guess my request is to be able to try to find a way to describe that in a more environmental way that we all understand. I'm sort of leveraging on what Alex Board Member Seifried was saying earlier, is that how do we gather maps from you that help describe these relative risks and what they're trying to tell us.
So So I think there's some place in the middle there where we're all basically saying the same thing. That's my comment for now.
Speaker 18
This is Barry Molleen. I have a question about that. And that is, would you find that that would have more meaning in a rural utility compared to an urban utility? So for example, Burbank, would that information about weather patterns make as much sense for them or Anaheim, for example, compared to Trinity in the North or something like that?
Speaker 15
I mean, I think there's significant nuance there. So Burbank and a number of the urban a lot of the Los Angeles urban fringe regions have these vegetated areas that would feed into the urban space. So some of the utilities that I saw who are entirely urban are bordering topographic areas that are heavily vegetated. And even though it may not be their responsibility, that the relationship of the wind and the risk of fire coming from those regions into the area or potentially a spark coming from the city into the into the wildland does exist. And so we don't we don't understand fire risk unless we understand how strong the winds are as part of that, which are almost were almost never mentioned in these utilities in these in these plans.
So I think it's equally important to describe because there's definitely a wildland urban interface risk for even places like Burbank compared to, say, Turlock, which is going to be much more rural but have a very specific risk profile related to the weather and the topography and vegetation. Am I answering the question properly?
Speaker 18
I think so. I mean, just trying to gather more data on the rationale behind the request.
Speaker 4
want quickly to check with the operator. Do you by chance have either Mike Webster or Randy Kraeger on the phone?
Speaker 11
Yes. In in at the danger of stating it a fourth time a different way, which you've already called out that you don't like. But I I my question is, in light of, first going through these plans individually and then going through the exercise of stepping back and going through them as a group, there's a number of patterns that emerged that I could see. There are some things that are in common with all utilities that have facilities in the high fire threat district area. There's obviously it's different for in the Southern Region because the amount of fuel is different than in the Northern Region.
We get that. But there were a lot of best practices, and there were a lot of particular analyses that were done over and over again, but some utilities that have similar profiles would do certain analyses over sectionalizers or lightning arresters or expulsion fuses and then other ones would be silent. And like I don't know if that analysis was done. And so I think that there might be some facility or faculty or advantage to this Board perhaps working with the POUs to share those best practices or not to share them exactly. We are not going to do the work, but to facilitate that transfer so that we could see consistently that based on different risk profiles that all the analysis was done and able to facilitate those transfer of best practices.
So it's hard to deal with each 50 individually, but represent to potentially represent conglomerates of them. So maybe there's some facility, there's some utility there for us to be able to work together so that these wildfire mitigation plans are more effective in the future.
Speaker 4
That's a good point. I think that was the point Barry was trying to speak to.
Speaker 4
No. Think we should all be quiet and not answer. Michael? Mike, we got you. Have you been That
Speaker 11
participating in watching and listening, although you haven't heard me speak, unfortunately. Maybe that's a good Well,
Speaker 4
I was hoping, Bill, for just that. Given this particular topic and certainly your familiarity with your Southern California membership, what are your thoughts?
Speaker 11
So I kind of like the idea of having a quick directory type checklist that was brought up so that you can actually get very quick read on the different utilities because I have Cerritos and Colton all the way up to LADWP. And I don't speak for the members. We coordinate with the members. We try to help the members. But I am quite concerned about trying to come up with categories for the members.
Because if you put somebody into a category and they may be considered low risk and then you have some event where a wildfire is kicked off, you know, I think we'd be held to a standard of, well, why didn't you address those risks in a comprehensive wildfire mitigation plan? So I think that there's things we can do to make it easier for the the board to take the information and categorize themselves. But I don't think we wanna impose a categorization on the utilities so that they can address the issues as they think are appropriate for their communities and for their boards and governing bodies.
Speaker 4
I see what you're saying though that there are a lot of commonalities and perhaps risk isn't one of them. And I will remind you of the title of this group, we are advising you guys. We're trying to offer these areas of expertise up to the publicly owned community and our recommendations just simply go to those agencies. So it's important for us to all find a way to take advantage. I mean, what Alex and Jessica know alone about mapping and fire safety and risk is a lot more than I certainly know.
