PG&E Announces Community Wildfire Safety Program
PG&E is working closely with first responders, civic and community leaders, and customers for this program. Their goal is to reduce wildfire threats and improve safety before the wildfire season begins in Northern and Central California.
In order to help address the challenge of increasing wildfires and extreme weather, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) has announced a comprehensive Community Wildfire Safety Program.
PG&E is working closely with first responders, civic and community leaders, and customers for this program. Their goal is to reduce wildfire threats and improve safety before the wildfire season begins in Northern and Central California.
California’s years of drought, extreme heat, and 129 million dead trees make wildfires a threat to public safety. PG&E is implementing additional precautionary measures in hopes of reducing wildfire risk, with their Community Wildfire Safety Program focusing on three key areas: strengthening wildfire prevention and emergency response efforts, working with customers and first responders to put in place new and enhanced safety measures, and doing more over the long term to harden the electric system to help reduce wildfire threats and to keep customers safe.
"All of us need to work together to make decisions and put in place solutions based on the dynamics of climate change and severe weather events," said Pat Hogan, PG&E's senior vice president of Electric Operations. "Our communities are depending on us to take strong and preventive actions that will protect our state's energy future and help reduce the risk of wildfire in California."
The actions PG&E are taking include:
- Establishing a Wildfire Safety Operations Center to monitor wildfire risks in real-time and coordinate prevention and response efforts with first responders.
- Securing additional PG&E firefighting resources to respond to wildfires, protect poles, power lines and other electrical equipment during fires, and assist utility crews working in high fire danger areas.
- Refining and executing protocols for proactively turning off electric power lines in areas where extreme fire conditions are occurring, and implementing the appropriate communications and resources to help inform, prepare and support our customers and communities.
- Investing in stronger, coated power lines, spacing lines farther apart to prevent line-on-line contact during wind storms, and replacing wood poles with non-wood poles in the coming years.
- Expanding our practice of pre-treating electric poles with long-term fire retardant in areas where the fire danger is high.
- Partnering with communities to develop and integrate microgrids to help support community facility resilience in the event of major natural disasters.