CPUC Workshop - 2021-03-02
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California Public Utilities Commission
Follow its sittingsSpeaker 4
The agenda is available and the PowerPoint presentation will be available soon. I will now hand the reins over to Board Member Jessica Block, who led the planning on this workshop.
Speaker 5
Great. Welcome to today's Wildfire Safety Advisory Board workshop where we are focusing on topics around vegetation management. We're excited to host this discussion to talk about the dynamics of California's fire environments and the emerging tools for monitoring and modeling it. For our agenda, We will start first with Board Member Seifert, who will introduce Doctor. John Kealy.
John Kealy will present on understanding differences in California's fire regime. John comes from the U. S. Geological Survey Sequoia National Park. Then I will introduce Doctor.
David Marvin from Salosciences and Kevin Hiers, who is the Director of Fire Science Applications from Tall Timbers Research Station. They will each be presenting components of emerging technology for wildfire monitoring and modeling. Panel presentations will be followed by each of those groups, followed by a discussion session with representatives from Pacific Gas and Electric, San Diego Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison. We'll also leave ten minutes for Q and A from the public using the WebEx chat feature. Before we close, we will have a time for public comments.
Like Leah mentioned, if you would like to comment, you can use the WebEx chat or the conference line. Dial star one to be entered into the queue. Finally, we hope to adjourn this workshop by 4PM or sooner. I want to thank very much the panelists who are presenting today and the IOUs who are participating in the panel discussion. We sincerely appreciate your time to look to put together the presentations, and more importantly, we appreciate all of the actions you're taking to protect California from wildfire.
Before we dive into the presentations, board member Seifert, will you make a few introductory comments and introduce doctor Kealy?
Speaker 6
Sure. So California, as most of us know, is one of the most environmentally diverse places in The US, if not the world. And it's got a huge range of ecosystems, vegetation types, has very high biodiversity. And much of the state is naturally fire prone, but the fire regimes in California are just as diverse as its environment. And they shape the structure and function of the ecosystems in the state very differently.
So the objective of this workshop is to discuss these differences in fire ecology and fire regimes across the state so we start getting on the same page in our understanding of these differences, and to discuss emerging data and modeling approaches so that we can also use better technology to characterize California's fire risk better and to select the most appropriate wildfire mitigation strategies. And to start off today, I am proud to introduce our first speaker, is Doctor. John Kealy, a colleague of mine, a dear colleague of mine. He is a scientist with USGS and he's also adjunct professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA. His research focuses on a wide range of topics from plant physiology and botany to climate change and invasive species.
And I consider him one of the world's leading experts on plant ecology and fire ecology. He's been publishing on fire ecology and plants in California since the nineteen seventies. So, John, take it away.
Speaker 7
Oh, okay. It's problematical for people my age to have video on one medium and audio on another. So everything's good to go. I just need the first slide. Okay.
Maybe the second slide. Okay, anybody who's involved, I think in this workshop today recognizes that we have in the last couple decades had a skyrocketing increase in fires in California, easily double the acreage burned in the last two decades relative to the prior twenty years. And this increase is also related to an increase in size of individual fires, but perhaps most important to all of us is an increase in the destructiveness to people and property. Go ahead, next. Now, California is not the largest state in The Union, but when it comes to fire regimes, it's probably the most diverse state in The Union in terms of fire regimes, in large part because of its North South latitudinal range, which is the largest range of any state in The Union.
It is comparable to the range from New Mexico all the way to Wyoming. And along this latitudinal gradient, we have very different landscapes, very different ecosystems and very different fire regimes. This image of California here that shows much of the Sierras and Northern California in blue and much of Southern California in yellows and orange represents a US Forest Service attempt to evaluate how in the last hundred years fires have differed from what we think the historical fire regime was. The areas in blue represent landscapes that appear to have missed fires in the last hundred years relative to what the historical range was. And the areas in yellow are ones that have had an excess of fires.
And the data that supports this conclusion looks something like this. The image on the right shows these horizontal lines with vertical spikes in them. And each of these horizontal lines represents a tree and each of the vertical notches here represent a fire. And unfortunately, the scale got left off here, but the last fires that are known from most all of these trees occurred about the year 1900. And going all the way up to the present, we've had essentially no fires.
What this illustrates is historically forests here in blue in the northern part of the state have had frequent fires in the past, but beginning about the beginning of the twentieth century, fires have essentially been excluded. And this is all due to fire suppression activities. If we compare that with Southern California, the areas in yellow and orange, we don't have tree ring data like we have in the North because we have no trees. But if we look at just recorded fires in the last century, we see in this bottom figure that from decade to decade beginning in the early 1900s to the present, there hasn't been a big change in fires. In other words, we haven't had this suppression effect.
That's not due to differences in management policy. All of the landscape has been managed pretty much by a policy of fire suppression. It's just that fire suppression in the North in forest has been successful and it's excluded fires. Fire suppression policy in the South has not been successful excluding fires. Now, part of the reason has to do with the ecosystems.
Forested ecosystems in the North tend to be dominated by conifer forest, ecosystems in the South tend to be dominated by shrublands and they are conducive to very different fire regimes.
Speaker 7
And the other important distinction between these two parts of the state is a difference in population density. There's about a tenfold greater increase in people in the South relative to the North. And that has large impacts on the frequency of fires. For example, fire frequency is about 10 times higher in the Southern part of the state than in the Northern part of the state. And also the ignition sources are very different.
Almost all the fires in the South are due to people, whereas a substantial proportion in the North are due to lightning ignited fires. And the differences that I've just described have resulted in very different patterns of fires in the past and very different patterns in the present. For example, this is a fire from 2012 in the northern part of the state, this map on the upper right. And that perimeter, most of the hatched areas indicate areas where this fire called the Rush fire burned in 2012. The colored areas indicate prior fires.
What we see is when we get big fires in the North, they're burning through landscapes that have not been burned historically. And by historically, mean since 1910. So we're burning areas with anomalously high fuel loads from a century of fire suppression. And compare that with the southern part of the state in the lower right, here's the fire perimeter from the Wolfie fire and all of these colored area indicate previous fires prior to this twenty eighteen Wolfie fire. In other words, much of Southern California has been repeatedly burned.
As a result, we haven't had an anomalous accumulation of fuel. Go ahead, Nick. Just an illustration of some of the differences between these two different fire regimes in the North, what we call fuel dominated fires because they're areas that have been affected by fire suppression have had anomalous accumulation of fuels versus the Southern part of the state and not just the Southern part of the state, but the Western portion of the state, which have been dominated by winds and not by fuels. We see a number of characteristics that are quite different. Many of these fuel dominated fires in the Sierras in Northern California are lightning ignited fires.
All of the fires that are wind dominated are started by human ignitions, either intentional or accidental. And there's a big difference in terms of the impact on humans. Loss of lives generally in past has been very few compared to these wind dominated fires where we've often seen large numbers of losses of human life, as well as numbers of structures lost. So there's big differences between the Northern California conifer forest fuel dominated fires versus the western part of the state which are wind dominated fires. Go ahead, next.
Next. Maybe try next again. Illustration of some of the patterns that we see in terms of ignition sources that are quite different across the state. For example, lightning tends to be a major cause indicated by the red areas here in the northern part of the state tend to be very rare in the coastal regions of California. In coastal Southern California, mostly what dominates are human ignitions, arson for example, debris burning and kids playing with matches, equipments, vehicles, power lines, a lot of things contribute in the South.
But generally, lightning is not a major cause. Go ahead next. Now to put some pictures to these patterns, let me just describe a pattern that we generally see in North versus Southern California. Northern California tends to be dominated by conifer forests and historically these forests burned in understory fires such as this scene in the upper right burning through the understory and not getting into the canopy. In other words, burning out the understory but not burning down the forest.
This is in marked contrast to what we normally see in Southern California and has historically been the case. The shrublands have always been subjected to a high intensity crown fires that take out the entire canopy. Go ahead next. Now in the forest, historically we saw fires burning the understory and because they were frequent and they were frequent because lightning was a major source. They burned out fuels in the understory generally didn't take out the canopy.
Go ahead, Nick. But with a century or more of very successful fire suppression in these forests and they were successful because of the type of fire regime in the forest. The fire regime was low intensity surface fires and firefighters had a relatively easy time putting those fires out. As a result, most of the forests in the Sierras and Northern California have gone for a century or more with no fire because we've been very successful in excluding fires. The consequence is we've increased the amount of surface fuel and we've increased the density of in growth of new trees, all of which contribute to very different fire regimes.
Next. And one of the consequences is when we have unusual events like the twenty twelve to twenty fourteen drought in Sierra Nevada, we saw a massive dieback of Ponderosa pine as indicated by all of these dead trees here. That dieback was certainly due to the impact of the drought but almost certainly a large component of that was due to the past management practices that allowed for densification of these forests. And as densification increased in the last century, it increased competition for water, droughts have much bigger impact under those situations. Next.
Now, when we get fires in these forests in the West that have been perturbed by having fire suppression and accumulation of fuels. We also see ecological changes in the fire regime. This photo here shows a landscape that was all burned by the same fire. The foreground is a landscape that burned in what we think was similar to the natural fire regime, low intensity surface fires, perhaps patches here of trees that were burned out. But the background shows an anomalous pattern that we don't believe was common in the historical past where there was crown fire and entire forests were taken out.
And this is a major concern in terms of the ecological sustainability of those forests because they're dependent upon recruitment from trees that survive fire. In other words, normally these forests would recruit into gaps produced by high intensity fire coming from the trees surrounding. When you have a large area burned, there's no close seed resource and so these areas have a harder time to recover. Next. But in contrast, Southern California Chaparral, they've always been adapted to frequent high intensity fires.
Next. Next. And what we see in Chaparral is once the fire burns through, it's always a high intensity crown fire, but the vegetation responds very quickly. All of this, this is the first six months after a Chaparral fire and we see massive in growth of new species that haven't been there before that have arrived, that have come up from dormant seed banks, many of which are stimulated by fire to germinate as well as re sprouting of the dominant shrubs. So Chaparral is very fire adapted but most importantly, it's not just fire adapted, it's fire dependent.
It actually has to have fire to regenerate itself. Next. Now, when we say Chaparral fire adapted, we have to clarify that what we mean is it's adapted to a very particular fire regime. It's adapted to infrequent crown fires that occur on the scale of two to three decades. In other words, there has to be time after a fire for those shrubland systems to regenerate seed banks in the soil that can recover after the fire.
What we've seen in recent years and that perturbation is an increase in frequency and it's resulted in fires more frequently than historically would have been seen and more frequently than the shrubs can actually replenish seed banks. And here's an illustration of a landscape. The entire view here burned in 1970 in the Laguna fire. The bottom portion of this all burned in 2001 from the VES fire. And what we see in the middle is an area that basically represents natural regeneration of Chaparral.
But in the foreground, we have an area that burned three times in that period. And this period of three years between fire resulted in loss of the native biodiversity and an increase in invasive grasses. Next. And in fact, we're seeing this more and more, this reburning of previously burned landscape which results in the conversion of natural systems, sharp bloom systems to grasslands. For example, this is San Diego County and the green perimeters here represent 2,003 fires.
The yellow represents 2,007 fires. And what we see in San Diego County between these two different years is a substantial amount of areas that re burned over a period of four years. Estimated maybe 60,000 acres re burned over after a period of four years. This is too short for those shrubland systems to recover. And ultimately they represent sites suitable for type conversion from native shrubs to exotic grasslands.
Throughout the coastal ranges, we see patterns like this. For example, this is observed just off the 101 Freeway going up through the Salinas Valley. Here's a native shrubland system. Most of that landscape has been tight converted to grasslands due to repeated fires. And this is an illustration here going from the border with Mexico up into San Luis Obispo County.
This is an evaluation of how vegetation has changed over the last seventy years. And the purple indicates landscapes that have changed from shrubland to grasslands. In other words, we have massive type conversion from native shrublands to exotic grasslands. Next. This is what much of the Southern California landscape looks like when it's not perturbed by high frequency fire from humans.
Next. This is what the landscape often looks like when it's been perturbed by too much fire. There are still patches of native shrubland that have survived but much of it has been replaced by exotic grasses. Next. And this is important because it's a reflection of the ecosystem health of those landscapes.
In general, we think of native shrublands as being healthy or systems of high integrity. When we increase fire frequency, we increase the invasion of grasses. And if we increase it even more, we replace the native shrublands with exotic grasses. This disturbance gradient all driven by human ignition is a reflection on the impact of humans on ecosystem integrity or ecosystem health. Next.
And this is important in terms of fires because in this illustration here,
Speaker 6
We've lost John. John, are you there on the phone? Oddly enough, I can explain to you what's on this slide. Are you there, John? Well, I can at least explain this slide.
Up in the top left, see a breakdown of the major vegetation types in the state based on the proportion that they occupy. So in gray, 43% of the state is represented in other veg other vegetation types, meaning it's wetland or it's urban area or it's barren. 19 is conifer, and you can see the rest of the vegetation types distributed in the other colors. And what you can see in these other bar charts is the same proportion of vegetation based on, for example, in b, you see the number of ignitions that occurred. So what you can see is that, in particular, is this herbaceous cover, even though it only occupies 11% of the cover in the state, it occupies 25% of the ignitions.