I want us to develop a methodology where we can extract that, we can include useful information in the plans, we can all learn from one another. And we're not putting this burden on you per se, we put up a stalking horse of this is how we would do it. But if you have ideas as to how better to do it, I think that's fine. And I do know the difficulty in making a statement like that when you have dissimilar members, all of whom would have a different idea as to how to respond. We are sensitive to that.
Speaker 11
May I just add one item that I think that our members have talked about has been extremely helpful is the sharing of best practices. Scapa, we have history of sharing best practices in a wide variety of areas. But this is one where I think it's especially important. So there may be some practices that are just truly outstanding in Northern California that our utilities need to hear about. So the more that, this board can facilitate topical discussions on what the very best techniques are, it's how we're actually going to improve the knowledge and ability of our other utilities.
And I would just recommend that that's our focus area.
Speaker 19
And this is Scott as well. I definitely would like to echo that 100%. I also think in terms of where the educational forums help these best practices, we have our own respective superintendents' groups. So we get down into the lower levels of dealing with the utilities that are on the ground dealing with the stuff and sharing those best practices. So if there's any suggestion that we don't do that already, I hope that sort of we can kind of change that direction that there's a lot more that needs to be done.
But I will say things like what you've put together today to have six presentations on the front end to talk about a lot of the best practices, those are the things that really help inform each utility as they take into consideration things that they would change for 2021 and beyond. And so the plans themselves are really written to serve the communities that they actually are trying to protect. And of course, number one on our list is public safety. So we're not going to short trip any of that when it comes to wildfire mitigation and the like. So we have our audiences as our members and the challenge is to try and provide the information in a way that you can do an analysis and then identify areas where there might be vulnerabilities or some gaps and provide us with recommendations for how we might improve our plans in the future with the idea that it may not apply to utility A, but it may apply to utility B.
So it's that information sharing that's just so critical to making it work for us as a group of utilities.
Speaker 4
I would agree, and I would thank our analysts for being the ones who thought we should really surface the workshop. So we had an opportunity to talk about it in detail. But what I would like to see back, difficulty level notwithstanding, is suggestions. I get the no, we don't want to do this. That's fine and I understand it, but let's entertain what we can do, would wanna do, what bifurcations are indeed possible.
And we can also include questions from our stance to try to lend clarity. And to those, it's fine to say, well, that wouldn't work and here's why. That's a reasonably good answer. Do I have any more board members who have to want to add on a statement or ask a question? I just wanted to clarify.
Speaker 11
Well, I'm making sure. I just wanna clarify. I was only talking in terms of the WMP themselves. Oh, yeah. I need it.
Best practices. So I'm not I'm not trying we're not trying to run your utilities or tell you how to run them.
Speaker 4
Mr. Mader is used to going after the IOUs. And so he's now accustoming himself to the cooperation level of the POU.
Speaker 4
to check with Jessica Nelson and make sure she doesn't have anything she wants to add to this discussion. Jessica, are still I'm
Speaker 16
Great. Thank you for the invitation to participate. And I really just want to echo what my colleagues have shared. You know, we really appreciate your ongoing recognition that each utility is unique, But we also want to make sure that, you know, you maximize your efficiency. And so I think we would welcome the opportunity to provide clarifying information upfront to help you, you know, help you assess our wildfire mitigation plans and make it an efficient assessment for you as well.
And then allow us to focus our efforts on best practices and information sharing and maybe that upfront key cover page with some statistical information will help us kind of be able to look to our other utilities and see, you know, how is someone who's most like my utility doing, you know, implementing things and maybe there's something to learn from them. And so I think I understand where you're going with wanting to get that clarifying information about each of us so that we can really maximize our efficiency and take care of our communities. So thank you very much.
Speaker 4
I appreciate that. Board members last chance. And as I said, I'm going to fall back quickly to the risk assessment portion I will apologize because I was the one who was rushing Mr. Porter like usual. So if you would permit us falling back to risk assessment as a portion of that last bit, the recommendations were on details of infrastructure risk and situational awareness technology and that Bagley Keane group was made up of board members Maynard, Seifert and Block.
