 This is your host, Guillermo Saladier, and welcome to the show of A Perspectives on Energy here in things like Hawaii. Again, I am the director of international services for HSI, the Health and Safety Institute, where we are one of the products we offer is training in industrial skills. Before I begin the show, I just wanted to express my deepest condolences and sadness that we share on what and why it's undergoing right now with the tragedy of these fires. So many lives lost and so much loss overall, hoping that the missing are found and that this sort of tragedy is addressed quickly and doesn't happen again. But definitely is something to watch and it is again a tragedy. So thank you for, thank you for attending today's show. And we're going to discuss the, usually the ongoing issues with wildfires. And a lot of times it's what role of any utilities play in this and specifically when it comes to vegetation management. Now as it is now, right, with the fire in this particular instance, right, there's a lot of speculation at this time regarding whether the utility in charge there was responsible in some form for this fire starting or having some kind of equipment failure. Well, at this time it's, I will point out that that is currently under investigation. And like any due diligence and water utility, they are going to run this down to understand what the root cause was. I'm sure not in an effort to avoid blame, but rather in an effort to find what happened to make sure this doesn't happen again. That being said, right, it's, I still don't have an opinion at this time regarding what happened or what the root cause was. I will, however, discuss what, how some of these wildfires start and oftentimes what role vegetation management has played in certain utilities. Their, their examples of those include what had happened in California, something is happening right now in, in Canada and what I've experienced myself in Florida. There's quite, quite distinct differences in all of those environments, right? So I can imagine these differences also play a role in what is happening in Hawaii at this time. Let's start off with the fact that climate, climate changes of course has an impact on how certain areas become drier than others. Some of them may be seasonal, but some of them may be exacerbated and pronounced due to, due to the climate differences or, and one of those in this case perhaps was the fact that in other places, it's like that warmer than normal temperatures and reduced rainfall, which leads to a certain dryness in the vegetation. One point, well, something that I wanted to point out of course is that in wildfires in California several years ago, a lot of those were brought about with a combination of factors. One of those, of course, was the, the change where they were no longer allowing controlled burns in some of those forests over, over many years. Ultimately not having a controlled burn in certain forests, of course, creates a lot of undergrowth and underbrush that becomes fuel for a fire later on and a much more powerful fire and it spread a lot more quickly. So that was one contributing factor. Of course, a fight that had been a prolonged drought in the area along with quite a bit of winds also caused a problem. Now there were, there's some of the fires started with lightning strikes and what there's, and usually those were a significant occurrence where a fire begins, excuse me, but according to according to EI the Gov, a lot of these like wildfires usually start off with, well, I'm sorry, according to the U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service, a lot of those fires, wildfires began of course due to some kind of human intervention, whether it's a campfire, a cigarette, but or leaving some equipment running or some equipment failure. The rest of those times usually can be attributed to some kind of natural causes such as a lightning strike. In some cases even, for example, due in the morning, acting as droplets of course with some sun rising over, eventually acts as little magnifying glasses that of course concentrate a beam at a certain point. Now, those are rare, but those have been known to also happen. So, aside from all these causes, let's look at the 85% of those according to the National Forest Service which begin due to human causes. Focusing specifically on those that have to do with or often enough that are attributed to the utilities. So, as the governing body that manages or has regulations in place and standards that govern the utilities, NERC, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation has standards in place, FAC 003 and 008 that dictate how the utility must maintain easements and right-of-ways for transmission lines and transmission lines, in this case above 100 kV, 100,000 volts, namely because of the Northeast Blackout, which we had an anniversary for recently, was started in part by vegetation contact. So, vegetation management is a big role in transmission rights away, so much so that that is one of the most commonly violated standards. But in spite of that, that's something that the utilities do expend a lot of resources to maintain, whether they have, for example, a very robust vegetation management program or they engage in everything from AI to satellite imagery and they even use a large pulse of contract, their full-time function is to trim those trees that are getting anywhere near those transmission lines, anywhere near those right-of-ways, which is usually the easements, and then of course they even employ those aerial tree trimming crews, which is usually a helicopter with a saw blade that's hanging beneath it and that's how they fly across and they trim those trees that are on the sides of the right-of-way. And then of course there's also tree trimming that happens in the right-of-way underneath the lines. So, quite a bit of work and many, many miles of tree trimming, many, many