California Burning: Lessons in Combatting Wildfires

Wildfires are raging across the globe, with devastating consequences. In 2023, nearly 400 million hectares were scorched by wildfires worldwide, with this year’s toll already surpassing 167 million hectares. While advances in technology are aiding in the mitigation and response to wildfires, the threat is also  growing as the climate becomes more extreme.

In this episode we delve into the critical lessons learned from California, a state on the front line of the battle against wildfire. Our expert guests share their strategies for  risk management and explain how to build resilience. Listen now to discover how advanced technologies, such as AI and machine learning, are transforming wildfire management and response, and building a more resilient future.

Key learnings from this podcast:

• Explore the role of climate change in fueling these devastating fires
• Uncover innovative strategies for wildfire mitigation and prevention
• Discover how advanced technologies are being leveraged to enhance risk assessment and response strategies.
• Learn actionable steps to protect communities and ecosystems from this growing threat.

Host:
David Metcalfe – CEO, Verdantix

Guests

• Andrew Abranches, Senior Director, Wildfire Preparedness and Operations at PG&E
• Mark S. Ghilarducci, Former Director of the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services; President and CEO at Emergent Global Solutions.

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Transcript

David Metcalfe

Hello, I'm David Metcalfe, the CEO of Verdantix. Verdantix is the essential thought leader for world enhancing innovation. I'd like to welcome you to the Curiosity Applied podcast. Where we debate topical issues relating to the scale, shape and velocity of change in the business. Today we will be talking about wildfire risks, business continuity and public safety. Recent years have seen wildfires taking place around the globe at an unprecedented scale. Wildfire seasons are extending into spring and even to into snow season locations that were previously. And touched by. Wildfires and now having to respond to this natural peril. In this special episode of the Vedantic podcast, I am joined by two guests who will be sharing their lessons learned from California's challenges and responses. Our hope is that other communities can leverage these learnings to improve their own risk management practises. So I'm delighted to introduce Mark Ghilarducci, who from 2012 to 2023 LED emergency services and Homeland Security for the state of California as the director and Homeland Security adviser. Great to have you with us today, Mark. We also have Andy Abranches who is senior director for wildfire preparedness and operations at Pacific Gas and Electric Company, or PG&E Andy. We're welcome to you as well. Well, let's get started and I'm sure people are keen to understand more about the. Responsibilities that you have so, and if we could start with you, what are you responsible for in your role at PG&E?

Andy Abranches

Should in in my role of PG&E I'm responsible for overall wildfire strategy which really comes down to for the utility. What exactly are we going to do and what are we going to build upon? What are we going to stop doing with regards to wildfire preparedness? Modifying mitigation efforts. And this really covers a couple of different areas. One area it covers is, you know in here specifically how do you respond to wildfires? The approaches you take and then looking long term, what do we need to do to specifically try to get this risk in a more manageable level? It is a an existential risk for the company. And so under me, I do have various teams. I have a risk modelling team. I have a team that specifically monitors ignition events in part as fires around the globe to see what we can learn from them, and then very importantly, as part of the as part of the responsibility to the state and in compliance with. Our regulations in California we file a wildfire mitigation plan like other utilities in the state do, and in that built by mitigation plan, we explain what we're gonna do. What's the time horizon? We're gonna do it on and what's these estimated risk reduction we get from that work?

David Metcalfe

Interesting. Yeah, it's a multi pronged team that you have working across a wide range of. Work streams. Mark, could you give us an idea of what you did for over a decade in your role? As Homeland Security advisor.

Mark Ghilarducci

Sure. So my overall arching responsibility is really to coordinate statewide public safety, Emergency Management, Homeland Security for the state of California. You know, clearly California is, you know, one could say a nation state, 40 million people, lots of different kinds of challenges and. And certainly, the risk of wildfire has been prevalent in the course of the last 1015 years. I mean, really, California has always seen wildfires, but the extent, the extreme nature of wildfires, the speed at which they move, the climate related changes associated with that have all driven. The need to have a much more robust, you know, situational awareness and response capability. So my role was really as the top person in the governor's office responsible for managing all of the different aspects of how we prepare, how we prevent how we respond and then ultimately. How we recover? Are from disasters and emergencies of all sorts.

