EWEB Board of Commissioners — October 19, 2021

0:04 with the um eweb work session october 19th 2021 we will start with an agenda check it's a pretty short agenda is there anybody that has anything to say about that nope great then we will move on to our really one and only topic which is the draft wildfire mitigation plan approach and review so it looks like it's rod price tyler nice and janine parisi yeah excellent uh thank you president schlossberg um so uh good evening commissioners and staff my name is rod price for the record and with me is jeanine parisi and tyler nice i just did want to also do a shout out to the staff there's a lot of people that that have been working on this plan and

0:50 not just this plan but mitigation measures and they'll see and hear some of their work up here and and so i really appreciate all the stuff that's gone on to get us to this point uh just some real quick overview so janine and i will walk through some slides um tyler's gonna be available to answer questions the hard questions uh we we talked a little bit about this we hope this this worksh work session will be a little bit more conversational uh we've got some time here so uh i'm gonna go through a few slides we'll pause and we'll i'll ask ask some prompting kind of questions but but that'll uh allow you some time to ask and give some feedback on that portion um

1:35 i will probably prompt us to move on if we if we dilly dally too long in that area but janine will be providing some more information after that so next slide please i guess the other thing i want to say also is thank you all for for attending this i i know we've been asking for a lot of input and a lot of work sessions from the board and i i know it takes a lot but i think as you'll see you're uh this is a a a critical piece of of our mitigation plan requirement is to have the board involved in planning and part of the approval process so so i feel like it's a critical uh piece of work that we're doing here so but i just want to say think and acknowledge

2:21 just for a little context the backgrounder contained a working draft of the plan just to kind of give you a feel for what we have in place and what we have going on we do have a strategic goal number four to complete a plan this year uh i don't think we'll have a completed plan per se but we hope to take feedback and continuous uh some other things that are going on and have a pretty good working draft by the end of the year that that'll uh give a good idea of what's going on and i guess what i wanted to say too is tonight we're just going to highlight in our presentation some of the areas from the backgrounder and so uh also feel free you know of course to ask questions about that if we don't

3:07 bring it up so next slide please little context um the the basis of the wildfire mitigation plan itself is the sort of temporary permanent um rule that uh the the senate has placed in into effect and uh part of it requires that we develop a wildfire mitigation plan and so um while most of the the senate bill 726 applies only to ious uh there's a few components that do apply to to us as a consumer-owned utility and so those two components are really that we have a a risk-based plan developed and that we have that plan uh reviewed and approved by our our

3:53 governing body which in this case is the board and that we turn this in by june 30th so uh i would want to say too that uh besides uh some of the required components the the plan does contain a whole bunch of things that what i consider good practice and that you see in other uh like california for instance other plans and so uh i think as a matter of good practice we will be working towards including those components um because i i think actually will eventually be held accountable to the to the same plan as everybody else but so the first thing that jumps out probably here on this slide that i consider is good practice is that we have a plan purpose so hopefully you've had a chance to read

4:38 through this plan purpose the the idea behind it was to tie the the requirements we have from the from the puc uh to our our strategic plan so hopefully you see those elements melding in here next slide please uh this is just kind of an overview of our approach to planning and the first statements fairly obvious you know we want to meet the requirements of the from the puc uh but what we want to do is integrate and build on the existing plans and programs that we already have in place and back in may i think we talked to you about some of those things we've made a lot of progress in those those areas and hopefully those will show in the quarterly report a little bit the real cornerstone to the the

5:26 the pc requirements are uh that we have a fire risk assessment based plan and so essentially what that means is that we we examine our service territory and see where our fire risk is high and that's a term um and then using that we're able to prioritize our investments and also uh one of the things we're looking at doing is distinguishing urban risk versus a rural risk and so i'll show you a slide here in a minute of what our zone is but i think best practices though talk about engaging stakeholders and this is a it's a key to um our you know planning and in uh incident

6:11 responses how well we work with our public and in other agencies and finally another uh piece of best practice is really to involve a third party so we have a consultant on board that has done a lot of these plans and they're actually working with another utility or two in our area so we hope that that will help provide continuity between other utilities as well which is a i think an important piece of working in an area like ours so next slide please so here's a picture of our service territory you can see the outlines there hopefully you recognize that the the orange areas uh obviously the big areas up river uh and

6:56 then there's a little area down south so these are the the areas that we currently consider high risk that we apply our our programs to and there's uh it should be up on the website now i think it's there now this may change as we get more rigorous right now it's based on odfw maps rural fire maps and then also some of our own operational experience next slide please uh i just wanted to throw this into because uh this is the roadmap i'm using to sort of manage our wildfire mitigation work including the plan and so um basically where we're at is uh at the end of stage two we're trying to get uh