John, if are you there?
Speaker 6
And similarly, if we look at the vegetation types where there have been destroyed structures, you can see that, very few of them have been in conifer forest, but a lot have been in hardwood forest, herbaceous, and shrubland. And if you look at the area burned with fires that resulted in structure loss versus the fires that did not result in structure loss, you can see that the vast majority of area burned in the state is occurring in shrubland, and it's also the dominant vegetation type where structures are burning. John, are you back? Okay. I don't I still don't think we have John.
I'm not sure what we'll do about that.
Speaker 4
I think we're getting some some background noise if someone kind of kitchen activity.
Speaker 7
Catherine Leo, this is, Robert Stanford. Just to let you know, mister Kealy has joined us.
Speaker 4
Great. So for all the speakers, if you're not speaking, please mute your phone. Thank you.
Speaker 6
Okay. Well, I just mostly described the slide that has the circle charts because I put that slide together.
Speaker 7
Yes. In fact, you can do the rest of the talk. I'm not seeing the screen anymore.
Speaker 6
Next slide. I'll tell you what's on the screen. This is improvisation at its finest. I don't know how you can give a talk when you can't see the screen, John.
Speaker 7
Yeah. And the whole point is when we're concerned about this change in the impact of vegetation type on fire ignitions and the fact that in recent years, the amount the numbers of fires in the area burned in grasslands or ignitions in grasslands has greatly increased over what grasslands themselves represent. In other words, grasslands are critically important to ignitions. And this is most critical in wind driven fires. And we have them in Southern California.
We call them Southern Santa Ana winds. We have them in the northern part of the state, north winds or some people like the term Diablo winds. Go ahead, next. But the important thing to understand about these wind dominated fires is they're not tied to fuel load. So for example, the state is now embarking on a program to do fuel reduction throughout the state.
But this is and this almost certainly is gonna have major impacts on fires in the Sierra Nevada. It's going to be less important in Southern California as seen in this slide of wind dominated fires and the fire history is what you're looking at. But we'll see fire on the left. The black outline shows the perimeter of that fire and the colored areas indicate previous fires. Blues indicate prescribed burns.
The reds and yellows indicate different stand ages. And what you can see is in the northern part of the Woolsey fire, and this is important because this is where the fire started. It was an area that had burned relatively recently. And if you go to the next slide, you'll see an illustration of what the site of origin of the Woolsey fire looked like. It was an area in northern part of the fire perimeter that was largely dominated by invasive grasses where the native shrublands have been replaced.
In other words, it was highly flammable exotic grasses that almost certainly were a major factor in driving that fire. Go ahead, next. The the other picture we're looking at here, I think, because I can't see what we're looking at, is the fire perimeter for the Camp Fire that occurred in around Chico in Northern California, same year as the Woolsey fire. And what's interesting is much of the area had never had a fire, which is typical of many Northern California coniferous forest. But what we see is a large area here in red and around the town of Conkau just north of that is the site of origin of that fire.
And in other words, it originated in an area that had burned about ten years ago. And this inset picture here shows what a ten year old conifer forest looks like. It's heavily affected by invasive grasses. And so those invasive grasses play a big role in driving those fires in terms of promoting ignitions. And then when that campfire blew or burned to the East based on the if you go to the next slide, can see that insight that that fire burned here or ignited here around the town of Kankou just a little northeast of there.
But within an area that burned ten years ago that had almost certainly a significant amount of invasive grasses, highly promoted to ignition of fires. And then it burned into an area of that had never had a recorded fire. Certainly the areas around Paradise had never had a recorded fire. However, the densification of that forest does not appear to have been a major factor in driving the destructiveness of that forest. If you go to the next slide, this is an image from one of the communities in Paradise, the town that was almost destroyed.
And the white homes here indicate homes that survived the fire. Everything else represents homes destroyed. But what's interesting is the surrounding landscape is all green trees. Those winds blew the fire through the understory until they hit this community. And if the winds came from off from the right into that community and it's very likely that the fires due to the trees surrounding here blew up over the right side of that image into the community.
So the homes on the right were perhaps protected by these green trees. Now why would the fire burn that homes and not burn the green forest around? Almost certainly it's because the dead fuel ratio, dead to live fuels is very different in forest versus communities. Forests have a lot of green fuels that are being fed water from underground sources. Homes represent essentially all dead fuels.
And so when that wind blew the fire through the understory into that community, it hit a lot of dead fuels and those homes were just incinerated whereas the forest surrounding was not. In other words, this does not appear to be a fuel driven fire. It's a wind driven fire where the fire source is driven into the community. Go ahead, next. Now, what are the factors that drive these wind driven fires?
Certainly one of them has to do
Speaker 7
Southern California Santa Ana wind distribution indicated by the black bars. In other words, Santa Ana winds in the Southern part of the state are fall winds. And what's important is they occur at the end of our normal six month drought, which occurs usually from May through October. And so they occur at the time where everything is as dry as it's likely to be throughout the year. Go ahead next.
What's interesting about these Santa Ana wind driven fires is our worst fires occurred during Santa Ana wind. But just given a Santa Ana wind is not sufficient to produce a fire. This is data that has been recently produced that looks at seventy one years of fire history in Southern California during Santa Ana wind events. And what we see is in terms of the percentage of Santa Ana wind events versus the area burned, about 75%, at least in the last twenty or thirty years, 75% of those Santa Ana winds are not related to, there are no fire. And why are there no fires?
It's because the winds per se are not what dictate fires. It's whether or not humans ignite a fire during that wind event. And even if we have extreme winds, which are often produce our worst fires, at least 50% of the events with extreme winds have no fire at all. So in other words, it's not just the wind per se that produces these fires, it's humans igniting fires during that. Go ahead, next.
And what's interesting is that if you compare the sources of fire during Santa Ana wind events versus non Santa Ana wind events, these are mostly summer fires. The sources are very different. And this is the blues indicate early part of the record. In other words, from 1948 to 1983, the red indicates '84 to 2018. What we see is during summer fires, mainly non Santa Ana wind driven fires, equipment is a big cause of fires, campfires, debris burning, arson, but lesser causes are vehicles and power lines.
However, if we look at the Santa Ana wind driven fires, certainly in the last thirty five years, arson and power lines have been major causes of area burned in Southern California. Go ahead next. And if we break that down even finer in terms of just comparing arson versus power line over the last several decades, what we see is there has been a major increase in power line ignited fires beginning in 2000 and into the present. In other words, lines in Southern California have been a major factor in area burned. Go ahead, next.
Now, we can't factor out people in all of this. What we can factor out is the fuel structure is probably not important because we get lots of fires in these coastal areas. But what is important are people igniting fires and since the year 2000 and that's the scale here from 2000 to the present. The climatologist will tell us we've had a 1.4 degree change centigrade change in temperature and that likely accounts for this increase in in area burned. But we've also seen about a 6,000,000 people increase in the density of humans on these landscapes.
And since all of our wind driven fires are started by people, this is a major factor that we need to consider. Go ahead, next. Next. And an illustration of this is with the 2017 fire, the twenty seventeen Tubbs fire indicated in this black outline which goes from Calistoga all the way down to Santa Rosa in the southern part of this image. And this outline is interesting because it matches a 1964 fire called the Hanley fire also ignited up near Calistoga indicated in red.
And what's interesting is the impact of those fires. The nineteen sixty four Hanley fire much bigger than the twenty seventeen Tubbs fire, but no fatalities relative to twenty two fatalities in the Tubbs fire. And what's important is if you look at the age structure of the people who died in the Tubbs fire, almost all of them were older people in their 70s and 80s. So it has an impact on the age, different impact depending on the age structure of the communities, but also differences in structure loss. 1964, only about 100 structures lost in 2017, about 5,600 structures were lost.
What's interesting is if you look at the origin of the Tubbs Fire, this is the size of the origin here. And much of this landscape is dominated by invasive grasses. In other words, this is an important factor in determining where fires actually originate. Go ahead. One last thing I might just point out is if you compare the population density between the 64 and the twenty seventeen Tubbs fire, this is what the city of Santa Rosa population change has been.
In other words, there's been a fivefold increase in people. That means not only are there more people out there starting fires or contributing to changes in the infrastructure that caused fires, but also there's more people being pushed out into the landscapes that are vulnerable. Go ahead next. This illustrates an outline of the 1960s. Purple is the outline of the sixty four Hanley fire and the light tan indicate low density development, dark indicates high density development.
The Hanley fire, very few people were lost, nobody was lost and very few structures were lost. Compare that with the Tubbs fire in 2017, essentially the same area, but all of this area is low density housing and we lost 22 people and over 5,600 structures. So almost certainly development patterns and population growth has had a big impact. Go ahead. Next.
Oh, the and one other point, if you go back, I might just emphasize is when we look at power line ignited fires, there's been a huge change in the last twenty years in the amount of fires throughout the state that have or area burned in the state that are due to power line ignited fires. About a fivefold increase in the last twenty years. So power line fires are certainly a big factor and it's almost certainly driven by a combination of not only landscape changes that have increased invasive grasses, but also increased development and more people at risk. Go ahead next. Now, let me just summarize by saying briefly what can we do about these fire impacts.
And almost certainly we need to distinguish between whether we're talking about fuel dominated fires in the northern part of the state, mostly in Conepher Forest, mostly where we need pre fire fuel treatments that are going to reduce fuels because these are fuel dominated fires versus what do we need in wind dominated fire regimes. And it largely has to do with the fact that fuel dominated fires are what ecologists would call bottom up factors. In other words, they start within the system, the things we can control versus wind dominated fires or top down factors. These are things outside our control like climate. So what can we do when our fires are impacted by things we can't control?
Go ahead, Nick. And I'll just summarize all of this by saying, when it comes to the worst fires we have, which are these wind dominated fires, I suggest there are five Ps we ought to think about. One is this is a people problem. It's not a fuel problem. So much of the effort the state is putting in today to controlling fuels is probably not gonna have a major impact on these fires.
We need to recognize that we've had an addition of 6,000,000 people in the last twenty years. And that population growth is probably a bigger threat than global climate change. And we need to think about how we manage where people live. The other important thing is rather than trying to focus on fuel treatments, we need to think about preventing fires themselves. Now, if you look at the statewide program right now on how to control the growing fire problem, There's a lot that's said about prevention but what prevention means within that document is preventing the spread of fires.
There's very little said about preventing ignition sources and this is what we need to focus on. How do we reduce ignitions? And in many areas, this has to do with how do we reduce arson fires and how do we reduce power line ignited fires? Other things that we ought to be thinking about is prediction. If we are going to control the impact of these wind events, we need good real time wind prediction models and our ability to communicate those models to agencies and homeowners.
Planning is without a doubt one of the most important things we can do in the future. Historically, we've always recognized hazards like earthquakes and floods and we've zoned areas to reduce development in areas prone to those hazards. We now need to start thinking about focus on planning for fire hazards. And there is a growing focus on this. I've had discussions recently with state Senator Henry Sterns, who is working on legislation to try and develop plans for development that reduce growth into hazardous watersheds.
And then lastly, we might say protection. There's a lot homeowners can do to reduce the loss of homes largely because homes burn not because the fire front moves up and burns the house down but usually embers land on the roof and there's a lot of things we can do in the way we construct homes that could reduce losses from fires. So I will end it there. Happy to entertain questions.
Speaker 6
Thank you, John. So with that, we are going to move into our panel discussion. And for that, I would like to introduce our panelists. These folks will be with us throughout the rest of the day to answer questions. We begin with Brian D'Agostino, who is the Director of Fire Science and Climate Adaptation at SDG and E.
We have Michael Zaleo, who is the System Forester. He's with Vegetation Management with SDG and E. Steven Fisher, who is the director of vegetation management execution with PG and E Melanie Jocelyn, principal manager with vegetation management and compliance at SCE Tom Olinsky, who's a fire scientist with SCE and Eric Brown, who's the T and D Manager for Grid Assets Vegetation Management at SMUT. And we have about ten minutes right now for the panelists, And the panelists have come prepared to answer a wide range of questions ranging from the use of herbicides to different treatments and different vegetational types and different ecosystem types, as well as how to do deal with vegetation below the line and as well dealing with issues in the forest. A lot of these questions are clearly interrelated, and a lot of them, I think, have to do with what to do about the low growing shrublands and the vegetation type that is actually not posing a threat of landing on top of a line, but how do how do the utilities take steps to manage the shrubland vegetation and subsequently the potential for exotic vegetation that comes in afterwards?
And do you use herbicides? And if so, how do you do that? I think we would all just like to have a better understanding of what the typical process is and maybe what we could hope to do in the future. With that, I would invite the panelists to please contribute your experiences with these types of issues. And, John, if you have any input or comments, I welcome that as well.
We will we will look to have this this discussion until about 05:10, which is, I think, 02:10 your time. I'm on the East Coast right now. Shall I call on people?