David Metcalfe

One of the things that you mentioned there when you think about the risk assessment that you have to do or that Andy would need to do at PG&E is how the hazard has changed over time given that you were in that role for a decade, how would you say that the extent of the wildfire? This has changed since 10 years. The guide.

Mark Ghilarducci

Well, certainly it's climate driven. We have seen an extensive amount of drought starting in around 2012 or so that lasted a good five years and that really set the baseline for what would happen in the next five years with regards to ground level moisture. The you know groundwater levels just generally the amount of drying of the force and vegetation that we saw throughout the state of California. We also combined that with increased amount of growth in what we call the woolly or the wildland urban interface. You know where we saw more construction more. Building communities being developed along in in those particular areas of the state, and certainly an increase in population, people moving around and all of these, these are factors. And then we also saw an increase in growth in vegetation, right? So vegetation management strategies and policies over the course of the last 20 years. Really. Really were about, you know, sort of Environmental Protection, managing the force in a way of not taking too much out of the forest. And I think that, in retrospect, you know, lot was learned from that. And. And one thing that was learned was that you have to have a healthy forest. And that means that to have a managed forest, that it means to have a forest. That has a density level because wildfire is really good in force, but having a force that is not. Really. Dense and thereby creating so much fuel or so much ground fuel that the fires cannot be controlled once they get started. So all of these are factors and then I would just say lastly we've seen because of the climate related challenges probably more wind events in recent times, more stronger or we call extreme wind events. That we've seen in the past, I mean, we've always had Santa Ana winds and we've had N winds in the Northern California and Santa Ana winds in the Southern California area. But the extent of the amount of winds that happen now and how much they actually are impact. All aspects and you know particularly utilities as Andrew mentioned have been a factor because they do have an impact on our electrical infrastructure, which has been you know arguably one of those areas where a lot of work needs to be done to upgrade and keep those maintained, you can't defer. Maintenance on those you need to have a very robust activity to prevent and protect those.

David Metcalfe

See quite a few factors there, some natural, some more about what you know, human developments are doing, and maybe creating more hazards than they would otherwise be. And do you have a risk modelling team who worked for you and you know, one of the things we wanted to dig into today was about the greater variability in weather patterns and how that's exacerbating the risks. Could you build on what Mark was just saying about, you know, what's going on with the, you know, wind patterns and? How you see that coming through in? Your risk modelling.

Andy Abranches

So playing off what? Uh, what Mark was saying specifically I think in 2012 to the you know, the 2014, 2015 time period with that drought, uh, it created a lot of situations with the broader forests in and around the electrical lines, but also in the broader forests right here, the drought that you put those. Are those trees in stress? And since the trees are in stress now, you had situations with Bach beetle infestation. I'll further exaggerating the problem from a risk modelling perspective. We do risk modelling in two separate ways. One is what we call operational risk models. This is looking at it really on a short term basis. The one to five day uh forward look ahead, prime primarily from a weather situation. But it's also. A weather situation relative to where the utility assets are located and as Mark indicated, you know our utility assets are based. The spread out well across the wildland urban interface, and so that creates the overlap between where the risk profile is and where we could experience basically extreme weather events. Now these extreme weather events, we don't measure them specifically in the risk model. We monitor them because. It's really hard to look back and say, hey over the last 10 years worth, here's what the weather event has been and model it exactly that way, because you're what you're seeing is you're seeing a cycle where it's getting more extreme as the years pass on, driven by higher temperatures fundamentally from what we've observed. So what we do is we forecast out ahead. And our strategy has been to change how we operate the grid in those higher forecasts, but specifically to what Mark was saying and what you're referring to, we have seen extreme weather events. That's the way I put it, which is you have extreme drought as we indicated, extended periods of extreme drought interspersed. With periods with extreme rain last winter season, we didn't see it, but the prior winter season we had something like 12 atmospheric rivers hitting California. And prior to that, it was like 5 atmospheric rivers. You're also seeing extreme weather events in terms of dry lightning storms. 2020 saw a massive amounts two or three really, really large, dry lightning. What dry lightning does in a. Forest. That's. This thing, there's no rain, but you're getting lightning strikes when there's. Low relative humidity and even if it's not around electrical lines which you're getting is that start of a wildfire that could burn out electrical assets. Now Mark's point was our electrical grid. Was built in a time period where you expected these forests to be moist and so you had bare conductor running through the forest. Now, when you have extremely dry forests, bare conductor becomes very dangerous because bare conductor and high winds. If it comes down, it starts to spark and the fire triangle is fundamentally an ignition source. Do you have fuel and you have oxygen. Now the oxygen is supercharged when it's high winds. And so that's what we've seen these pretty massive wildfires. But so the risk profile really we cannot control to some degree the weather, the wind as well as the relative humidity. We can control is the assets that we have and to Mark's point, we can control the fuel load that. Exists in the forest. And so the efforts both on the state side as well as on the utility side is to try to tackle that aspect of it. What do we do about the? Vets and what do we do about the vegetation around not just the assets around in the General forest and you know on a good note, a lot is being done to move that that forward and change the risk profile which is the big the challenge. How do you stay ahead of the risk profile. So it doesn't become catastrophic are you want? Official 5.