miles of monitoring, and for the most part we haven't seen very much fire started by a transmission line that has a tree contact, but of course the primary driver, the motivator for that tree trimming and that vegetation management is to avoid a transmission outage that could be to a cascading outage that can eventually to another blackout. For a distribution situation where it's voltages that are, you know, maybe 38, 35 kV in below and that's probably what we're looking at here and what happened in the fires in California, those were more of a distribution outage and of course there's many more miles of power lines for distribution under offer transmission and a lot more area to cover and NERC does not govern vegetation management for distribution circuits. There are other entities that govern that whether it's the public service commissions and local entities like state, county and government and also local governments, but the mandates and requirements are in the straight and rightfully so because it is quite the task to be able to maintain all that usually what becomes a driver for vegetation management is avoiding momentaries, avoiding tree contacts, avoiding outages and that's where in more populated areas. Now once you get into areas that are more remote where you have away from population centers, rural settings or just basically in nature where lines are crossing through a tiny bit of areas that becomes a little more challenging, but vegetation management does happen there a lot of time and that they do maintain that. So what happens in some cases here is where you're going to see where vegetation growth happens rather quickly in spite of the droughts and in spite of the air conditions that does take place. Now one of the clients that we had at one point like I mentioned where or who, but they had a fire mitigation project that they needed or helped with and we helped determine what that was and along with the help from their local governments and their Port of Service Commission on the distribution side. They came up with a process in which rather than shutting power off you know before a fire started I mean or before a fire was approaching what they would do of course is making sure that the reclosers were off right for any given feeder that was coming out of a substation in an area that was prone to fire or already had the high elevated fire risk. What does a recloser do? Well a recloser basically allows a line to reclose once it has that initial line outage meaning something made contact with it and for the most part most of those like line contacts are momentary meaning that that fault will clear and then the system will then again reenergize that line and then everything is more respect to normal. But in a period or in a condition where you have an elevated fire risk usually you don't want to reclose that because then you're going to end up with a more likely a fire at that point. So in this case those reclosers are usually shut off and that's a typical condition. The other situation is that they would suspend switching especially remote switching in the field because of course they're afraid that was going to cause a spark or something and that would potentially start a fire or ignite nearby vegetation. So what they would do is if any switching needed to be done they would dispatch a crew to observe the switching take place and the switching was done remotely and then they would verify that nothing ignited around the area of that equipment out of the field. And so far it's worked pretty effectively. Now the reason utilities don't preemptively deenergize circuits whenever there's a fire coming or whenever there's a hurricane approaching or whenever there's flooding expected there's a protection system in place that will automatically deenergize that anyway. So to deenergize equipment preemptively what my experience has been is that that tends to put more lives at risk than it protects and in a lot of cases for example that would be you're losing a lot of the alarming a lot of the monitoring you're losing a lot of the infrastructure is being supported such as lift pumps and switch stations that of course would help keep water running for of course firefighting or for example you lose power to households that would otherwise have some kind of availability of information meaning they're able to watch the news and that becomes a risk at that point. So usually the suggestion to shut power off preemptively is often as an industry has been decided not to do that usually on the very special circumstances and a case in point was one time in Florida there was a hurricane approaching the Gulf Coast of Florida and they're expecting a severe storm surge and one of the suggestions made by the leadership was actually deenergize entire substations but that of course was determined that that risk was not worth it because of course you're putting more lives at risk and it's not the policy of the utility to do that instead they just have the heightened awareness and and at that point should the water impact utility that those service would get quickly deenergized anyway with the stations automatic protection that is already calibrated and set just for that condition. So the other thing is if you deenergize equipment preemptively you decide when you're going to do that well how long will you be out and when do you think it's safe to put that equipment back in service so that that of course puts you at another level of risk right at this point where where you're going to cause more problems than you then you would want but again looking at this half looking how this inspired I'm very curious to see how this what this investigation will reveal comparing that to what's happening in Canada right now they haven't attributed those fires to anything related to utility up there but rather it's some some mighty strikes and rather dry and warm conditions especially with