And I'd like to entertain some comments from the three of them. Mr. Maynard, why don't you start? You're muted.
Speaker 11
So my perception was that when reviewing these plans that some utilities did a deeper dive on potential other areas that were high risk, but almost all of them did a fantastic job of identifying the facility in their service territory that were in the high fire threat district areas. There was an analysis of whether or not to use reclose blocking. Whether the impact of the community. And you know that's what I was looking for I was looking for identification of where they are. And you know the the but what I didn't see the uniform application or or- statement of the analysis of some of the base.
Like a expulsion getting rid of expulsion fuses everywhere and now. And then now. The lighting arrest or things like that. Would like to be I would like to see I'm sure that they were done, but we're advising the POUs on the WMP, and we'd like to see these analysis done so that we know that these were addressed. We trust we want to verify.
Speaker 17
Yes, I don't have anything either. I think Jessica, Board Member Block, has something to say about this.
Speaker 15
So actually some of the stuff I'm about to say comes from the rest of my Board members in this BK. But I think the purpose of the risk assessment has a lot to do with this emerging technology of weather stations and cameras that the IOUs have invested in. I was glad to see how some of the POUs were leveraging the partnerships with the IOUs and using those same assets. And so that's useful. I really was looking for what weather stations were in those POU service territories that potentially the IOUs had installed and what those stations are reading.
But there were some basic questions that were also interesting to me in terms of understanding risk assessment. If you're in the HFPD, what type of prevailing vegetation types do you have? What are the dominant eco regions in your service territory? So are you desert shrub chaparral type of environment or are you a conifer forest type of environment? What kind of trees do you have in your environment in your service territory?
Are there trees at all? If so, what kinds? What are the non native? What is their habit for stretching and breaking? What is you know, what kind of risks do you have for invading grasses under the poles?
These sort of monitoring of the environment details that would be helpful for understanding risk as a unique POU. So that's sort of lever that's expanding on what I mentioned just a few minutes ago.
Speaker 4
Okay, good. You do bring up one other small thing for me, and that's the issue of information sharing across the POUIOU line. Some agencies have a reasonable working relationship and other POUs are told by their IOU that they can read it when it goes public and not before. We should talk as a board to what extent we could facilitate a degree of greater information sharing across that line because I think it can do nothing but advantage everyone. And I have heard that anecdotally is an issue from a number of folks.
Any more comments by the Board on the risk portion? And again, my apologies, Board Member Porter, for rushing. I have one comment in this section, if I may, and the section in general before you move on. Sure. Go ahead.
I want to thank the associations for giving us the feedback. And that's exactly how we designed this report. If you notice, we watermark draft in very large letters on every page. And you have an opportunity for public comment, which will is coming up. And we and that's going to be for our December 9 meeting.
We'll talk about that more at the end. But I really I think I'm speaking on behalf of my the entire Board when I say we appreciate having this open discussion. We don't have any ex parte prohibitions. We actually don't make any binding decisions because we're advisory. So this is very, very useful to us to look at our recommendations and then help us shape it into something that's usable, content rich, utility specific and succinct.
So thanks for your participation and your frankness with us today. Thank you, Vice Chair Fehlman. We'll talk about some of the additional conversations going forward. What I'd like to do quickly is check with Kathryn regarding the web chat and see if we have any public questions that have come in.
Speaker 3
We don't, but I would just like to take this moment to, you know, encourage folks who are listening in, if you'd like to make a public comment, can do so through the operator and let me just get that phone number again. Then you can also, if you've logged on with this WebEx, you can make a comment in the chat and we'll read that out loud. So maybe I'll flag you, Marcy, if we get anything the I end of the
Speaker 4
appreciate that. Jamie, same with email. If any come in and prior to closing public comment, it would have been good if I opened it. But again, it's not a formalized meeting, it's a little bit looser. All right, this is the end of the meeting.
Board members, before you run off, we're going to have a
Speaker 2
chat subsequently. Yes, ma'am. Excuse me, Chair Edwards, we did get some emails.