David Metcalfe

Yeah, I think you've brought up a number of issues actually that that I wasn't aware of. We see this quite a bit with severe industrial accidents where the original engineering concept for an asset is was based on studies from the 40s or 50s. To your point about expecting it to be a moist forest environment and for instance, there are a number of mining accidents where rainfall patterns change so much that actually the tailings dam for instance is no longer sufficient. Or you look at the Panama Canal. That is fed by reservoirs and rainfall patterns have changed so much so that really creates a connection. I think with some of the other hazards that that we see out. There. So could we just in terms of what you're doing on this, it sounds like the problem you have is that? In a world where you can quantify risks, you can have risk models that would help you tell you what to do. But what you're saying is the level of uncertainty is such that you can't really do that. You're not able to predict where the fires are most likely to take place.

Andy Abranches

Maybe let me. Approach this strategy that we've approached. First of all, you recognise right? What can you control? What can you not control? Right. We can't control the winds. We can't control the relative humidity and even predicting that aspect of it. You know you can't predict it six months in advance. You have a general idea, but your predictions even with the most advanced computers. Right now, and AI and machine learning, we predicted about 10 days in advance at the most right. And that is actually super advanced in terms of predicting that far. 10 days in. Advance So what you can do is you can operate the grid differently as you look at. In the recent time period, what you can also do though is given the historical patterns where fires have occurred. You can understand where your assets are and you can say this location is at the highest risk. When I do a long term view. So we have what we call planning risk models that take a long term view and said it's very likely that a fire will occur in this location and if it does occur in this location, the consequence of that. Will be pretty severe and dramatic given its proximity to structures, to people in the wary in interface now at that. Our choice is to rebuild the grid. And that's where we are planning on doing a pretty massive level of undergrounding work. Now, in places that are not as risky to Mark's point. Change the inspection and the maintenance cycles to accommodate and understand the level of stress that that, that, that exposed utility equipment is seeing over and above its design life or design margin.

