SAN FRANCISCO—Pacific Gas and Electric company (PG&E), California’s largest natural gas and electric utility, announced their Community Wildfire Safety Program’s progress in a news release on Monday, July 15.
The program was introduced in February 2019 and its main objective is to “enhance, accelerate, and [provide] new programs that PG&E is and will aggressively continue to implement to prevent wildfires in 2019 and beyond.”
In the press release, PG&E outlined the changes they implemented to the 2019 Wildfire Safety Program. Some of those changes include:
- Visual inspections of 96% and aerial inspections of 92% of approximately 50,000 transmission structures in high fire-risk areas.
- Inspections of all 222 substations in high fire-risk areas. Inspections of more than 99 percent of nearly 700,000 distribution poles in, or adjacent to, high fire-risk areas.
- The Wildfire Safety Operations Center (WSOC), based in PG&E’s San Francisco headquarters, has received technological and facility upgrades in 2019.
- PG&E will have 600 weather stations in place by the end of 2019 and 1,300 by 2022 in order to provide hyper-local information and increase situational awareness.
- High-definition wildfire cameras have been installed to spot wildfires early on. PG&E has a goal to put 100 in place by the end of 2019 and 600 by 2022.
- The 2019 forecast is to prune or remove approximately 375,000 trees along approximately 2,500 miles of distribution lines. More than 50 percent of the line miles have been inspected so far with 20 percent cleared.
“We’ve accomplished a lot, but there is more work to do. Our system is better today than it was yesterday, and it will be better tomorrow than it is today. We are committed to further reducing wildfire risks and helping keep our customers and the communities we serve safe,” said PG&E Vice President of the Wildlife Safety Program, Sumeet Singh.
To learn more about wildfire safety and what other objectives the company is taking to help communities and customers, visit https://www.pge.com/.