Speaker 10
First off, thank you for the ability to and the opportunity to participate. I think this is a great discussion. Obviously, it's a timely discussion given the unique challenges that we all have as Californians. We all play a role in the prevention of fires. Think Doctor.
Keeley hit it on the head when he said one of the key takeaways is in the ignition. And I think when you look at it from a utility standpoint, that really is traditionally and maybe most pointedly what we are in the business of doing is not only providing safe and reliable power, but making sure that we are not going to be the source of a fire ignition. So with regard to vegetation management, traditionally our role and responsibility has been the management of vegetation in the air that is adjacent and in relationship to the overhead power lines. We are regulated and mandated to do that. We take a fairly proactive approach with SDG and E in trying to manage safe clearances away from the power lines far greater than what is required by law.
The issue of managing vegetation at the ground level is something that is somewhat unique for vegetation management, most pointedly within SDG and E service territory. For one reason, we certainly do not have the density of trees and vegetation nor the species diversity that would lend itself to a wide range of different fires. As Doctor. Keeley pointed out, we characterized by a shrubland habitat. We have a fairly unique habitat, the coastal sage grove community which is actually one of most endangered ecosystems on earth.
So we have a unique challenge to protect those resources. So what we have done, what we have undertaken at SDG and E recently within the last couple of years is taking a look at how we can possibly manage fuels so we can help reduce fires and for us again it is all about ignition. So we are for example required to maintain fire safe clearances away from specific utility infrastructure not just the power lines but at the base of some poles that carry hardware that under certain circumstances could drop flammable material and start a fire. So we're required to create these fuel breaks, which we do by mechanical means, but also using some herbicides. I think probably compared to the other investor owned utilities, our herbicide usage is fairly infrequent and low.
Again, we just utilize the herbicides for our what we call our pole brushing fire break requirement. We don't do a lot of integrated vegetation management, which is the intermixing the use of mechanical clearing and the use of herbicides to get to a lower successional force, so it's easier to manage tree clearances away from the power lines. What we are looking at doing right now is creating some fuel breaks and also expanding some of our pole clearances that is the perimeter of our poles. So if there happens to be a line strike that is a potential for ignition from a falling live line, we're going to reduce the likelihood of starting a fire. So I'm going to go and stop there in the interest of time and to give others the opportunity to initiate the discussion as well.
Thank you.
Speaker 11
If I may, this is Melanie Jocelyn with SCE. I'd like to build on Michael's response there. I think you hit the nail on the head, Michael, in terms of, in Doctor. Keeley's parlance in terms of the five P's prevention, right? We are focused on reducing ignition potential, and that is what mostly drives the policies that we perform in vegetation management here at SCE.
Similar to what was described for SDG and E, our main focus would be around clearing the base of poles or other infrastructure. And so when you look at that in terms of an ecological perspective, it's a fairly small footprint, in the more rural locations where you're going to find things like shrubland. We do not apply any kind of herbicide on a broad basis. We are interested, in longer term in building our capabilities with regard to integrated vegetation management. And maybe I could expand on that a little bit.
That does include potentially the use of, herbicides. It also includes the propagation of specific species. It includes the use, for example, of livestock, variously sort of unconventional means to maintain the appropriate clearance. And then my final point, that I think is relevant to this discussion has to do with kind of what our objective is in reducing ignition. So, right, that very specifically clearing around the base of a pole is intended to prevent if you have some kind of sparkage from the equipment, there's nothing to ignite.
And so the idea is not that we propagate grasses in that area, it's that we remove the vegetation in its entirety in a 10 foot radius around the base of the pole. When it comes to wire swaths of land like on a transmission corridor, we are not actually looking to clear all vegetation. We don't want to remove, shrubs per se. What we're looking for is utility friendly vegetation. So in many cases, using typical heights even up to a 15 foot tree would be perfectly acceptable when you consider the sag of the line.
We really just want to make sure that we're maintaining that minimum clearance so that you never have that contact and then that ignition potential.
Speaker 6
Thank you for that. That was one of the questions that we had asked was whether any of you are considering to leave some of the vegetation that has higher fuel moisture content to potentially absorb a spark. Would anyone from PG and E like to speak before we move on to questions from the Board members?
Speaker 12
Yes. Yes. So very similar to what some of my peers have said, I'll just highlight a few things. So definitely the brushy fuels underneath that resonate. I've been on to a few smaller ignitions where a tree has fallen into the line and caused an ignition.
And typically what you'll see in those situations is the tree does not burn because there's moisture content still in it, it's the dry brush on the ground around the tree that ignites. So in response to that PG and E has been looking at some ways to potentially expand fuel removal underneath our lines of those incompatible fuels as we talked about. A few years ago PG and E took a little bit more of a dramatic approach and it wasn't well received by many of the communities. It was referred to as making it look like the moon surface, I think it was an approach we took. So, we've since dialed that back quite a bit and we're now looking at a system that more mirrors allow wing to leave vegetation still alive that has moisture in it and remove more of the dry brushes and also target removal of the ladder fuels that would potentially cause the fire to quickly spread into the canopy of the adjacent forest.
Our transmission system does that quite extensively along it. We're looking to expand that more into our distribution systems and working with some of the communities to do that work. Since it was asked, PCNE does not use the wide use of herbicide in limited application around our pole clearing requirements to keep the brush clear under those non exempt pieces of equipment and in isolated instances where we remove an invasive species that without the use of herbicide would just continue to grow back. That's done usually in partnership with the local property owner and with their approval. But besides that, very limited with the herbicide use that we currently use.
But in general, the examples that were shared by SDG and E and Edison as well are similar programs that PG and E uses around maintaining our right of ways.
Speaker 6
Thank you for that. And I also I didn't mention Eric. Eric from SMUD, would you like to speak before we move to the Board members?
Speaker 12
Okay, great. Thank you for the opportunity. I appreciate it. I'll just share that SMUD operates and applies an integrated vegetation management approach to our vegetation management program either on both our transmission and our distribution system. We are using some herbicides that are regulated to the DPR, Department of Pesticide Regulation, but they're applied with the highly experienced and licensed contractors and personnel that are targeting with backpack sprayers specific noxious weeds and or invasives that are populating the rights of ways either distribution or transmission.
Our interest isn't to create a moonscape under either a distribution line or a transmission line, but provide the platform for a low growing native plant community in a mosaic type pattern. This provides an opportunity for pollinators as well as livestock and wildlife corridors throughout those transmission and distribution facilities. In addition to that, SMUD has had a really robust tree growth regulator program that reduces the risk and reduces the growth of species of trees that can be challenging that are not to be removed or couldn't be removed or challenged with their growth patterns. That's another technique that's used here at SMUD to manage our vegetation around both our transmission and distribution programs. Thank you.
Speaker 6
Thank you for that, Eric. And now I would like to open it up to the Board members. If any of you have questions, could you please unmute your microphones and ask questions now?
Speaker 9
So this is a Board Member, John Mader. The question for John and John had said that the utility initiated fires were up markedly. He also said that the development into these previously areas where there's the potential for high impact fires was also up. Is it a direct correlation or is there twice the development half the increase and comparable to the number of utility initiated wildfires? Or is it a one to one?
Or is there the information to be able to look at that? Because from that, I think we can infer perhaps some incident rate historical incident rate per say mild energized line?
Speaker 7
Well, I would say that those are fascinating questions and they're ones that need to be answered. So far, we haven't been able to access the data to look at how the changes in electrical grid have correlated with development patterns. So we can't really answer that in the specific way you're suggesting, but it's certainly something that needs to be looked at because the one thing about these wind driven fires is they're all due to humans one way or another either accidental or intentional and recently mostly accidental. And what's correlated with that, if you talk to climatologists, it's climate change. But also if you talk to a demographer, it's human population change.
And we really have just scratched the surface in how to evaluate the role of changing population growth. On the bright side, California population has been growing at the rate of about 300,000 people a year for the last fifty years. But in the last three or four years since the last administration change, our growth has actually declined. And in fact in 2020, California population growth declined. So maybe in the future, this isn't going to be as big a problem, but this is a lot of this is politics and we don't know how populations will change.
But I would just say we don't have the information in part because it's hard to get the data on how distribution lines in particular are changing relative to population growth.
Speaker 9
When I look at the where to allocate resources, you need consequence mapping, which goes to some of the data that you shared today about where they're likely to be high impact fires and then you need incident rates for the types of different equipment. And if we could get I mean, if we could get that data, we can start building some profiles to help point us in the right direction where we need to place our fire hardening.
Speaker 7
Well, it would seem to me that I need to work with people like you because we don't have the data to answer those questions, but I would love to be able to address them.
Speaker 6
Thank you for that. Just being sensitive to time, I think I would like to move on to questions that come from the public. Catherine, would you like to let us know any comments that are coming in the web chat?
Speaker 4
Sure. So we have two so far. One from Michael Neal to John Keeley. John Keeley mentioned invasive species are causing more destructive wildfires. What are the utilities doing to control invasive invasive species in their right of ways?
And that's a question for the utility panelists.
Speaker 10
So this is Michael with SDG. I'll start again. So I think we're primarily our focus when it comes to invasive species is to look at those again, those species that are the source of ignition. Most of the fires or a majority of the fires that or trees that cause outages on our system, some that do result in fire are those non native species and primarily eucalyptus trees of which there are hundreds of species. They predominate in Southern California.
They're planted on purpose for noise control, for dust abatement and but they pose a critical risk to our power lines, right? They're fast growing species. They have a propensity for branch breakout, poultry failure, especially when it's combined with saturated soil. So our focus really is to try to remove proactively remove those trees that could be the source of a fire or if a fire were to occur, if they have a lot of volatile oils in them like eucalyptus trees, they could quickly propagate a fire. So we have a list of targeted species that we try to focus getting greater clearance on that is time of trim clearance to prevent outages and it also could either ignite a fire if a line were to fall in for some reason or propagate.
We're really at this juncture not in the business and trying to change or modify the species. Again, we're doing we're trying to do some of that with regard to our some of our fuel modification projects where we are primarily trying to reduce or thin out some of the flashy fields like the non native grasses that are usually the source of a quick spread in fire.
Speaker 7
to SDG and E. What's interesting to me is when you look at fire history and ignition sources, power lines were a major cause of big fire events in the first decade of the twenty first century in San Diego County. And then San Diego Gas and Electric initiated a program to address fire issues. And in the last decade, there's been almost no big fires in San Diego County. This could just be serendipity or it could be an impact of their programs.
And I'm just curious if somebody from San Diego Gas and Electric has an idea of why their program may have impacted reduction in fires and how that might relate to what PG and E could be doing?
Speaker 10
I'm going to hand it off here to Brian D'Agostino, who is the Director of Fire Science and Climate Adaptation and SDG and E. Before that, I would just want to point out and reiterate that I think our vegetation management operation is a significant contributor to the fact that we have not had, as you mentioned, Doctor. Keeley, any major fires. The last one that we had that was related to trees was in 2007, which was the Rice Canyon fire, which was the result of a Sycamore tree branch broke out and fell into the power lines. But I also think it's attributable to the expanded clearances that we are applying.
We have a very robust tree pruning program and removal program. So it is an effort to reduce those problematic species and achieve greater clearances that we feel are reducing not only outages but the risk for fires that may come from that. So and we also have a very robust system hardening effort into place where we've invested a lot of money to replace our system. We have a very risk averse approach to building out our power lines. We want to use the best information that we can to make sure that we are taking the most prudent approach to reduce that risk with regard to our construction.
So I'm going to hand it over to Brian. He's got a lot of feedback that I think will help contribute to this conversation as well.
Speaker 12
Yes. Thank you for that Michael. And then to the Advisory Board and Doctor. Killy, really appreciate you being here and sharing this and the opportunity. As a meteorologist, part of what I think represent post the two thousand and seven wildfires that integration of science into how the utility approaches Santa Ana wind events.
And it's really understanding Santa Ana winds. And I think a very to keep it kind of simple is our ability to anticipate and prepare for those specific days where those larger fires are going to be possible. And whether it be those weather conditions on the ground, like you mentioned, are so important to understand so that we can take those preventative actions. And we can operate the electric system in more conservative ways to decrease the potential of an ignition. And if we know when and how to appropriately implement those mitigations, we can drastically reduce our potential for being an ignition source.
And you mentioned the other utilities. I did notice Tom Ralinski from Southern California Edison was on the call as well. But I know this is something that we're doing not just in San Diego, but we're doing it across the state. But Tom, is this anything you'd like to speak to at all?
Speaker 12
All right. Well, we'll see if Tom does chime in. But I think a major component of it is understanding fire potential. So working on understanding that fuel environment and what is the potential on any given day. If we do see an ignition, which as you mentioned, Doctor.
Kiehle, especially receptive in those non native grasses, which we're finding, especially because just the spark from a power line can ignite those grasses, which then travel into our Chaparral species. And even in some cases, not as much in San Diego, but we do have at our higher elevation, some of the forests. But really managing that ignition risk is a major component of what we've been focused on in San Diego. As you mentioned, it has proven effective where we haven't seen a large power line ignited fire since 2007.