Mark Ghilarducci

The other piece is the need. Well, there's two things. One is that. Really we mentioned the cascading impacts from you know one thing leading to the other and that really has a necessity for us and government us as a society to not only recognise what the risk of a threat is but then to change accordingly to be able to be as resilient to that change as possible. Right, so a huge amount of public education goes along with what Andrew's talking about, and that's been a huge effort that we've done out here of making sure the public, our communities are aware of what the wildfire risk looks like in their communities. There's a lot of this that actually is a personal responsibility. You know, you don't when you buy a home in, in, in, in a particular area, you should always do a, you know, essentially a risk assessment to understand the kind of risk to threat. They're existing around where you live. Are you in a floodplain? Are you in a wildfire zone? Right. Are you next to an airport? There's just all these things that are necessary and then a plan accordingly. And so there's been a very large effort in the case of. Wildfire and climate related impact, but particularly wildfire because they move so rapidly and they're so catastrophic. And unfortunately they kill a lot of people. We want to make sure that it's a all hands on deck sort of approach, right. The community, the individuals in the community, our schools, our school children all the way up to our government. Leaders understanding what the threat is and that partnership between our utilities and our government evolved over the course of the last 10 years or so and that's been evidenced a lot by what Andrews talked about it of where PG&E was at. In like 2015 and where they're at now, really, I would say, you know, probably the world leader in wildfire assessment and mitigation. But you know they have a massive service area and a lot of vegetation that needs to be managed on a regular basis. So, they have to hit it with a multitude of things education. Nation's infrastructure improvements, risk assessments, response operations, etcetera and a very, very tight coordination and collaboration with the response agencies, fire and Emergency Management organisations at the local and at the.

David Metcalfe

State level, I mean that's a huge amount of complexity given the scale of the operations. And the high level of uncertainty, one of the things that I think helps with this is that the wildfire risk monitoring and mark, I believe during your 10 year you know this is one of the big areas of improvement. Could you just give a sense of like what has been put in place to, you know, provide that monitoring and then who has access to the information, who has access to the camera feed and then what can they do with it?

Mark Ghilarducci

You know, it's not just the government and you know, it's our utilities as well have really stepped up in the area of wildfire monitoring, etc. It it's really leveraging new technologies now. You know as we go into the AI and you know, machine learning environment, you know leveraging all of that to help us streamline this effort. You know, when I started in the business back in the late 70s, you know, early 80s, you know the fire service, we would get 150,000-acre fire. In California and that would, we would consider a campaign fire once in a lifetime. You know, if you're in the fire service, you'd have 150,000 acres. Fire and that was a pretty big deal. It didn't happen that often. They happened, but they didn't happen that often. We could date back to the 1960s and the Bel Air fires in Southern California where we lost, you know, parts of Beverly Hills and in the Hollywood Hills. Now, you know, fires are, you know, easily get to 1,000,000 acres or more. And you know, it's really a scary, you know, thought that the fires can get that big. So, along the way, we've had to really, you know, go from what we typically would have as a what we call predictive analysis, which was sort of media logically driven assessments. In other words, understanding what the weather patterns we're going to do kind of point in time on a fire and you know sort of a microclimate sort of environment. To now a much broader sense of what's happening in the environment as a whole, and you talked about 10 days out, you know that is sort of the idea behind the state of California putting in the wildfire threat intelligence and Information Centre this that was called the lift tech. Modelled after the National Hurricane Centre, which is really the idea was is if they could see hurricanes on the East Coast developing five and six days out and then doing enough analysis through, you know, predictive analysis through their understanding of risk mapping, looking at the historical records. And then considering what the weather, we're gonna do, determining where the cone of that hurricane was going to make landfall, and then in a pre-event manner, evacuate people, why could not we do that on the West Coast with wildfire? And I think that. Capabilities had not yet existed or evolved, I should say, to make that that sophistication take place until the last few years, where we essentially started to do that and we were able to see fire weather evolving, better science, better, better models several days out. And that did a number of things first. Of all it gave us, and this is even before a fire started, right? So, so and I'll get to that in a second. But the pre-event was looking at the weather patterns and what was evolving and setting up to have what we call fire weather or red flag conditions, the ability to determine in a pinpointed way another what parts of the state. We're going to be most impacted by red flag conditions. With that, we would then be able to pre plan pre notify those communities we would use through social media and other forms. Of information sharing, push out maps and other kind of digital data that would determine kind of the community that would be involved. This is really part of empowering the Community to act in their own best interest, right? This is part of that public education piece and in fact we not only would push that information. Now we would work with the with the news media to amplify the message about what parts of the state, what parts of the community of your community specifically was going to be the most potentially impacted and in fact what we would do in those areas. We would then preposition fire. Assets, whether there are helicopters, firefighting helicopters, fire engines, firefighters. We would pre. Position them into those areas so that they would have an immediate response. In other words, just basically lie down the time it take the to dispatch a unit. We would have them in the Community so that we could keep fires small or. In the event of an extreme sort of circumstance. We would pre evacuate a community because the risk was so high and so all of that was coordinated through multiple entities. You could imagine not only the public, the media, but our local governments, our local fire departments, our utilities, etcetera. Once the fire started, we also needed to know. And would help us to buy down that response was where the fire was located and to get there we launched a very robust programme in California called alert wildfire cameras, where we basically essentially. Really, you know, working with a lot of different partners, I mean, Federal, State, local, private, placed very high definition cameras throughout state of California, mostly in the in the mountainous areas. But you know really now I'd say I would say 99.9% of California is covered which are attenuated to. Focus on identifying fire start so we could actually see a, you know, Andrew mentioned a lightning strike up in the. Mountains. We may not have known that lightly strike existed until the fire was really burning big time. Now though, those alert cameras can actually identify a smoke column very, very early, and we can then support that within flying intelligence aircraft over the areas being able to do a predictive analysis. Getting real time in. Information and we even used satellite communications satellite what we call fire guard. The idea where the fire is located, what the vegetation load is, what the rate of spread of that fire could be given the heat, the humidity and the wind that is existing at the time. All of that is fed into the wildfire threat intelligence Centre and is pushed out. To the community and has also pushed out the local and state responders that are responding to these fires so that there is informed as possible. So a lot has actually happened and there's more, but there's a lot has happened in this collaborative effort over the course of the last. Ten years and so while the utilities have really increased their game, so has the state and we've sort of done this in parallel actions.