7:42 our working draft up to speed but with the target of really having a compliance ready plan ready so what we're missing uh in between those stages is the the consultant work and the gap work and so that independent audit work next slide please i just wanted to highlight here some of the key elements for the board and where you where you folks come in is we'll bring a compliance ready plan in may uh for review um and discussion kind of like this uh and then in june we'll bring a consent item for for approval official approval we'll go ahead and turn this uh that plan into the the puc and they have said

8:29 they will supposedly get the plan analyzed back to us in a couple months and any modifications or whatever of course we'll have to do so the other part is though that uh the there will be a yearly uh cyclic kind of review and i think currently right now we're targeting an april or may review you know right around the beginning of fire season and coinciding with our capital planning and i did want to note too that i think you'll see um the results of the plan some of the things will will pop out projects that um both o m and and capital projects and they'll be earmarked with uh you know wildfire mitigation on them so there will be another uh in source of input that that the board can comment and and uh take part in so

9:16 next slide please so at this point i'm gonna pause and i'm just going to throw out a few prompts i guess and and we're curious you know does the the plan purpose resonate with you is there any gaps in that is there anything in the approach here you think we're missing um is there any thing on the road map or the timing of things that that seems out of place and then i'm i really didn't refer to this in the presentation but there's a roles and responsibilities section in the draft that that we want to make sure is is well uh thought out and and explained so with that i'm just going to pause and i assume people will put their hands up either electronically or so we can

10:02 see them so i'll turn it over to mindy how about that sure great um matt go ahead your hand is up yeah thank you can you hear me okay great thanks uh thanks rod um a few things you thanked us for having an extra meeting and i just want to turn that back and say thank you all i know it's extra work on your behalf as well not only to you know set up a meeting with us and engage in this government vacant but the work that goes into this planning so um much appreciated uh in terms of the play and purpose i think it looks right i'm grateful that it goes beyond just we're trying to meet the letter of the regulations from the puc um

10:47 i encourage us to continue to move that way that you know trying to uh make our wildfire mitigation efforts as robust as possible um you know given the resources that we have so i appreciate that and the road map and roles and responsibilities looks good to me um thanks very much thank you i tried to unmute multiple times and it kept clicking out of the screen kept disappearing when i tried to unmute

11:34 all right um so i was just looking back at some of the slides and i'm curious a little bit about how the the the determination of the at-risk areas is made is that um i know it was mentioned a little bit in the packet but if if you could outline that a little bit more for me because it's it seems like it's just up the mckenzie and basically in south eugene and those are the main areas i'm guessing that's just due to tree density around those you know particular power lines sure so um what um or the state of oregon odfw um i think in 2016 created some fire risk maps and they used extensive uh

12:19 satellite and territory and terrain and all kinds of criteria that went into those and so those maps were used to lay on top of our service territory and uh and create some ideas about where they um where the higher risk areas were also the lane county's got some um and janine would have to correct me on the exact term of the map but there's also the rural fire districts have some some uh danger maps as well so we've kind of cross checked against those and then the other thing we did was um we we had some internal discussions with our operations folks who had knowledge

13:04 of the trees and so forth so if you'll if you kind of those areas kind of encompass uh entire feeders so our so we can apply our operational changes to entire feeders at once to make sure that we don't miss anything so um those are the three basic things in in the future what you'll see is um uh you know science has progressed and there's some much more rigorous kind of methods to to determine these you'll probably see some finer finer tuning of these maps and that's what the consultants icf will help us do okay um i mean the the timeline looks fine it

13:49 seems like most of that's dictated by the uh you know sp 762. i am a bit curious about the purpose in that um it doesn't seem to say anything about kind of coordination with other stakeholders groups um you know government entities in the area that we could coordinate with and i don't know if that's because of the requirements of 762 or if there is an opportunity there to you know outline that you know there's a lot of the upfront work that we're doing in our service chariot territory is on us but as we kind of implement more of the you know responses to red flag alerts and things of that nature there may be a

14:35 higher level of coordination so i don't know if there's a place for that or if it has to be more narrow depending on the requirements of that bill but that was the only thing that i saw that kind of stuck out to me thank you i think that's a really good comment we'll take a look at that thanks and thank you for your time too i know this is a lot of work on you all as well so it's very important though so thank you okay i'm done go ahead frank and then john brofsky yeah thanks um rod one of the things that you you may want to explain a little bit is you know we're working we're working on what we call a working draft which is basically a plan um but we also have this compliance deadline