Speaker 13
Yes, sorry about that. I think I might have missed my queue, but we are doing a lot of the same things that Brian mentioned across Southern California Edison. We're also taking aggressive measures to prevent wildfires not only from vegetation management standpoint, but also in our weather modeling and our fuels modeling, sampling live taking samples of live fuel moisture to really get an understanding of those situations where the combination of strong winds overlap with critically dry fuels to create that favorable environment for a major wildfire if we get an ignition. So again, we are doing a lot of taking a lot of those same aggressive steps that Brian had outlined here just a few minutes ago and we'll be happy to talk more about some of the technology here in the next panel session.
Speaker 7
Let me just make one further comment about what Brian had to say. I'm impressed. I've been to SDG and E offices a couple of times and heard their explanation of what they've been doing since 2007. And I'm very impressed. And I get the distinct impression that the other utility companies recognize that they're following suit and trying to emulate what SDG and E is doing.
And I say that not just because I think the fire data is showing that their program is effective in making an impact, but also the fact that my father was an engineer for SDG and E for his entire career. So I'm sure he would be impressed by that as well.
Speaker 6
Okay. Well, with that, just being mindful of time, I think I'm going to pass it off to Catherine to lead our stretch break. Catherine?
Speaker 4
Hi. And, Jessica, what what time did we want to come back? How long of a break were we going to take?
Speaker 5
So it turns out that this we were more much more ambitious than we thought we were on this workshop. So we were we're a little bit I think we're about a half hour behind. So maybe maybe maybe a little bit less. So if is it too short to take a five minute break so that we can have catch up some time?
Speaker 5
at okay. Great. Let's come back at 02:35 just to give it seven, you know, seven minutes.
Speaker 4
So welcome to our stretch break. I encourage everyone to stand up, shake it out. For the panelists, turn off your video, move around, get your blood flowing, take a take a drink of water, and we will like Jessica said, we will return at
Speaker 5
I wanna thank John Keeley for a comprehensive presentation characterizing our environments and hopefully enlightening our listeners to how complex the problem is around vegetation management. For our second panel, we're going to start looking at emerging technology for wildfire monitoring and modeling. This is going to be a conversation of exploration of new research and tools. We wouldn't be California if we weren't taking into consideration the cutting edge. So I'd like to introduce first Doctor.
David Marvin, co founder and CEO of Salosciences. Doctor. Marvin is an expert in forest ecology, remote sensing, and machine learning. He will describe the California Forest Observatory, its underlying data sets and applications, and he will further discuss tree mortality and fire hazard modeling data products in California. Dave, take it away.
Speaker 3
Thank you. Great. You can go to the first slide. Great. Thanks.
Good afternoon, everybody. And thank you to the Advisory Board for inviting me today. As Jessica said, I'm David Marvin, Co Founder and CEO of San Diego Sciences. We're a conservation technology company that uses satellite imagery and artificial intelligence to perform forest monitoring. My background is in forest ecology, as well as airborne and satellite remote sensing science.
And our flagship product is the Forest Observatory, which is a new type of forest monitoring system. The California Forest Observatory is a partnership between Save the Sciences and Planet, and was generously funded by the Moore Foundation with additional support from the California Tom Conservancy and the Tahoe Fund. Slide. We built the Forces Observatory to fill a major gap. This slide.
A lack of current and high resolution data on the vegetation fuels that drive wildfire hazard across California. And the Fortis Observatory system consists of three components. Slide. First and foremost, the observatory, the vegetation fuels mapping and monitoring system. And to achieve this, we built a scalable cloud based software system to process massive volumes of airborne and satellite data and to train artificial intelligence algorithms to extract ecological patterns from this imagery.
Second, before the observatory embedded visualization platform, providing users with a simple and intuitive way to view the drivers of wildfire hazard statewide. You shouldn't have to be an expert GIS analyst to access and understand these statewide data. Finally, the system includes an API or tool set to connect multiple software systems. This means we can easily develop links between other systems. And indeed, we've already integrated our data with WI FIRE's FireMap platform and the Pyrojet consortium's near real time wildfire hazard mapping platform.
And importantly, in order to support ongoing research efforts, the data are free and open for non commercial use. We really hope these data will become the new standard for research and monitoring efforts across California. Slide. We also integrate external data to provide additional context into wildfire hazard beyond the vegetation fuels themselves. This includes forecasted wind and weather, active fire detection from satellites, and near term forecast of wildfire exposure from our partners at Pyrogens, a consortium of university, nonprofit and private organizations that I'll talk about a little later.
Slide. The central value proposition of the Forest Observatory is that it provides up to date, regularly updated, and high resolution data on the fuels that drive wildfire behavior. So how do we do this? Essentially, we collect as much airborne LiDAR that's available across California, in total around 130,000 square kilometers of airborne LiDAR across about five years recently resourced. We pair this up with satellite imagery, multiple different sources are used at different resolutions.
And we use deep learning algorithms, which are really good at recognizing quantitative patterns for a structure in the imagery to train models that allow us to then apply those newly trained models to statewide comprehensive satellite imagery to get continuous maps of forest structure and fuels. Slide. So what specific data does the Forest Observatory produce? Currently, we have seven core layers that describe vegetation structure and fuels. The first five here are the fuels data sets required to run most wildfire spread models.
These data are not simply spatial interpolations of existing airborne LiDAR. They're directly measured from satellite imagery across every square kilometer of California. And they're provided as continuous variables, not been in the categorical ranges. Each layer is available to download at 10 meter resolution annually from 2016 to 2020. And for select layers, we have integrated PLANET's three meter satellite imagery to produce high resolution versions for 2016 and 2020.
Working to make all these data available to download as landscape files to run-in wildfire spread models that require that type of input. But in the meantime, you can request custom LCP files directly through the Observatory by emailing us. So what does this data actually look like when you look at the landscape? Here we see a example wildland urban interface, just East Of Sacramento. On the left side of the image, you can see some developed areas, roads, utility corridors.
You see a burn scar recently in the center of the image there. On the right side, you see some forest management patterns of clear cut harvest and recovering forest post harvest. Slide. If you look at the current state of the art of mapping forest fuels, this is from the LANDFIRE system. This is the nationwide system that provides the inputs for running FHIR models.
It comes at 30 meter resolution. And you can see here for tree height, with darker green being taller trees, you can see those similar patterns of disturbed areas on the left side sorry, developed areas on the left side. You see the disturbance from forest harvest on the right side in a few patches. You're missing the recent burn scar because these data are updated every two years and often take a few years to actually become available once the update process begins. And so you missed that recent context of disturbance and any new harvest or development patterns that have occurred in the interim.
Next slide. With data from the Forest Observatory, you see a very different pattern across the landscape. It's much more high resolution. You can see the individual developed areas. You can see the roads, the utility corridors.
Of course, that burn scar is front and center. And you can see recent harvest patterns on the right side there. So we're fundamentally creating a different type of fueled landscape, and this can be done across all of California. Slide. So how does this actually compare to ground truth data for fuels mapping?
So we'll review here how fuel estimates from LANDFIRE and the Forest Observatory compared to fuel estimates from airborne LiDAR. Airborne LiDAR is a laser scanning technology that can be used to map canopy fuels at very high resolution. It's basically the gold standard for mapping canopy fuels. Unfortunately, there is no similar source for service fuel validation. So we don't really have an easy way to roughly compare our service fuel models to a ground truth.
But to interpret these numbers here, our square value should range from zero to one. And this refers to not a variation explained by our models, where the higher numbers are better. MAE or meet absolute error refers to the average uncertainty in the data and the lower numbers here are better. In the LiDAR or LANDFIRE comparisons on the top row, you find very low of any agreement between LiDAR and LANDFIRE fuel oil estimates. LANDFIRE explains a low proportion of variation in the LiDAR data, but the total variance and the total variance is very high.
On the other hand, on the bottom row, fourth observatory data shows strong agreement with LiDAR derived fuels. We see dramatically higher R squared values and lower mean absolute error values across the board. In most cases, LANDFIRE and MAP fuels have about 200% higher error compared to North Observatory MAP fuels. Now, to be fair, this is a little bit of an unfair comparison. LANDFIRE's data and their approach weren't designed to match LiDAR precision, but ours was.
Our design goal was to get as close as possible to the laser precision of airborne LiDAR measurements, but from using satellites only. Slide. And this is a view of the platform, everyone can access at forceobservatory.com. Anyone can visit and visualize the data and explore California, and we encourage you to follow us on social media for the latest updates, data releases, and features. Slide.
So our commerce and current and forthcoming applications of the system, particularly those most relevant and applicable to California utilities. And it will fall in or strike tree inventories, individual to stand scale tree mortality monitoring, wildfire burn severity mapping and analyzed wildfire hazard modeling. Slide. First, because we're able to map the height of individual large trees and groups of small trees to within a few meters of vertical accuracy, and pretty obvious use of the data is to map the locations of potential falling trees along utility distribution grids in California. These are trees that are tall enough and close enough in proximity to electrical utility equipment that if it were to fall into the equipment or a power line, it may cause outage or ignition.
Next. Here we can see the fallen trees mapped at two different years across the distribution grid from the area just East of Auburn. Next. Removing the tree height layer, you can see the striking locations in the context of this landscape. Importantly, we can provide coverage of every single line mile distribution lines in California, every single year across the state.
We don't need to fly new airborne ladders to be able to deliver these updated maps. Sorry, but how well does this data compare to airborne LiDAR, which is traditionally used to digitize inventories. We compared our 2023 strike, strike three data to the most recent airborne LiDAR coverage we had available from 2018. And we found strong agreement between satellite and LiDAR strike tree inventories. Not perfect, but pretty good.
The majority of our errors occur on the edge of areas of agreement, which mitigates operational uncertainty for mapping these areas. In regards to the wildland urban interface, satellite predictions do very well in the higher risk wildland and at the interface itself. The performance is lower in highly developed and in urban cores. Satellite fig tree inventories are most accurate in areas of dense vegetation, which is typically found in some of the higher Tier two and Tier three fire and foot districts. What leads to some of these errors?
Well, of it is temporal offset between our predictions, which is twenty twenty, and the latter data we had access to, which is twenty eighteen. But there's also, of course, model uncertainty, and importantly, horizontal error inherent in satellite imagery, which is about 10 meters of horizontal positional uncertainty. You can see this highlighted in the bottom right between the and the overlay between LiDAR and satellite map tree height. If we accomplish uncertainty, we find that about ninety percent of the false negatives are actually within 10 meters of a tree's location. So not too bad for a space telescope orbiting 300 miles above the Earth at about 700 miles per hour.
We think this means satellites can provide a low cost system wide alternative to utilities having to fly their lines each year with airborne LiDAR, or driving them to update their understanding of potential falling trees. Or at the very least, it can be used as a tipping key system to isolate specific locations for more detailed airborne or on the ground inspections. Slide. So another use case is understanding tree mortality at high resolution. Traditionally, a lot of the data in California and for most of The US comes from the Forest Service Air Detection Survey, which does a great job of mapping out patterns of bark beetle and other pathogen and insect driven mortality events statewide.
However, these data come in polygon form, and you can't really get down to the individual stand scale to map these mortality events. We're able to do this with satellite imagery. And as part of our collaboration with the Pirates consortium, we are providing this data to try to understand how we can improve some fire spread models and fire behavior models to account for a lot of extreme mortality. A big concern in the years leading up to 2020 was what would happen if we had a fire in some of these really extreme pockets of mortality. Well, we found out this past year in the Creek Fire, which over the course of three days became quite the fuels driven, plume driven fire in the Southern Sierra or Central Southern Sierra.
And we can see that some of the fire spread that occurred really was in part driven by these buildup of canopy and service fuel from extreme mortality events. Next slide. Eight We can compare the burn severity post fire to the dead tree cover pre fire. Actually can see that in areas showing on the figure on the right side, where you have higher mortality severity, you tend to have, sorry, higher mortality cover, you tend to have higher severity pockets that occurred in the Creek Fire. Next slide.
We can also provide pretty rapid within a few weeks to a month or so post containment maps of wildfire burn severity. These will be released pretty soon to the fourth observatory. And for next fire season, we'll be operationally releasing them within a month after the fires are contained. What we're seeing here is the footprint of the North Complex from 2020. And slide.
And we are showing the pre fire tree height. And this is the post fire burn severity that occurred across the landscape. We hope that having access to this, both of the data, the high res fuels and the high res post fire burn severity, a lot of research into how to improve some of these forecasting models of burn severity can be improved. As well as understanding post fire potential landslides and other effects on the landscape, where you have areas of intense, high severity fire that leads to high basal area or canopy cover reduction. Slide.