David Metcalfe

I mean, it sounds like a very sophisticated system, which, as I said in the introduction, hopefully other locations around the world could learn from and we will specifically have you done at PG&E. To you, I guess you're more focused on. Protecting your infrastructure, but also preventing it from being the cause of fire.

Andy Abranches

Let me play off what Mark was saying. First of all, it has been a massive joint collaborative effort between the state taking a very, very big lead. The utility is playing a big role given the nature of the assets. But there's a lot of public, private other partnerships in play, right? I'd like to call out, you know, the, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation that's taking a very active role in trying to basically support us new ideas and new innovation into this space. And So what you see in California today is and I'll give you some numbers within the PD service territory, right, which is pretty much most of Northern California, you have 1500 weather stations. You know these are weather stations. Terrestrial weather stations industrial grade that provide information relatively like every 10-15 minutes and you can bring them so you can get the information from those weather stations every minute if you need and that's public for everyone to consume and build into. The risk models. The cameras that Mark was talking about. Across the state of California, you have over 1200 cameras today that are constantly scanning both the weather stations and the cameras are currently AI capable. And what I mean by that is the let's give you the cameras. They're constantly spinning. If they spot a tendril of smoke, they will stop. Other cameras around will triangulate the message, goes to the warning centre that Mark says the message comes to your utility as well to say, hey, there's a location there. We will check our assets if need be, we will take action then. But that allows response agencies like Cal Fire to dispatch to suppress when the conditions are extremely dangerous to suppress. So our role is how do we support what we called ignition detection and post ignition response in the best way possible. So that's the, you know, after the ignition has happened. Now ideally we don't want an ignition to happen. So what do we do prior to that, right? When conditions are really high, when the danger is really elevated because you get high wind conditions, you can you can get that projection from meteorological data. You know California has actively starting with San Diego Gas and Electric take and started to take what we call a public safety power shutoff, which means if the winds. That over a certain threshold, we will turn the power off so that you don't get the situation where a power line gets blown down or a tree falls into a power line and knocks it down and starts a spark. On high windy day. But when the days are not as windy, you have the other option, which is to say you have in the electrical system a way that what we call protection schemes, right? Where if something is going out of kilter, you have the ability to turn the power off based on. The device itself. And so we have something called enhanced power line. Safety settings. Other utilities in California use the same basic technology. It's called fast trip. And what this does is it makes the settings on devices that already exist on the grid more sensitive when the conditions are not at the high windy, but you have a hot, dry summer day where if something happened it could get to be really large. It could get to be a really large fire. Now those provide you the protection in the short term. While you go about doing the long term work and the long term work is really rebuilding the infrastructure because extreme weather events are going to take a toll on the infrastructure. So the best you can do is either you do covered conductor. And that's been done aggressively in Southern California, partly because the tree density over there is not as high in. The PD service. Territory we're very heavily focused on undergrounding because the tree density is much higher than Southern California. And then in the intermediary enormous amount of veg management work around the assets, you know a much higher sensitivity to inspections and repairs, but the inspection has changed. Before you would inspect an asset from the perspective of. Is this asset going to fail and cause a reliability problem cause an outage for customers? The thought process now in these high danger zones is, is the asset going to fail and cause an ignition? So you've. Taken a much more different view of inspections, which triggers a much different view of maintenance as well. So that's kind of gives you the full spectrum from the near. To how do? We build for the long term and how do we deal with the medium term?