this drought so that that that investigation is still ongoing uh when wildfires have happened in Florida again it all depended on time it was dependent on a time of year but in Florida there's examples where wildfires would happen in areas that of course were brought about by usually lightning strikes Florida being the lightning capital of the of the world that was definitely a a fire brought about by lightning the challenge there of course is uh and I saw a video where where there was a show the conductor arcing and the problem was I already saw smoke already in the background so usually when there's a fire already happening and the lines energized that fire that smoke getting up near the conductor where I nice the air and of course that'll cause an arc to happen and the line will relay out anyway because of that so that will be a fault but at that point the fire the fire was already burning and which smoke in the air of course uh makes uh means like I explained makes the air more conductive by either ionized the air and that way you have an arc that happens and you have the faults taking place in Florida one of the things they always worry about is of course when usually the fires there that become concerning are the agricultural fires usually they have prescribed burns namely in the sugar sugarcane fields and a lot of times those prescribed burns are plans and they're monitored and usually it happened when the weather conditions are right meaning that the wind is blowing in the correct direction but there's always instances where you know you run the risk where that fire will burn out of control in the wrong direction so how does that impact us well Florida there's a lot of uh 500 kv transmission lines that run across a lot of that farmland so once that takes place you run the risk of losing those lines uh due to due to the fire and that smoke when I say lose I mean you know that line will of course relay out and stay locked out until the fire is over so losing a 500 kv line is rather severe in that case especially when you have a hot day with a lot of imports so um uh usually you know it's coming and you prepare for it but at the same time it's not a it's not a political experience to undergo for any reason um so now talking about hawaii what's happening there uh one of the things that I think we may see coming forward perhaps could be a change in how vegetation management happens uh my experience with vegetation management uh due to hurricanes there's a few cities in Miami um that have a lot of like um historic ornamental trees that the city itself would always resist and oppose and push back on any indication of like needing to trim them often what happens is um a lot of those those conductors usually run right alongside the street or behind houses and a lot of residents tend to plant trees and palm trees and everything else right underneath those lines without really considering the the danger of what they're doing so of course at that point the utility is forced to go ahead and make and trim those trees problem is that you're not allowed to trim as a hedge you're then forced to trim in a v cut uh in the same axis as the actual line so viewed from the street it appears like the tree is not been cut but that line is running usually along that along that uh that that v cut axis now we're going to point of course eventually those those limbs may actually hit but usually the trimming places those limbs far enough away where they don't pose a risk now once a hurricane happens all bets are off especially with high winds uh what that can do to vegetation so usually those trees hit those lines of of course ripping them off and breaking poles you have sustained knowledge usually at that point right the public in the city is a lot more agreeable when it comes to engaging in tree trimming or removing certain trees certain problem trees in areas but usually the formula is that once enough customers have been restored usually that that resistance comes right by right back and then they want to impose any further tree trimming at that point so usually it's a lot of a lot of public relations they know they say convinced seeing the public to plant trees in a smart location and not plant them in an area where it's going to grow right into the line and in hawaii i imagine that there's a lot of like uh a lot of grassland in some places where those areas kind of fire rather quickly and of course given the fact that there was a storm not not far to the south that increased the uh the winds which of course that picked up the wildfire risk which spread the fire quickly and the other the other problem there of course is that you have a lot of embers that are picked up and you may have a wildfire right now maybe two miles away from your home but all of a sudden and in a few minutes time thanks to the wind the flying embers that fire will be you know right on your house before you know it so that that is the uh the challenge right with with the conditions dry conditions and then how they're they're able to pick up the embers and deposit them in an area that's really far away from the fire that wasn't considered a risk so those are the things that are definitely uh interesting in that regard i'm really curious to see what will happen with this investigation and maybe a while i understand there's already there's already a lawsuit in place uh so i am wondering how what that would reveal at this time but i'm really curious to see what that investigation will yield and hopefully we'll get down to the truth in this case and um no opinion yet as to what would cause it but i hopefully we're gonna learn from what happened anyway that's all i have for today uh thank you so much for uh for watching and if you have any questions or comments go ahead and put them in the comments below and i'll try and answer them as soon as i can and again everyone stay safe and best wishes thank you again