Six:thirty And importantly, we are collaborating with our partners at Pyrogens to take these fuels beta and be able to produce annualized wildfire hazard across the entire state. Slide. If we zoom into an area, can see that this high resolution fuels data set, paired with the Elmfire model developed by Chris Lautenberg at React Engineering, we can simulate tens of millions of fires across an entire year. Drive each of those fires by the weather, real weather from the previous year that we've got to collect and actually simulate each individual fire, track its perimeter, track its intensity, stack all those together to create a map of burn probability as well as intensity to create a high resolution version of annualized wildfire hazard going back each year to 2016. Slide.
Because we have that current accurate fuel data set, we hope that these data are going to be able to provide some more accurate understanding of the distribution of hazard across California. And because we can run this in a really rapid iterations, we can even simulate potential for fuels treatments, and how that might impact the landscape, resulting landscape fire hazard. This is in beta development right now. And we're working with Pyragin's consortium and other partners to start testing and validating some of these outputs to see how well it compares to current approaches to mapping fire hazard. Slide.
And I want to mention, I keep talking about this Pirate Consortium. This was a California Energy Commission funded consortium to bring together a wide range of organizations to really bring online next generation of wildfire hazard and spread models. And one of the early outputs from this consortium was the development of this site. If you go to piratebusiness.org and look at forecasts, you're able to get hourly forecasts and burn probability seven days in the future. And you have the option to use either LANDFIRE or Forest Observatory fuels as inputs to the model.
This model runs, I think once a day now, but can run up to four times per day during fire season, ingesting the latest weather forecasts. Slide. And the platform also provides the option to look at the state from the perspective of electrical grid. Here we see the forecasted level of structure exposure to wildfire via utility called ignitions. This is we can do this by removing the influence of other non utility emission factors and looking at the resulting fire spread from the grid.
Slide. So I want to just kind of close by talking about how this high resolution monitoring system for fuels and wildfire hazard facilitate forest resilience statewide. Slide. The Forest Management Task Force in California recently released a really incredible plan that's going to help guide the billion plus dollars that Governor Newsom plans to spend this year and next on forest and wildfire resilience in the state. And because we have already built and launched this Forest Observatory, there's a number of areas where the data can directly support, where we provide context for a number of the goals of this action plan.
Slide. In particular, related to this seminar here today, community protection regarding defensible space. Being able to have high resolution data on tree cover and tree height, we can easily screen for areas that might need some encouragement to improve multiple space around homes and structures. And then the fallen tree data that I mentioned before, cannot just be used to improve management and grid hardening on the side of utilities, but can also help create dynamic maps of emission probability that can be used to improve statewide wildfire modeling as well. And so again, encourage everyone to visit forcesobritory.com and follow us on social media.
You can also get us directly at info forcesobritory dot com. And I'd be happy to take any questions from the panel or the audience. I think it's going to be after the next talk though. Thank you.
Speaker 5
That's correct. Yeah, we're going to go into Kevin Hyer's presentation. Please everybody write note down your questions so that we can get to them after the next presentation. David, thank you. That was really wonderful.
I'd like to introduce our third panelist, Kevin Hires. He's the Director of the Fire Science Applications at the Tall Timbers Research Station. Mr. Hyres has worked in the fire management and prescribed fire science for twenty seven years and has published over 100 peer reviewed articles. He's in the US Air Force Wildland Fire Program Manager at Eglin Air Force Base and now partners with various agencies to develop improved methods and practices for wildfire mitigation and prescribed fire application.
He'll discuss developments of high resolution three d fuel and fire models and wind effects on vegetation for applications to fire risk and resilience. Kevin, take it away.
Speaker 15
Awesome. Thank you, Jessica. If you can hear me all right, I'll go ahead and get started. It's a great intro and wonderful program that David just went through. And we're going to be continuing to kind of build on the idea of really fine resolution dynamics that are going to affect both vegetation management and fire management.
And I'm glad we moved on. His bio picture was much better than mine. So we're going to move past these title slides pretty quick. I do want to recognize Doctor. Rodland from Los Alamos National Lab, Russ Parsons from U.
S. Forest Service Fire Lab and Doctor. Elkay Altintas from Wi FiRE University of California San Diego, who are critical partners in this. But if you flip one more slide, Joe, this is part of a much larger effort. That's really a national effort to advance next generation fire behavior modeling tools.
And these are much more dynamic and fully integrated tools than we've ever had access to and are capable of building on the level of detail that David was just mentioning earlier in his presentation. And so I do want to recognize this national partnership that really is built out of NSF funded project at Wi FiRE, some connections with SIG and Pyrogens with the Northern California consortium that David mentioned as well as a lot of the other federal partners. Next slide. We're really about to enter a revolution in fire behavior modeling. It's one that's really built on the idea of coupled fire atmospheric feedbacks, where we've had the capacity to do this on high performing computing systems for a number of years, in fact, almost two decades.
But really, we're limited both by computing power and our own creativity and bringing these to market and starting to explore the really the consequences of being able to resolve fire and atmospheric dynamics and those feedbacks from large scale dynamics all the way down to the fine scale dynamics sub meter in some cases, really that we need in order to manage fire at the scale of power lines, for instance. And so I'm really excited about this revolution. Next slide. In order to really understand this revolution, though, you have to understand that fire is a coupled system. It isn't just fuel driven and it's not just wind driven.
Every bit of it's feedback driven. Now there can be dominant components to those feedbacks. But this schematic here in the top left really shows that fresh air entrainment can be cool, and that's what's driving the slides that John Kealy showed earlier, where the houses are burned, but the vegetation next to them is still green. There's a lot of convective cooling being driven down by these high velocity winds. But now once vegetation or housing starts to catch fire, the convective energy release, then it creates this buoyant plume that feeds back with the atmosphere to entrain more fresh air to support combustion.
These couple fire atmospheric behavior modeling tools like FireTech that just blew through the mountainside on the right are physics based. They couple typically a large eddy simulation, LES model with like high grad with a combustion code on a three-dimensional landscape. And that three dimensionality is really critical here. We're going to try to do some videos here and we'll see how much delay we get. Next slide please, Joe.
The three-dimensional landscapes that we're capable of modeling now can be high velocity winds. This is a collapsing column that we modeled for the U. S. Forest Service, well, actually for the thirtieth anniversary of the Dude Fire, a tragedy fire in DuPason, Arizona. This collapsing column is very similar to what we get with a thunderstorm on a wildland fire, and it hit the fire with 50 mile an hour gusts and pushed that fire across firefighters in Walkmore Canyon with rates of spread that they estimated to be 40 miles per hour on the ground.
Well, next slide. We were able to really decompose the model to look for these kinds of winds. There's a very large roll, Eddie, in the front of this simulation. And then these red arrows really are the complex wind fields that are representing those high velocity winds upwards of 25, 30 meters per second that are convective bursts, that are feedback loops with this big cool air that's coming down from the column and spreading out fire in all directions. As it stops, look at the size code as sort of the magnitude and velocity.
But these couple of fire atmospheric models are producing winds as highly resolved as one to two meters in a field. This is just a slice through the dynamics that Rod Linds produced for this fire reconstruction. And so the wind velocity, so really what separate this class of models from anything else like the Rock Mill base spread models that we typically use for two dimensional fuels nationwide. Next slide. And so I really want to emphasize how excited I am.
I mean, you look at presentations like David's, where we're really resolving tree. I mean, map every tree. We're actually moving away from the whole concept of fuel models. We're moving back to vegetation and ecosystems. Because these modeling tools, these couple of fire atmospheric behavior modeling tools really need good vegetation, highly resolved three-dimensional representations.
We actually want to give up this idea of abstracted fuels and embrace the idea of highly variable three dimensionally resolved structures in the forest that allow for fresh air entrainment, convective dynamics, buoyant plumes interacting with their environment and of course ignition patterns, whether it's tactical suppression, gaps in the forest that we might see like a power line or a road that are really very important for understanding where foul fire goes and how it spreads. And of course, LiDAR tools are becoming more and more commonplace and they're going to be incredibly important for us to map these trees and really generate the fuel inputs that the next generation fire behavior models need. Next slide. This is a one example of a NSF funded project, Wi FiRE Commons that is now leveraging a new tool called Fast Fuels that what we call voxelize. It turns a tree into three-dimensional fuel inputs that can be ingested by next generation coupled fire atmospheric behavior models.
And so really, we're trying to think about going from one meter scale all the way up to the landscape scale in three dimensions and doing it in a way that the fire models can run efficiently. And this is a partnership that not just stop it doesn't just stop at the Wi Fi comes, but this is a level of national partnership that includes pyrogens and really could leverage some of the really wonderful data that you saw from David in order to kind of enable some of these new modeling tools. Next slide. One of the fascinating things about three-dimensional data is that and these models is that they can take some of those dead trees that David was mapping, and we can actually start applying in three dimensions at one meter cubes that are represented here. It's almost like my son's Minecraft, only fuels craft for fire behavior modeling.
And we can look at the variability in how fuel moisture and fuel structure interact with the surrounding wind field and wildfires in order to create outcomes. Next slide. So in preparing this slide or in preparing the talk, was trying to think what is relevant about these next generation fire modeling tools to power lines. So I'm going to break out break down the rest of the talk into two bits. One how trees are blown down and intersect potentially intersect power lines.
And then kind of talk a little bit about fine scale variation and how we're modeling that underneath power line right of ways. One being source of ignition, the other being initial controls on initial spread once we've got a small ignition underneath the line. And so here in the Southeast, we've been doing quite a bit of work with hurricanes. And this is a prescribed fire and hurricane blowdown on the left conducted used by U. S.
Fish and Wildlife Service after Hurricane Michael, which obviously impacted quite a bit of power line infrastructure. And what I'd like to point out is just the trees that have come down on that as a result of the wind field. And on the right is schematic produced by a partner of ours, Jeff Cannon, at the Jones Ecological Research Center, really that just sort of defines the forces. I just showed you how we modeled wind and fire behavior really fine scales. Well, trees at that scale, the physics behind wind throw are being captured pretty accurately by these models because they're known forces.
Next slide. And Jeff has been conducting experimentation to document the force, the moment of breakage or tippage that results from the application of wind and force on the tree. And so we can combine these empirical observations of the amount of force. We can map highly resolved three-dimensional vegetation. And now we have these couple of fire atmospheric modeling tools that can apply that force to every individual tree that we can map at one meter cubes.
Next slide. Just to show you how important the understanding forces and the couple fire atmospheric interactions are, I'm going to show you a modeling tool, FireTech, again, that Rod did for the International Crown Fire Experiment. So on the right is running a simulation, and it's going to kind of burn through a stand. On the left, Joe, if you can just click on the video on the left, we're going see if we can get the wind vectors to come through. Just one click and it should go.
So we just watched that crown fire come through. But what I really want to draw your attention to is how different the wind vectors are going to be when the ambient wind, which is flowing from left to right on your screen, is running parallel to a break in the fuel versus perpendicular to the break in the fuel. As that fire is about halfway through, look the channeling of winds through that and eddies through those gaps in the fuel, and it's going to be exceptionally dynamic here as that fire approaches a gap in a perpendicular direction. There you go. We get some vorticity right there around the bend.
And think about how your power lines are intersecting some of the highly directional Santa Ana or Diablo winds that are coming downslope. So the angle of intersection is going to be quite important. And these models are capturing again exceptionally fine scales, the forces on every single tree in the simulation. Next slide. Just to give you some sense that Rod and his modeling team know what they're doing.
This is actually really similar to a problem that they've already done in the wind energy industry. And so they've been modeling turbulent wind fields forces on blades of fans like the model on the left. And again, Joe, if we can just click the simulation on the right, we can then show how that individual, in this case, I'm going to use it as a model tree, this wind turbine creates turbulent fields that affect the other wind turbines in a downwind pattern on the right. And so these tools are highly mature and application to the space of modeling, forcing and tree mortality or tree breakage is very, very easy at this point, especially with high resolution data like we've seen. Next slide.
One of the really interesting aspects of this though is because we have and we heard from John Kealy's talk, been talking about so much treatment. And when we're planning treatments, we really need to not just assume that they're going to do well. And I think John made that point earlier. Here, again, borrowing a slide from one of our coconspirators here, Russ Parsons, When we're planning a fuels treatment, we change the dynamics of drag and wind, three-dimensional wind fields through a stand, which can drive changes in fire behavior. Next slide.
And actually speed up fire. I mean, a former firefighter, the wind reduction factor is less in a stand that's open. And so fires go faster. And if you aren't reducing the surface fuels, you could actually have the effect of actually speeding up fires. And we just published a paper with Tirtha Bennerzzi down at UCLA showing that in some of these stands that were treated and untreated using these models.
But more importantly, I think in this illustration, when you thin a stand, you actually increase the force of wind on each individual tree that remains. And so as you're planning power line or treatments next to power lines, you really want to be thinking about these three-dimensional winds. And this couple of fire atmospheric behavior modeling framework is so wonderful. You don't even have to have the fire. You can just be thinking about the winds, but you still need the coupling in order to get the vegetative and wind feed bags.
Next slide. So just thinking again about LiDAR. I mean, it's becoming less and less expensive. It's become more and more prevalent and being able to map individual trees at the scale that David showed or the scale that we can model from the data that David showed. But we also can think about pieces of trees.