David Metcalfe

Fascinating. And one of the innovations that you talked about is the public safety power shut off, which you know, I can understand, could be challenging in terms of getting buy in from communities to do that. Can you give a sense like, how frequently do you have to do that?

Andy Abranches

It's very, very dependent on the weather, so to give you a context like as we said right now, right, we are forecasting. Taking a public safety power shut off in the northern part of our state today, starting later this week. In the next, in the next 24 to 40. 8. Hours. So we have already started the notifications of that. Because of the forecast right back to what Mark was saying, but. You know, last year we took a couple and we got better at narrowing it down as the meteorological data and the ability to triangulate it down to just where you need it is better. And then a couple years ago we anticipated, but the weather didn't show up. So we didn't, you know, we didn't take any public safety power, shut offs we had a year with 0. Now, in 2019, when we were first getting uh, let's put it our sea legs on public safety power shut offs. We had a situation where in 2018. If we had taken public safety power, shut off on that transmission light, we probably would not have had the campfire. Right now our thought process and our thinking in. Build where we said, hey, you don't need to take public safety power shutoff for transmission. We're now in Northern California. We would take it on transmission or distribution. If the wind conditions cross certain thresholds, so in 2019 we took a massive public safety power shutoff and I think Mark would remember that, you know, in Northern California we shut off over a million households, which could translate into, you know, like 2 million people were without power for a number of days are because of that. Because the reason is when you take a public safety power, shut off. It's not just that you take it off and then you wait for the weather conditions to pass, but after the weather conditions pass. Because you don't have any electricity flowing in the. Lines. You need to patrol every line to check that there's no vegetation in the line or the pool hasn't broken. And make sure that you don't energise that until after the patrol has been completed. Say it is safe to energise, so that takes actually a fair amount of time to patrol, especially depending on the size of the event. And if I could spend another minute on this. Today we're dealing with an event that's upcoming just honestly today and tomorrow, and over the course of this week in the 4th of July. But it's a very unique combination. And I'll talk about it from the perspective of the customer. The combination we have is we have a red flag warning. And we have a heat event. So because there's a red flag warning, it means the wind conditions are going to be elevated if the wind conditions are going to be elevated past a certain threshold, you will turn the power off. Well, if you turn the power off during a heat event, you have a number of customers now that are dependent on their air conditioning and their cooling to survive that heat event. And they require electricity to do that. So now you've got the situation. How do you provide support for those customers that you've turned the power off, but it's too hot for them to be in? Their home so. All the authorities in California, in conjunction with, you know, with Cal OES and other state agencies we provide what's called Community resource centres. Where we will provide AC water charging for that thing so that that Community can come out there for the general community. I have the other situation and it's very, very important. We have these access and functional needs customers, but these are customers that are dependent on electricity because it powers the medical devices. They have in their home. Right, and you've got to, you've got to be very well aware and put yourself in the shoes of someone who's got an access or functional. Needs. They don't have the flexibility to just get up and. Leave their house. Even if we want them to evacuate and if we want them to move right now, it's a fire coming. There's extensive outreach to get them away from the house because they need to get out. But if it's just going to be a power outages, we've started the process for the last four years, right. We provide them batteries, we provide them situations so they can survive through that power outage. In their home and have temporary power to manage through the situation or because they have that medical need specifically or they have some level of a handicap when they need support. So those are, you know, like Mark said, there's a full range of activity that takes place and I cannot be more grateful for the level of coordination. And cooperation with the state, with the nonprofits. But actually you have to give credit to the population of California now living in that right. They're much more amenable to understanding the needs for this. When we first started it, it was there would be a lot of grief about it. Now nobody wants their power off. But people also understand that the. Level of risk is. Really, really high. And there's a great deal of. 1st that you're turning it off or you're taking the taking the action because the danger is imminent.