15:20 and um what do we know about all of the compliance requirements it seems like some of them are the reason that this evolves a little bit and we can't just put a stake in the ground now is that there's still work sessions there's still some things going on at the state that um you know how how firm is is the requirement um defined at this point or will that continue to evolve not just past the june deadline but but beyond yeah i mean that's the that's the tricky part of this right now the um so the the senate bill um the in essence the pec has to figure out rules um around how to enforce it and so they're in the middle of still developing those

16:05 rules there's the i'd say they're pretty close but um they're still out for comment and there's there's still lots of discussion going on with those uh the the investor on utilities need to um and there's probably not much wiggle room on this they need to be compliant by the end of the year uh and so these requirements probably should be outweigh um in a month or two so that they can be compliant to them uh for some reason they've they've delayed this the consumer owned the cut the consumer owned uh customer owned utilities till june but yeah the requirements are still open and um a few of them are up for debate but the sense i get from the listing in on the conversations is they're not going to change much so we pretty much know what

16:51 they're going to be but they're and they're going to continue to evolve i know they are so there's this so-called these are temporary permanent rules um and so they wanted to put something in quickly and so this is the methodology that the legislature uses to to get something in quickly so i expect we'll see more changes over the next couple years yeah thanks rod i really appreciate the the comment about coordination and the purpose too because i think that's that's going to be a big part of moving forward thank you go ahead john okay so i just have a question and then a couple of comments so the question kind of goes to one of sonia's and the

17:36 uh map and where we're going to um so it seems to me that the the danger is more with high voltage transmission lines as opposed to feeder lines because i mean i think of the hills like when we have a snow incidence and we have outages from trees going over lines those lines are less susceptible for fire is that what i'm understanding and that's why we're just concentrating on the high tension feeder our transmission lines uh no statistically distribution uh systems start way more fires than do transmission um usually because it's not as well taken

18:21 care of to be honest and it's closer to the ground and more likely to get hit there's just more of it so the upriver service territory includes we have a lot of distribution upriver as well as some transmissions so most of it is centered around distribution feeders well well i'm i'm mostly considering the south eugene one i mean i see a lot of areas in south eugene that aren't in orange that would be i mean like the neighborhood that i live in or laurel hill valley or some of those other you know sloped hills that aren't in the wildlife mitigation or wildfire mitigation yeah okay i'm following you a little bit i mean the all we have to go on is what odfw has

19:06 supplied to this for the most part in the in the rural districts and so that that's the basis of our map and i think what you'll find is um a much more rigorous analysis here in the next six months or something like that to start fine-tuning and answering some of your questions you know why not this and why that that kind of thing okay so that goes to my next next the cut the two comments that i that i have on this is one is you know we have the minimum that we have to do to be compliant and i hope that that's not what our goal is i i hope we are looking for more than minimum compliance and i think that as a utility that's something that we've always always gone above and beyond so

19:52 that's kind of may tie in in the in the iterations of this you know this is the first stab let's at least make sure we're compliant but i would also like us to to push beyond that and make sure that you know the south hills are safe and and those types of things and then the other thing that i was curious about is you know when you talk about funding and capital putting capital putting projects in the plan i'm wondering where the balancing act of is if you put it in the plan and down the road funding comes from either federal or state things that you can you can use federal or state monies if it's in your if it's in your plan then you can apply for those funds but

20:38 then if you put it in the plan and those funds don't aren't available then you've got to use your own capital i'm just wondering how that balancing act goes because i would like to get as much put in the plan if more funding comes along and they say if it's in your plan you can use this funding yeah i mean there's there's two components really there's sort of uh i think and janine will talk about this a little bit but the um most of the work is done maybe at the o m level where you're you're changing out uh equipment so there will be capital projects though that hopefully you can get some funding for like you said from from other sources but [Music] we have a fairly robust uh amount in our capital plan so

21:26 what we're really hoping is that as we go through this analysis with our contractor uh we'll get some uh so-called gap list and it'll be like 20 projects and we'll go okay well 20 projects that's 100 million dollars you know i'm just picking a number but and and then we'll come back and we'll say okay so here's the highest risk areas um and and this is what we we think we can apply these to and here's how we think we can spend that money through time and that's where we'll come back to the board and with this uh it's like a new almost a new category within the um you know is it compulsory is it risk based is it you know so um so then we'll be able to come back to the board and say okay if we want to do this then then we need to transfer money from here or