And Rod and I, and just thinking creatively about what might be of interest to this crowd is, branches often come out of individual trees. And it's just like seeding an ember in these models. We can distribute them with the force of the wind. We can separate an ember from the fuel bed and see how far it goes. And so it's we are actually capable of modeling how far branches can go and travel in a given windshield, given a turbulent environment that the at a one meter to two meter scale that a stand experiences.
And so thinking about modeling risk to power line infrastructure with these couple of fire atmospheric behavior models are now possible, not just from the whole tree, but from individual branches and how far developing probabilistic models for how far they can go given a wind and a three-dimensional landscape. Next slide. One of the things that really excites me and we'll kind of shift gears here and think about how heterogeneous fuel beds affect fire spread after the fires started is a new tool that we've developed called QuickFire. It was partnership with U. S.
Forest Service, the Southern Research at the Southern Research Station, Los Alamos National Lab in Tol Timbers. And this is a fast running simulation that takes a little bit of the high fidelity physics and scales it back, but still captures the dynamics and the feedbacks at really fine scales, the same three-dimensional fuel inputs as FireTech that runs on a supercomputer, but it runs on our laptops. Next slide. Go ahead and click through, Joe. One more.
There we go. One of the neat things about QuickFire is its capacity to deal with highly heterogeneous surface fuels. And we've got a couple of very creative ways of representing these. This is a partnership that we've entered into with USGS in the Desert Southwest. These are fuels that were created by USGS from a variety of sources at the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge.
In blue, you'll see patches of bare dirt. And what really is important in desert fuels and really kind of all of Southern California, what John Keely was showing you, is the patchiness of bare ground following fire or in these inter fire recovery periods. As we get exotic species of grass that sort of fill in that interstitial space, we speed up the spread of fire. So as you're thinking about vegetative management techniques, everything that you can do to homogenize grass fuels will speed up the rate of spread of fire and the likelihood of ignition getting going and being large at the time of suppression resource arrival. But anything we can do to keep heterogeneous, these natural shrub lands in that post fire environment is going to slow down the rate of spread once a power line starts in ignition.
And we can start modeling again these dynamics at very fine scale, submeter scales in many cases. And what I just want to point out to on the right is that they're just preserving some of the heterogeneity, really even at high wind speeds creates the opportunity to reduce the area burn in that initial period of the first twenty to forty minutes, which is really what we're trying to do if you're thinking about suppression resources and suppression success being dictated by the size of fire upon arrival. Next slide. This is one last example that we conducted with the state of New Jersey. The Pine Barrens in New Jersey burned with great alacrity.
It's known for one of the really the fastest moving fire regimes in the planet. It's a little flatter terrain than what we get in California, but it makes a nice test bed. This particular fire, we reconstructed. It was the Spring Hill wildfire from 2019. We reconstructed in a workshop with fire managers led by the U.
S. Forest Service, Nick Skoronski, up there in Northern Research Station. And actually worked with them using heterogeneous fuels, three-dimensional fuels and cutting in roads and firebreaks to try to understand what could have been done in advance of this fire to either limit spread or slow it down so that it can be suppressed at night. And so we worked with them to go through a variety of management scenarios using, again, QuickFire modeling in real time, heads up modeling with them on the computer. Next slide.
Here are just some these are not quite as fancy. When we visualize in real time, they come out with a little bit lower resolution. But we can we are showing on the left surface fuel consumption and on the right, canopy fuel consumption, and we had steadily worked with them to widen out needed to conduct this prescribed fire as a means of punching a hole in that continuous forest canopy. It's a fire dependent ecosystem, just like many of the ecosystems that John Kealy described in California, but managing it as a way of keeping fire in its role in the ecosystem, but increasing resilience to wildfire start was the objective of those managers there. And so we optimized how wide a road might be on the downwind side of the unit just to be able to hold it inside the box.
And these are the kinds of scenario driven opportunities we have when we got the high resolution three-dimensional fuels that you've seen and using these couple of fire atmospheric behavior modeling tools that they have to have inputs that are slightly different than what we used to have them. And most of our current fire behavior modeling tool suite simply is built along 1970 technology, at least that understanding of the way that fire operates. And these couple of processes and feedbacks really are critical to capturing if we're to
Speaker 15
managing vegetation or landscapes at the scales that we see fire across in places like California and the long power lines and right of way. So let's I think next slide is just a question I think we all need to answer. There's a prescribed fire conducted in hurricane blowdown debris that was successful and one that was not following a prescribed fire. And so if we're going to be reducing fuels or we're going to be addressing risk and thinking about infrastructure, can these enhanced models help? I certainly hope so, and I hope that we'll have some time for questions, but that's it.
Speaker 5
Thank you very much, Kevin. That's wonderful. Let me get back to my Thank you both so much, Dave and Kevin. Let's move on to the panel. So the panelists are the same members as the last one.
Brian D'Agostino from SDG and E, Director of Fire Science and Climate Adaptation. Michael DeLeo from SDG and E also, System Forester of Vegetation Management Steven Fisher, the Director of Vegetation Management Execution at PG and E Melanie Jocelyn, who's the Principal Manager for Vegetation Management and Compliance at SoCal Edison Tom Ralinski, who's a Fire Scientist at SoCal Edison and Eric Brown, the T and D Manager for Grid Assets Vegetation Management at SMUD. Okay. So I'm going to try to be efficient since we are just actually,
Speaker 5
our time. This is very cool. Okay. So I would like to just open it up first to say, some of this is new to everybody on the panel. Do you see opportunities to using this kind of emerging technology in your operations?
Speaker 10
So this is Michael again. I guess we'll be consistent with going south and north.
Speaker 10
So first off, those were great presentations and I really appreciate what they brought to the discussion. Obviously, are many tools that the utilities have at their disposal to engage with these different types of technologies. We like our sister utilities have engaged and reached out to multiple vendors to see if and how we can utilize the most cutting edge technology. Some of the challenges come with how do we integrate it within our for example our routine inspection activity. So it actually augments and builds upon what we're already doing.
I would say that at the outset, we embrace and love technology at SDG and E. I think Brian has definitely led the effort with the company in that regard. What we have to do in vegetation management is to make sure that we utilize those technologies such that we are actually reducing the risk and we are actually achieving what we're trying to do and that is avoid strike potential. At the end of the day for vegetation management that is the goal to again manage that space between trees and power lines. So for example, we have utilized LiDAR.
We use it rather significantly on our transmission lines. We've begun to use it on our distribution lines as well. We have started a use case look at the technology of satellite imagery. Interesting to see how we can possibly marry that with some of the LiDAR data to give us even a more robust look into our operations. What we're doing in vegetation management with regard to technology is really sort of holistically trying to look at all these different data points that could further us along.
So we're trying to do to the best of our ability some predictive analysis with all the data points and I'm going to let Brian talk about that in more detail but as far as vegetation management we build out this vegetation risk index which looks at all these different data inputs. We manage our trees at the asset level. So for example we know every tree in our inventory, we have a rich history of inspection and trimming and clearances. We know obviously where our trees are located relative to our most riskiest circuits or segments of circuits. We're trying to capture as much data as we can to better inform us.
So we look very critically anytime we have an outage because those outages tell us a lot of information on the dynamics and the mechanics of why a tree fails, when a tree fails, how it fails. A critical component of this obviously is use of technology but arguably just as important if not more important is to have a very diligent and robust and frequent inspection activity which we are forced to do here in California because of regulation. So we for example at SDG and E we do two inspections annually every year utilizing certified arborists who not only can utilize the data of these technologies but are skilled and trained to look at potential defects in trees, know trees inherent failure propensities for example, species growth rate, what constitutes a failure point in a tree. So it's knowing tree biology, looking at trees holistically from three sixty degrees around the tree relative to the power line. So bottom line is for us that we really have to not just think about encroachment.
I think most of the utilities now are beyond managing the encroachment. It is trying to proactively avoid, again, the strike potential. And that strike potential can be a branch breakout from a tree close by or tree that's fallen up that if the work could fall at the ground level can strike the power lines. And Brian, do you want to touch any more on our some of the technology that you and your team are engaged in?
Speaker 12
Yes, I do. Thank you, Michael. I'm going to be really brief just to make sure we hand it off, but a couple of things. One, David and Kevin, thank you so much for the presentations, right? I think we strive so much to continue to advance fire science and I think that was a demonstration of kind of the state of the art.
And when I look at the applications of how we integrate that science, there's two ways. And I think it comes down to Kevin something I heard you say, fuel inputs that are needed for the next generation of buyer behavior modeling, right? Not to quote, but really, this is the information that goes into improving fire behavior modeling. And that right now, behavior modeling is the basis for how we prioritize our investments, where do we harden first, how do we go about mitigating the overall fire potential. So with a lot of our planning, I think part of what we're seeing as we continue to get this integrated into fire behavior models, we were able to make more informed, more science based decisions on how we harden the system and manage the risk of wildfire and manage that potential for ignitions.
The additional challenge, of course, too, is how do we operationalize this? And that is a challenge that we take on and it's one that's difficult. We're always working on it. How do we take this information and use it to help us make decisions on public safety power shutoffs, minimize public safety power shutoffs if possible and decrease the impact that these are having on the communities that are in these highest risk areas. So it's really exciting to see this technology.
There are applications in the utility, and we continue to strive to operationalize it, as Michael said, with even our vegetation risk index, right, where we look at every tree. And I think that was something really interesting, right? We can track every tree and start to understand how does that pose an immediate risk to power lines and how does that inform how we operate the system. So appreciate the information. And with that, I'll hand it back to Jessica now or another panelist if they want to jump in.
Speaker 13
this Yes, this is Tom. Here with Southern California Edison. So just to maybe add on to a few things that Brian mentioned and also to talk a little bit about what we're doing at Southern California Edison in terms of our fire spread modeling efforts and how we look at our fuel conditions across our area. We are basically all the IOUs are using the same vendor Tecnosilva to model fire spread. And also I know that we're heavily engaged in a fuels remapping project with TechnoSilva that will actually be completed here in about a month where we've worked with them to remap all our fuels to get away from the LANDFIRE data set that we're currently using in our fire spread simulations to move more towards this remapped fuels layer, which is going to greatly improve our fire spread simulations.
Not only that we not only in use for PSPS, but also just for our long term wildfire mitigation efforts. So that's going to go a long ways in improving those simulations. And like Brian, just looking at the new technology here and really excited to see what's on the horizon, but the challenges we face are the same with how would we operationalize these kinds of new technologies. The other thing I wanted to point out too with all our fuel modeling that we're doing, we're not only modeling live fuel moisture for just to determine the state of the fuels, not only on a daily basis, but also for our PSPS program, but we're modeling dead fuel moisture. We're modeling the green up of the annual grasses.
And we're also going out and sampling our vegetation to assess its health and moisture status. One of the things that we face is a huge challenge for us as Doctor. Kuehle pointed out earlier is the fuel type conversions that we see occurring pretty frequently in our service area because we have fire that's very frequent on our landscape. We are seeing these fuel type conversions occurring with these Chaparral, large sands of Chaparral being replaced by various grasses. And it is a challenge for us in our vegetation management program and how we assess fire potential and fire behavior across our service territory.
So those are some of the challenges that we face. But again, we are really embracing all the new technology that's out there and really excited to be moving forward in this space. I don't know, Melanie, if you had anything to add or we want to pass it on to someone else here.
Speaker 5
Yes, think there's an echo happening. I wonder if everyone is unmuting themselves really quick. Testing, testing, testing. Awesome. Okay, John Healy, you were about to say something.
Speaker 7
Yeah, I just had a comment. Alex Seifert and myself along with climatologists at Scripps have recently done an analysis of Santa Ana wind driven fires in Southern California. And one of the things we did is applied fire weather indices to Santa Ana wind events. And what we found was that parameters such as fuel moisture had no impact on how much area was burned during the Santa Ana Wind event. And that's largely driven by the fact that all of these Santa Ana wind events occur in the fall at the end of a drought, and they're generally always dry so that if one year it's slightly drier or oyster, it doesn't seem to have a big impact.
What really drives these fires is the wind intensity and whether or not a human ignites a fire during one of these wind events. So I think, when we talk about fuels and fuel moisture and those things, we're really talking about parameters that impact non Santa Ana wind events. In other words, summer fires, it appears to be a really important parameter, but probably less so during Santa Ana wind events. And that's those are the events that are most critical in terms of losses of property and life.
Speaker 15
Okay. So heterogeneous fuels are really critical. And even under high wind events, almost all fires start small, maybe some non conventional ignition sources. But the ability to spread across heterogeneous fuel bed, especially when there's bare ground is a factor that both delays arrival and it's not captured in any current fire behavior models. No offense to some of the vendors that are pretty popular around the country.