Mark Ghilarducci

Can I just say a? Couple of things because it's so counterintuitive. If you think about it, you know most everybody else in the world wants to do everything to keep the power on. And we were actually proactively turning the power off. So you know it, it was a. Big deal. When? When we first started, it was literally we. We actually made it a state of emergency. It was a very. Very significant matter, but as Andrew said. And this is where it gets into this whole issue of public education, the public has become a partner in this, and that's why it's so critical. And so now it's in many cases, if the winds coming up and all of the conditions because the public knows what those conditions are, they're asking the question when are we going to have PSPS because of this? Event so you know, because of that, all boats have risen in the tide and it, you know, everybody's understanding, kind of where we're at and the need to do this in addition. PG&E and the other utilities have become more sophisticated in establishing micro grids, and you may want to talk about that a little bit. The ability to carve out critical infrastructure like hospitals, 911 centres, certain schools that may serve as evacuation centres, etcetera, so. They can actually carve those out in the ability to keep those the power flowing to those areas based upon. New technology and the ability as they've evolved and we've learned over the course of years, we know now that these PSP's have actually prevented fires from taking place. And that's really what the goal of this was of being able to do Community protection overall. We're still having fires, but we're having less. Fires as a result of utility caused power lines coming down and that that of course has been a big problem for the. Utilities throughout the state where these power lines come down and they start fires and in the wind event where you have a fire, then something with a high voltage amount of coming down. It causes this the you know pretty good sized fire that can be off to the races right away. So this is this is actually. And a very, very positive thing. Again, I was there from the. Beginning and I will tell you, it was extremely controversial around the world. I've had people reach out and say what exactly are you guys doing out there? Because this is very, very much like, you know, we never heard of such a thing. So, but now I think that it's a, it is a model and it does take sophistication and it takes an extreme amount of coordination of. All the different levels and the public to actually make this a successful operation.

David Metcalfe

Clearly this is helping a huge amount. The monitoring the public safety power shut off so that stops a certain percentage of fires starting. And then clearly fires are still being started through natural causes or. You know the you know, bad cases of peoples barbecues or whatever it may be. And so I mean you were talking mark earlier about you're talking about a million acres burning and I know the state of California send a huge amount to upgrade its firefighting capabilities. But it's still I think anyone who follows a wildfire knows that that you get the information about the level of containment. It still seems that you will still get fires that are so large that you can't contain them. Is that a fair observation?

Mark Ghilarducci

Yes, I mean, I think that given everything we've talked about of the amount of vegetation. But mostly because of the. Of the weather that's driving these extreme weather patterns that are driving the conditions that that move the fire forward when you get into the particularly these timber fires where you get what they call topping out you know the fire can sometimes burn. At a lower level, and then can come back and burn at a higher level most of. These are. Wind driven and heat driven. There's very, very little humidity in the air and the conditions are just right for these to go. And once you get that. Wind behind it. It's almost impossible to stop that fire. You can try to contain it as much as. Possible you can cut line. You can use pound it with aircraft. All of those things are going to be critical to be able to try to divert it around communities or prevent communities, but the truth of the matter is, until the winds sort of get to a place where they're more manageable, it is. It is a very, very big challenge. That's why. Hazard mitigation building resilient community. Things you know having you know defensible space, all of those things really, really matter. You have these kind of conditions because those are the kinds of things that can actually have a very, very positive outcome in, in you saving your property or even saving your.

