FIRE SEASON IS HERE ...
Officials across the state and in Santa Clarita are preparing for fire season, one that could potentially be worse than last year.
“Last year was a very quiet year firewise across the region and the state,” said Tom Rolinski, a fire scientist expert with SoCal Edison. “It looks like it’s going to be more active this season.”
Southern California Edison officials have said that for the past few years they’ve been using a system known as power safety shutoffs, which essentially cut off the flow of power to certain circuits.
“The reason we proactively de-energize power lines is because we’re worried about sparks,” said Don Daingler, director of business resiliency for SoCal Edison. “And 50% to 60% of the sparks that have occurred that started a fire in our service territory over the last several years has been because things have interacted with our lines.”
According to Rolinski, the systems have improved over the years. One of those was the power-safety shutoffs, which use a combination of weather monitoring and certain models to determine when a place is most at risk.
“We’re taking that data and we’re feeding that into our fire spread modeling applications that allow us to actually simulate a fire spread in real time,” said Rolinski. “What if we had a fire here in the Santa Clarita Valley? What it would do on this particular day or three days from now, what would happen.”
“We can run those simulations using our fire spreading model applications with our forecasting and weather data to see what kind of fire activity we would have over the next several days.”
Additionally, SoCal Edison officials say they are installing insulated power lines throughout the SCV in order to help prevent the spread of sparks.
“So far, our SCE’s Valencia district have installed over 10 circuit miles of insulated wires (covered conductor) to date with plans to install over 75 more circuit miles in 2020 and over 140 circuit miles in 2021,” said Reggie Kumar, a spokesman for SoCal Edison.
“Covered conductor, once it is installed, dramatically decreases the likelihood of a spark, therefore decreases dramatically the need for us to proactively de-energize our circuits,” said Daingler.
SoCal Edison officials said that despite there being a chance of a more active fire season around the corner, that does not mean more shutoffs are in the future for SCV residents.
“Just because we’re anticipating more fire activity this year doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ll have more public safety power shutoff events than we did last year,” said Daingler.