They don't have access to these kinds of tools. Even in the Santa Ana wind events or any shrub driven wind dominated fire, flanking fire dynamics dictate lateral spread and that's a function of the types of heterogeneity that simply are unresolved in your current model suite. And so you can almost never tell how fast they go laterally, which dictates how many homes and how wide the head fire is when it gets to houses, because they don't resolve those dynamics. And some of those lateral spread dynamics are going to be governed by linear features, whether the roads, power lines or other brakes. And so being able to capture that even in these Southern California type fuels, some of those heterogeneities are going to lead to fire atmospheric feedbacks that are really critical for fire spread and fire patterning, fire tactics at that point.
But maybe beyond the scope of certain utilities in the state, certainly they're relevant to what assets are going to be impacted by fire when we're trying to predict it.
Speaker 5
Thank you. Melanie, did you I wasn't sure if you were on in time to respond to Tom's handoff. Do you have any further comments? I was just
Speaker 11
going to tie this a little bit to vegetation management operations very briefly. Think San Diego covered that pretty well in terms of how do you operationalize this kind of information. So as we mature, that is an ongoing challenge to kind of hit home the few points, fundamental goal is to reduce ignition by reducing contact opportunity, right. And so that means that effectively we are out and about across the territory year round on a cycle that's consistent with the growth patterns of the vegetation in question. So where the risk modeling becomes really important is around how do you do these extra efforts, at least that's where we are today.
We are working through development of a tree risk index that we're hoping we can leverage the inputs from those models and marry that up with our tree inventory database so that we can map that risk propagation information from all of those great sources with our knowledge of tree behavior. I know we spent a lot of time focusing on shrubs and grasses. From a volume perspective, trees do dominate our world. And I think previously someone raised eucalyptus, for example. So what we really ultimately want to get to is this particular tree in this particular location, how do we treat that?
How do we take special circumstances into consideration? So you may have a higher risk in one area and then you need to actually layer on top of that what is the behavior of this actual genus in terms of its propensity to break, fall or grow quickly in a manner that could drive that contact with infrastructure.
Speaker 12
Yeah, I'll just echo, I think a lot of what's already been said, but PG and E as well uses this kind of information to create its risk model and also to make decisions during our power safety shutoff events. Our main goal is to limit the size and scope of those events so that they have the least impact on our customers. This kind of information is what we use to do that, that kind of that type of modeling. Specific to the VEDGE program though, in 2019, PCD Fluids entire distribution high fire threat system for LiDAR to get aerial LiDAR. It gave us an inventory, if you will, of the number of strike trees.
We tried some other types of analysis with that data to some mixed results. We do continue to patrol our transmission system annually for LiDAR and we're moving in a direction specifically where we're looking to expand our ground based LiDAR for post inspection work after work has been complete. So, PG and is very open to trying some of these different technologies, but I would say one of the challenges we still have is we're looking for that road tree that goes down in a windstorm event or that loose branch that comes free. And one of the challenges is a lot of this data so good for directionally targeting where work should be done, it still can't identify that tree and that's a challenge that we're all trying to deal with and face currently.
Speaker 5
Absolutely. Just to reference back, I think that some of Kevin's tools that he presented might have the opportunity for addressing some of those. I also want to ask Eric Brown from SMUD. Do you have any comments?
Speaker 12
Sure. Thank you very much. I appreciate the information and the presentation. Certainly, the data science will provide value to all of us as we're managing similar ecosystem failures and challenges on our systems. SMUD is deploying and has deployed numerous types of technologies, LIDAR remote sensing technologies alike on both our transmission and distribution systems.
We're open to that technology. We embrace it. And we're using it where appropriate outside of traditional inspection approaches. One element that I see value in and Mike DeLowe briefly pointed to this was around vegetation management outage inspections, specifically detailed vegetation failure types by species, by event that I think could be coupled with some of these data points to provide some better operationalized information for the utilities. That may be one area that we could explore further.
I know that outage investigations aren't a typical consideration for all utilities, but from a vegetation management centric position, it's one of the key elements to providing trend analysis going forward. So I see that the value in these technologies certainly and SMUD is embraced and continues to embrace and we'll explore further technologies on our system. But one of the key elements for us at least on the vegetation side is really the trend analysis from the outage investigations as a really baseline starting point for executing vegetation management activities. Thank you.
Speaker 5
Of you have answered one of my additional questions where some of the challenges in operationalizing this. What I would like to say is the encouraging aspect of these technologies to be high resolution both in space and time and in scale. Fact that these tools can be used to expand on our understanding of the entire state of California at higher timescales. Dave, a question for you. How often are you updating the Forest Observatory datasets?
Speaker 3
Thank you. So we currently have annual data from 2016 through 2020, and we'll be updating on an ongoing basis going forward every year. We have the ability to do sub annual updates in areas where there is disturbance that have occurred, but haven't quite found the use case to be able to operationalize that type of data, but it is there. There's also the feature integration of different sources of imagery, such as sub meter resolution imagery from some of these satellite providers that might take us from kind of that groups of trees to large single tree canopies down to kind of the individual, even the branch scale ability to detect locations of trees and branches. So really, there's a lot of capacity out there to utilize and expand temporally.
Just need to be talking with and working with folks who need that sub annual capacity.
Speaker 5
Excellent. Thank you. And so and speaking of which, both of both Dave and Kevin's talks have have relied heavily on LiDAR, which are comps are difficult datasets to come by at times, and the utilities here are collecting much of it. What are the opportunities? I mean, and this is where where the technologies we've just been hearing about are understand like, being able to measure and understand the state of the current environment, but also do advance the science and understanding the coupled and fire behavior, atmospheric and fire behaviors at higher resolutions.
And so it requires large volumes of high resolution data. What are the opportunities here for the utilities to offer some of the data that they're collecting to start advancing this state of the art so that can can know more. And think Eric was referring to that basically in terms of understanding the time series of of the past events.
Speaker 5
It's for no. It's it's actually it's I'm asking the utilities, actually. Collecting wonderful volumes of data. What are the opportunities for collaboration with these groups by sharing data that you collect so that the advancement of the science can continue?
Speaker 13
Yes, this is Tom at Southern California Edison. We'd be happy to collaborate and share our data as much as we can. Of course, we have to figure out how much data we can share and sort of go through the legal process. But the bottom line is we'd love to collaborate, love to share. This new technology is fantastic and they say it's really exciting and we want to embrace it as much as we can.
So any way that we can collaborate, we would be happy to do so. So yeah, we definitely would be willing to share our different data sources that we have through the regular process that we have for sharing.
Speaker 12
Jessica, this is Brian. I'm happy just agree with Tom, right? I think we're in that exact same point where we've seen that the biggest scientific advancements that we have made have been collaboratively through partnerships, partnerships with academia, government agencies and the utility, right? When we work together and we share this data, we advance our understanding so much faster than otherwise. So we certainly would embrace any type of partnership and opportunity to work together with the data to kind of advance the fire science without a doubt.
Thank you.
Speaker 5
If there's I would like to, I think, transition to ask if there are any questions from the Wildfire Safety Advisory Board to the panelists and presenters.
Speaker 6
I have a question. This Alex. Actually is directed to Dave Martin. Relative to your data availability or applicability, of course, your data are very exciting for a research scientist like me. As a shrubland fire ecologist, I am wondering to what extent the data you have cover the entire state of California or is it just limited to the forest?
And the follow on question of that is, it's exciting to see that you're doing all of this burn severity mapping. And I'm wondering if as you move into the future, this is going to include burn severity mapping of fires of any size or do will you have a size cut off? And then finally, are there plans to extend your data repository and analyses beyond California?
Speaker 3
Thank you, great questions. So on the non forest ecosystem mapping. Yes, the data do cover all land area of California, including shrubland, grassland, ag lands. And so I think the we have most of our validation data available from kind of forest areas or some units from Chaparral areas and woodland areas. I think it'd be great to get more field validation that can really tell us, are we getting the fuel loads correctly?
Are we getting the fuel types roughly mapped? But for the most part, the veg cover in height works pretty well in those areas. Second, you were asking about deeper and severity mapping. Yes. So right now we'll be releasing in this next month fires over 1,000 acres.
We would love to there's just some computational issues and also access to some of the smaller fires. We are working, employing the data from NFC. I think they have a, I think maybe 400 acres cut off or something. But yes, if we can get the perimeters, we can map it. I think really small fires, just with the resolution of the data at 10 meters, whether or not it will be valid to map like a five or six pixel fire or something might not make sense, but certainly open to including smaller fire sizes.
And just for clarity, we're not doing anything special to map fires severity. I mean, is very long established metrics to do fires severity mapping. We're just trying to get it out the door much faster than some of the other programs that do similar mapping. And then finally, expansion beyond California. Yes, we're actively expanding to Oregon and Washington right now.
We'd like to expand to the remainder of the Western U. S, at least West Of The Rockies by the end of this year.
Speaker 7
One of the things that I was impressed with when I met with SDG and E about fire issues was they tried to impress upon me the idea that the PSDS program was a temporary solution until other problems were solved. I've observed in discussions with other people throughout the state that message isn't out there that there are many people in the northern part of the state don't see the PSBS program as temporary that some of them see it as a long term problem. And there are even grant proposals about how to deal with PSPS in the future. And so I do think there ought to be some further discussion about what the role of PSPS is in terms of solving short term problems versus long term problems. The other observation I'd make is, I've looked at fire for many decades and one of the things that I've noticed is in general fire issues when it comes to destruction of homes and lives is really often viewed as a wild land urban interface problem.
And other people don't seem to be particularly engaged. With the PSPS program, it's attracted the attentions of hundreds of thousands of people. So despite all the negative feedback we hear about PSPS, there is one positive aspect and that is it's captured the attention of a much greater portion of the population. And to me, that's a good thing. We need to get more people engaged in fire issues.
Thank
Speaker 5
I will say that because it is a monumental conversation, there have been independent workshops on just the PSPS issue itself yesterday and today, I believe. And then if any of the other panelists would like to respond to that comment, please do.
Speaker 5
Okay. So, thank you. Are there any other Board members that have any comments or questions?
Speaker 9
This is a Board Member Mader. These are very impressive tools and analysis that have been shared with us. And as we're as our understanding of fire behavior becomes more developed, it occurs that it is possible that in the decision to initiate a PSPS, let's let's say, the prevailing direction of the wind might be able with this understanding, might be able to factor it in and saying, oh, we must do a PSPS or we can avoid one here, because it isn't just the severity of a fire in one particular spot doing the consequence mapping, but also factoring in real time weather conditions and as they relate to how fires spread with the conditions that are on the topography. So, of course, that that's something has become much more and more sophisticated in order to be able to leverage those tools in the decision making of a PSPS, but you could see where this could be headed.
Speaker 13
Is Tom at Southern California Edison. Was there a question there? I'm just trying to I'd like to respond. Just want to make sure I'm responding to a question.
Speaker 9
Not really question and observation that in thinking as these fire behavior models become more sophisticated and we understand them better that we can leverage them when we're making our decisions about when to initiate a PSPS event. And where, say, a particular wind direction may not cause a catastrophic wildfire or we have confidence that there wouldn't be catastrophic wildfire if it was if the weather is behaving this way because of our knowledge of how fire spread from these tools, whereas in the other direction, we would initiate the PSPS.
Speaker 13
Sure. Yes. So I guess one of the comments I had is that we're in the process of refining our atmospheric modeling, our in house atmospheric modeling efforts that was, I guess it was about a year and a half ago that we started modeling the atmosphere in house. So we brought on two supercomputers to help with that effort. We're actually acquiring two more supercomputers to really redesign our atmospheric modeling and we're going to be modeling the atmosphere at a one kilometer resolution now across our entire territory, which takes a tremendous amount of computing power to do that.
But the reason why I'm pointing this out and mentioning it is because all of that information though all the meteorological information, all our fuel modeling information that comes out of our in house weather modeling directly feeds our forest spread modeling efforts. So the better that data is and the better our fuels mapping layer is, the better our fire simulations are going to be and which will help us to be more targeted with our PSPS decisions going forward. So we're really excited about all the modeling that's going on in house and how that's going to positively impact our spread modeling simulations. Sorry, I think Brian I cut you off.
Speaker 12
No, I just completely agree with what you're saying, Tom, right. And the technology and what we found is the integration of new technology always enables us to focus and start to minimize the impact that public safety power shutoff has on our customers. So the better we understand it, the more we're able to refine the impact, reduce the impact. So just to reiterate that point that technology works in the favor of mitigating PSPS.
Speaker 15
Jessica, this is Kevin. I don't know if it's appropriate for me to jump in as part of the discussion or not, but I just had a thought that I mean, there's so much emphasis on real time modeling, the wind fields that generating, particularly the high velocity winds, downslope compression winds, Santa Ana, etcetera, are known meteorological phenomena and are always going to be terrain and local vegetation modified. And so running synoptic wind fields through some of the higher resolution modeling tools like FireTech HighGrad or QuickFire that we have is capable of being done well in advance to identify potential sites when those synoptic winds come back through. So it's not even about the fire modeling so much. It's about getting down to that meter scale well in advance when you have the time to get there.