Andy Abranches

Life what Mark was saying. If a fire is starting in a grassland, right? Even if you have heavy winds, it will spread that fire, and in the recent months in the month of June this year, right, we had a large number of fires in California. Why? Because in the last two years we've had relatively mild seasons. And then we had a nice extended rain period. So California almost if you looked around California in the middle of may, it looked like it was island, it was beautiful and green across the board, right then the heat set in. But the grass crop was really high and so by the time you were at the first week of June 2nd week in June, you had that Golden Brown. You could call that gold in California, right? But you have the Golden Brown California landscape. Now you get a small ignition with even a little bit of wind. The grass will burn really fast. But the grass fires don't tend to be the dangerous fire. Because the grass is just burning out, you can get containment routed. When you get it in a location where there is heavy timber. Now what you get is if you have overgrown underbrush from the start of the base, you have these ladder fuels which will allow the fire to climb up to the tree tops. And then if you have the circumstances as it's climbing up to the tree tops, you get a series of wind storms coming in, especially when we call Diablo winds in the North and Santa Ana winds in the South, the Diablo winds hitting at the treetops is what will really spread the fire so that when we talk about the million acre fires, right, there were two million acre fires. And these were fires in 2021. One was the Dixie Fire. It started when a tree fell on a PG&E power line and started the ignition when it initially started the ignition. The wind conditions were not that great. It that fire got bigger. And then you had that set of weather conditions come in that really spread that fire because when it started. We didn't have a red flag warning condition. It was a blue sky summer day. But further down, once the wind picked up, it got to be a size of a fire that you couldn't control. The other was the counter fire, which started in a in a campground in a sense where from that point on you didn't have wind on the time when the ignition started. And that's important because in the past when we thought of dangerous fires, we primarily thought of them during red flag warning days. In 2021, what we saw as 4 fires that were large, the Caldor, the Dixie, the McFarland and the monument fires which we call, we started calling them. These are vegetation driven fires because the fuel load that was there, it allowed the fire to get large and as the winds picked up over a case, it spread into a pretty massive. The thing, but initially it wasn't due to the wind issue until earlier point, David. When you think about fires from a source right, 90% of the fires really occur from human type of interaction. So the campground, you know the, the, the, the, the secret brought out the car or utilities, it's anywhere where there's human interactions 90% happen and 10% is from nature. What we're trying to do is control the 90% utilities are doing a better job in California. I'll give you some statistics. When we started in 2017. We had something like 150 to 180 ignitions. In our high five threat districts. That was CPC reportable. That number has been dropping, and last year it was 65. But because of our methodology has gotten better. We've also said it's not just any ignition, it's ignition and high risk emissions. So last year our high risk condition ignitions were 28. And so from 2017, that's now a 75% reduction in high risk condition ignitions. And the goal is to try and take those down to 0 overtime like this year. We've up to this point this year we've had two of those type of ignitions. Now we're not entered into the heart of the season. But we're. We're right in the middle. It tends to be actually July and August tend to be the worst because when the winds pick up in September and October, you can use public safety power. Shut up. It's in that hot, dry summer conditions when the wind thresholds are not that high that you're actually in, in, in. In a more a risky position, well.

David Metcalfe

I have so many more questions that we didn't get around to talking about business continuity, evacuation planning. And so on. But I. I knew that there would be a huge amount to talk about and I think it's very encouraging how much progress has been made in the last decade in terms of the monitoring, you know, rethinking the approach to having more stable infrastructure and you know, ultimately I'm sure the work that. Eight of years done has saved a lot of lives, so it's been great having you Mark and Andy on the podcast today and I'm sure that people from other regions who are focused on environmental risks will learn a lot from what you've shared with us. Say thank you both very much. Concludes today's episode of the Curiosity Appliance Podcast, brought to you by Vedantic thank you for listening. If you would like to deepen your understanding of today's topic, we provide complimentary access to our library of research content for eligible practitioners. Search for Verdantix Vantage and register today. We'll release a new podcast every month. If you enjoyed the show and want to be notified when a new episode is released, follow or subscribe to the Curiosity Applied Podcast and Leave us a rating. We also have an e-mail for feedback in the show notes. Please do. Get in touch.