Speaker 2
Two emails. So the first email is from Danny Zaraganza, consultant from GRID subject matter experts. The first is, is there any consideration in the Wildfire Safety Advisory Board drafting a guidance documents to provide specific expectations of the independent evaluators from writing their evaluation So that's the question. And the answer is, please read the draft. The second question is, are you considering a certification for independent evaluators or a mechanism to determine if the independent evaluator is qualified to perform a detailed evaluation of the POU wildfire mitigation plan?
Speaker 4
Yeah, you know, I'd heard some discussion of this as well in that there was some question as to the qualifications of those who were doing those reviews. We should discuss that as a board because on the one hand, don't want to, and again, as was pointed out, our commentary is not prescriptive, but we should discuss the implications of that further. Those are the two you got? I got one in chat.
Speaker 2
And the other email is directed to the board with regards to Southern California Edison. So I will hold back on this and we can
Speaker 4
right. I have a question in chat from a Ethan Billadmeyer. And the question is, will each POU be getting comments from the Wildfire Safety Advisory Board on their 2020 plan? It's something we had been discussing, and I think it's part of the interest behind looking for those issues so that we don't maybe make the same observation 50 times that we could say that this is applicable to these 17 plans. Diane, Or do
Speaker 4
content that we were having when we were talking about individualized responses? Yes. First of all, we looked at, we hear that there might be an, there is an interest in perhaps having individual responses. And we started down that path, to be frank. And when we started down that path, we realized, when we got to the end of that path, realized that these, the twenty twenty WNPs are really the first set that we're looking at.
And we didn't, we hadn't established any evaluation, standardized evaluation criteria in the same way the IOUs had guidelines. So what we decided to do for this and we proposed and we're hoping that this is again the beginning of the conversation about it, that we are presenting our recommendations for format and content. And then in the subsequent years, we will be able to look at each individual plan and determine how it conforms with the guidelines that are established. So in short, not this run through, we're focusing on format and content, but ultimately it is in our interest. We found reading the 50 and just trying to answer the questions we reach allotted to be quite exciting.
And so it may be it is that we don't have enough time in this run through, I think, do the specifics. But I would suggest that ultimately when we do some streamlining and it's easier to transition from one report to another that we will lean more on specifics.
Speaker 4
just going say we welcome any ideas on how to do individual plans because we realize that each POU and co op has to go to their own managers and governing boards to present their plans. So you might want an advisory opinion on those plans. And with respect to the IEs, there was a response to the independent evaluation. We have some very specific thoughts about that and it's in the report and we did see a lot of redundancy there and we want to figure out how to make it easier to get to the heart of the independent evaluation and perhaps make it even more economic and efficient for the POU. One of the points of confusion is that in some IE reports, says, well, this utility doesn't do this, but I know of four or five more than do.
And then there were two pages of things. And so it was a little confusing for us to figure out what was applicable to whom with some of the efforts where the IEs were kind of putting a new name of a utility on it every time they issued it. So we'll have to talk through that. Okay. Anything else from the Board?
All right. Hearing nothing, we've arrived at the end of the meeting. Things to expect. We'll be accepting public comment on these recommendations until Monday, November 30. We need time to incorporate any comments, suggestions so that we may publish a draft to vote on.
And given those requirements, I think it's ten days, fifteen days. I always forget, we have to come out with it quite a way in advance. Prior to our next meeting, which is on December 9, we will have a window again for the municipal utility and co ops associations and agencies to speak to the discussions they've had with their members and some of the direction or any suggestions you may have arisen. I will assume you will be more reprising some of the written material you hopefully would be providing us. And I'd like the Vice Chair and the advisors, do we have any other announcements?
None from the Vice Chair.
Speaker 3
Hi. This is Catherine. I just one one announcement. The the in the discussion about the BK groups and the the the grid recommendations, I just wanted to note that that was two separate groups. We didn't have four board members meeting.
We had two separate groups on one on the same topic.
Speaker 4
That that's true. For those of you who go Bagley Kane is what? The, you know, how we have Brown Act limitations of who can talk to who? The state has these Bagley Keene constraints. And so the board members cannot talk to each other.
But we did have one member who wanted to opine individually, and that's why it was listed as four. It was not an intentional quorum discussing it. Anything else? Right. Thank you again for all of your work and time.
Everyone, if the Board members would stay on for a moment, we are now adjourned from the workshop. And again, thank you very much.
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