And I just wanted to put that out there as really the operational opportunity to use this is not necessarily even once the fire started. It's actually advanced planning, especially when you have kind of the landscape scale data that David
Speaker 12
presented. Kevin, it is a great point from the perspective of SDG and E. We've leveraged some of this kind of composite modeling beforehand to update our design limits of the system. So some areas where originally the system was built for 56 miles per hour, we've measured winds over 100 in these areas because of these localized terrain driven flows, which now we can go in and advance. And in some cases, we have removed the transmission completely because we're frequently seeing winds eighty, ninety, 100 miles an hour.
So we reroute completely. But yes, all of this is taken into consideration. Even when considering what is the most strategic hardening to minimize PSPS. Do you go with covered conductor or do you go underground? And if these terrain flow shows that hurricane force winds are frequent, maybe undergrounding is the best solution for that area.
Speaker 5
Great. And just to I don't want to cut anyone off. Is there anybody else who would like to comment? Okay. I do want to say that one of our hopes and goals of this workshop was to also highlight that all of you have been doing tremendous work advancing the technology in your work, which is advancing the ability to use that technology in other fields.
And, you know, my the the speakers we've asked to come today are in the process in in in many ways of parallel efforts. And so to say to commend what everyone in this room is doing and how a lot of it can be actually pulled together to continue to advance the science together. That's where we're coming from. I'd like to now take it to Kathryn and ask for public comments. And I also want to go ahead.
Speaker 5
Great. Catherine, I'd just like you to check me. Am I missing any other groups that we
Speaker 4
should Yes. Be checking like to open would you like to open the public comment lines on the phone?
Speaker 4
Yes. Let me review really quick the tech. If you'd like to participate in today's public comment, the phone number is +1 (800) 857-1917, and the passcode is 1767567. Please press star one on your phone to get in the queue. You can always email the board at wildfire safety advisory boardcpuc.
Ca dot gov. And then we still will do one last check before the meeting ends of the Webex chat. So with that, operator, do we have anybody on the line?
Speaker 8
I believe, it's Dan Portman. Your line is open. Hello. Am I able to speak? Can you hear me?
Speaker 8
Oh, okay. Great. Thank you. Yes. My name is Dan Courtney.
I live in La Jolla, San Diego County. My family has property in the Yosemite area in Toulumne County, specifically at 11250 Sawmill Mountain Road, Groveland, which is just six miles west of the entrance in the Yosemite National Park on Highway 120. So during the during the rimfire a few years ago, the area was burned through. Our area was right in the middle of the rimfire. And we have by the way, we have 12 cabins on large areas of land with a lot of forest.
We're surrounded by Stanislaus National Forest and again just outside Yosemite National Park. So we have a lot of old growth, multi century instant cedar, ponderosa pine, sugar pine, black oak and so forth. During the REM fire, it came up during the evacuation with escort and found that PG and E was clear cutting all the trees along, you know, through our private properties with, you know, no owners around. The setting is that our properties are on top of a mountain, at top of a ridge. And what happened is that with all the trees that were clear cut, it creates it created a large tunnel through our area, past past our through our properties.
And with they cut down trees that were healthy trees, but they were tall enough to strike the power lines. This was after the fire had already passed through. So with that, what happened is the following year, we believe what's happening is the wind is hitting the side of the mountain and then funneling up through this channel, this tunnel that they've opened up. Because the following year, we lost a lot of other trees, I call them the teenager trees. Those fell down because I'm told because, A, they were no longer shielded or protected by the old growth trees, which have been removed.
And secondly, because of the they had grown up, you know, not being used to sustain having a sustained wind force. So now we have wider corridor closer to our properties, closer to our homes. What I'm learning and the reason for concern is I'm learning that what's happening with the speed of these fires spreading a lot of the times I'm told it's the actually the flaming brands that are being propelled at high rates of speed through these wind tunnels and through this wind shear. Now the with over the past few years, we've had PG and E come out and mark quite a few trees throughout our properties with their enhanced vegetation management program with their marked trees which are way outside the right of way. I had I hired a forester, retired deputy superintendent, Forest Service deputy superintendent Glenn Goskow to assess the trees.
He found that 85% of the trees that have been marked were actually healthy trees with long life expectancy. So we wonder, you know, why that happened, why they were marked for removal, just simply because they were tall enough to strike a power line. What we found is what we seem to be finding out is that the line hardening the line situation, power line is very poor there. Most of it is uninsulated bare wires. We're also seeing to be learning that the vegetation management expenses, are being passed through to the rate payers and actually the FEMA and the post fire situations like after the rimfire.
And also this sort of activity is ongoing now in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Sonoma areas and other footprints of burn areas where the same thing quite a few trees are being clear cut out at site across from the power lines. So we're finding out that apparently the equipment upgrade cost is something that doesn't get passed through as the other expenses do and comes out of the profits. So looking at historically, and I'm almost finished here, so one more piece to read here. What it appears to be is that the CPUC has consistently oh, by the way, in Tuolumne County, we just got an email. It looks like about 85% of Tuolumne County is in high fire threat district either two or three.
Yet only 11 miles of line hardening was conducted, believe 11 miles was the number throughout 2020, very small percentage of the lines and out of this other part. So, what it appears is that the CPUC has consistently and unexplainably failed to mandate strengthened covered conductor and computerized circuit protection from PG and E. Yet SoCal Edison and SDG and E are and have been upgrading extensively. PG and E must be mandated to do so as well. The need to expedite the installation of upgraded distribution line covered conductor is paramount in Tier two and Tier three high fire threat districts.
This is an ongoing crisis of equipment inadequacy and failure that PG and E refuses to address. Replacing fewer than 400 miles per year over the past two years is totally unacceptable. There are many thousands of miles in Tier two and Tier three alone to be upgraded. PG and E is apparently not expert as demonstrated by the Camp Fire and all the other failed engineering has caused some of the other fires. PG and E's persistence and continuing use and installation of bare eight gauge conductor, bare six gauge copper wire, and expulsion fuses is leaving all the people in these areas vulnerable to wildfire, catastrophic wildfires, PSPS and power outages.
Selk Edison has responded reasonably sorry, responsibly to this issue and has accelerated upgrading the steel core triple insulated wire. PG and E's failed safety culture is still broken. One solution we see as options which is much less expensive to undergrounding is simply employing some of the newer technologies such as spacer wire, the cameras and so forth. And we hope that CPSC will start to direct PG and E rather than cutting down 100,000,000 trees which are simply tall enough to strike power lines, as they say that even healthy and green trees are a threat to their exposed wires, that the pressure will get on them to finally address the deck of deferred maintenance in addressing the equipment upgrades and modernization. Thank you for your time.
And by the way, thank you everyone for all the excellent information that's been conveyed during this meeting.
Speaker 5
Thank you very much for your comments. Do we we should go to probably the next caller, please. We are running over time, and we have two more public commenters.
Speaker 1
Yes, thank you. Our next comment comes from Nancy Macie. Your line is open.
Speaker 14
Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity to have attended the webinar. I've really learned a lot. What an impressive bit of technology. And I live in the Santa Cruz Mountains where we had the CCU fire.
And I would very much like to see improvements in how that technology could be used for infrastructure, not just vegetation management, because we're getting hit hard by post fire vegetation management here. The last speaker touched upon that. I represent the Valley Women's Club's Environmental Committee. It sounds kind of funky, but the Valley Women's Club is a 43 old nonprofit organization, very active in the community with many ties locally and nationally. And we've been working hard to analyze and understand the pros and cons and ins and outs of vegetation management and of other means of preventing wildfire.
And we've come to what appears to us to be a really obvious conclusion, which is that the focus needs to be on preventing wildfire, not responding to it, which far too many of PG and E's activities have been. And as the last speaker said, upgrading the infrastructure, there are two main ways. Kudos to Southern California Edison for their extraordinary wisdom in adapting the steel core triple insulated wire to address the problems that they had had in the past with bare wire and other antiquated wire. And for accelerating its installation, they're actually much smaller than PG and E, but they're putting in 3x and 4x the mileage of this upgraded cable than PG and E is. Another point the last person made.
I wanted to also thank kudos to Southern San Diego Gas and Electric because SDG and E has underground significant portions of their line, finding that to be the best way to do it. And boy, that would be helpful in a lot of forested areas in PG and E land. And they are talking about he Mr. Agostino D'Agostino talked about modeling using the modeling for improving the infrastructure. Boy, I'm all for that up here as well.
One of the fastest quick fixes which Southern California San Diego Gas And Electric has been doing is installing types of computerized circuit breakers, which do things like cut off the power if mine breaks within a second or two. And the only problem with them is that it cuts off the power. And ideally, you would have the wire strong enough that you wouldn't need that. But put those two things together and you're not going to have problems with a branch or a balloon causing wildfire. So, I guess my main point is let's use these advanced technologies.
Let's focus on how they can be used to locate exactly where within the high utility associated wildfire areas would to prioritize for infrastructure improvement and to treat the infrastructure improvement as an emergency situation. Let's stop doing PG and E is planning on doing 170 miles of infrastructure distribution line this year. That's absurd. With at least 7,000 miles of bare six gauge copper wire or eight gauge copper wire throughout the tier two and tier three areas. That's the high utility associated fire areas.
It's gonna take too long. We don't have ten years. And that's where the content that Mr. Kelly made that BSPS is going to be PG and E's long term solution if we have to wait another decade to reduce the fire danger. They're only but the their wildfire their vegetation management is only addressing about 25 to 35 of the problems of the things that instigate that initiate wildfires, the igniters.
Other things like vegetation and vehicles and balloons are all contributing to the problem. And 19% of it, at least under the 2020 wildfire mitigation plan, 19% of it is from the conductors themselves. So you've gotta make the improvements. You've gotta mandate the improvements to infrastructure, use these wonderful technologies to help guide where it to go first, make it into an emergency situation so that PG and E and to a lesser extent, the other IOUs who we've gained great respect for in our research. And we're really worried about PSPS for the rest of our lives.
We're worried about fires coming in an area where they aren't needed if they would just upgrade the infrastructure. And they would not have to go around cutting down all the trees. My last comment refers to post fire addressing post fire concerns. PG and E's egregious tree clearing after the CZU fire resulted in five CAL FIRE notices of violation. Notices of violation from the regional quality regional water quality control board.
Another one from the coastal commission. They've received formal complaints from the city of Santa Cruz. The CPUC has and the county of Santa Cruz filed a formal complaint against PG and E related to the same issues. People came home just getting back to see their property and they found piles of trees and slash where trees that were viable were being cut down. And those same people later had brought in experts in erosion control and expert arborists to look at the rest of their trees.
And they were told, leave the trees, they're going to come back or they have the great potential to restore and they'll help hold your hillside. And within days, PG and E was back cutting down more trees. So, this is happening post fire here. We understand that it's happening post fire in Sonoma and Napa. We understand it's happening wherever PG and E thinks it's going to be more convenient later on for them to deal with their wires.
And for us, it's not the convenience of the utility that matters. It's the safety and reliability of the utility that matters. And it's the ability to live safely and to have the forest restored without our watershed and our water supply being threatened. So, I appreciate the opportunity to express those concerns. I hope that those of you on the advisory board will take those to heart.
And please look forward to my written comments because I will include the notices of violation from CAL FIRE because I think you will find them extremely informative as to additional things that should be undertaken in the wildfire mitigation plans. Thank you very much.
Speaker 5
Thank you, Ms. Macy. Would anybody on the panel here like to respond to Ms. Macy or Mr. Portman, the speaker before?
Speaker 12
E are working very diligently to try and prevent these ignitions and help folks to recover. No one at PG and E wants to continue to do PSPS events. It's a necessary thing right now. How long that will be, it's still somewhat unknown. But there are thousands of people working every day to try and prevent these.
I think there's still a lot of opportunity and a lot of areas where we continue to make improvements, and we are definitely going to continue to participate in events such as this to find ways to continue to make those improvements, accelerate those improvements and work together, not only with the Wildfire Safety Division, but the different communities to make sure that the actions we're taking are in the best interest of our customers because that's where our primary focus is. So, if either one of those individuals who spoke up would like to work with PG specifically on some of their challenges and concern, we would be more than open to having those discussions with them and go through whatever the concerns they may have.
Speaker 5
Okay. Great. Well, I believe that is taking us to the end of our workshop a few minutes late. My apologies. Kathryn, is it okay for me to close out the meeting?
Speaker 5
Okay. So, this is an ambitious and productive conversation. I'm really thankful for all of you for being here and spending the time with us. Thank you very much to the presenters and thank you very much to the panelists. I believe we're just scratching the surface and we'd really love to continue the discussions, in particular merging the cutting edge work that the utilities are doing and the cutting edge work that's happening outside of the utilities.
Let's see. These advances in the science are helping us to understand how we can move forward and creating standards towards data and analytics. And we also are aware that standards are can be complicated when our environments are complicated. So I believe we've touched on a lot of important points that I hope become longer term and fruitful conversations in the future. Thank you for joining us today.
We hope you will turn in tomorrow. The Wildfire Safety Advisory Board is having our quarterly meeting tomorrow from one to four And participation information is available on our website at www.cpuc.ca.govwsav. Thank you again, and have a great rest of your evening.
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