22:11 or shuffle it from there or add more money or you know whatever it is and so the the other thing about this is we i want to make sure we have that risk based piece down because if i spend money here i want to know that the risk goes down appreciably right and so so we're spending our money wisely for the best uh i guess return as possible and one of the best returns possible is to trim trees like crazy so so we're already in the process of of doing that and ramping that up and that's not capital right yeah just that's what i was hoping is that you know we've got a long list of of things and if all of a sudden the feds say hey if you have this in your plan and you can

22:57 underground this but and we'll give you money to underground something that we didn't have in our in our budget but if the feds say if it goes to wildfire mitigation it'll be fun so that would be great thank you i think that's a great comment frank i see that your hand is raised and tyler you had wanted to say something before i don't know if you still want to jump in oh sorry so i would the one thing i would add to um what uh rod price just mentioned on the capital side is that um it's a it's a benefit to get these in the plans commissioner barofsky not only for wildfire mitigation but when it comes to capital a lot of these kinds of projects have multiple benefits

23:42 including reliability um you know in the midst of storms and other things so it's a lot of these projects will have multiple benefits um and so um as well as you know just general reliability so i think that it's good to have a robust list there we probably have uh more than um enough to keep us busy for quite a while and then um as rod said we'll we'll prioritize based on what we see the the sort of the stacking of benefits and the mitigation of risk so um that that's how i would approach it but to your point there will probably be a lot of items that we have on the list for opportunities you know i'll chime in if a chance uh i just wanted to add a little clarification to the original question

24:28 on the transmission versus versus feeder talk and and uh when rod was referring to that the feeders are the lower voltage 1247 like neighborhood um thoroughfares if you will for for that with the taps being um you know off to the different streets and such the transmission though exactly like rod said it's classically a higher speed trip off control and it does provide lower risk but when you look at those maps we're not we're not like excluding one type of wire or not really it boils down to to construction proximity to um you know vegetation and also you know if it's overhead or underground so just letting you know if there's a zone it's everything's captured in there

25:13 regardless of voltage or or what it is and uh when we go through this next phase of analysis you know what we have access to right now that's the publicly available fuel maps is kind of coarse as rod was saying when we do this next phase of analysis we'll get more granular and we'll see if we overshot or if we need to roll in some more so that'll be part of the process and tyler one of the things about transmission is that it tends to get a lot of attention be just in in general because it tends to go for hundreds and thousands of miles uh because of and therefore through federal lands and state lands and forests and so the the risk of exposure from a grid perspective can be pretty high

25:59 because of the just the thousands of miles that it covers but within our territory we have the most control and the most ability to to sectionalize and and implement different operational uh techniques at the feeder level so it's it makes a little more sense for us to concentrate on that all right well i guess i'm last up and i just have a comment and a couple questions and my comment is that um i am really supportive of going above and beyond um what is required of us i think i've heard that from some other commissioners too i think that oftentimes eweb does that we're kind of we're like big thinkers and i really appreciate that

26:45 about the organization so i'm supportive of that um my questions are one of them is about the stakeholders engaging the public stakeholders and i'm just curious like what kind of engagement are you looking to get is it just informing them about the dangers of wildfires and what we're doing or are you looking for um suggestions to add to the plan or both um mostly it's it's about coordinating um but yeah and suggestions to add to the plan i think and janine is going to cover this a little bit more um in in later in the the presentation but so i'll let her cover that when she gets

27:30 there how's that great sounds good didn't mean to jump ahead okay and then my other question i guess directly relates to the questions and feedback you're looking for right now um and that is just about the timeline and if we're looking to kind of finalize this in april does that give us enough time then to implement what it is that we want to do for the upcoming fire season i'm sure you've you've already thought about this but um just curious like are there things that would be like kind of rolling like roll out of approaches or are we kind of like ready to go as fire season hits sure i mean those that's a great question so one thing we've done is

28:15 earmarked a million dollars in the capital plan for for uh projects that will uh help with wildfire mitigation projects but uh kind of going back to the premise what we're trying to do right now is just build on the existing programs that we've already had in place for the last two three years and continuing to to ramp those up and then after we get through with the gap analysis we'll we'll have a stack of projects as uh commissioner barofsky has has talked about so so what we have plenty plenty to do and plenty of work and and in in some ways we're kind of limited by tree crews and some of those things but um we we are keeping up on everything in our high risk circuits both inspections and and

29:00 electrical inspections and tree trimming and so those are areas of focus and that that's why we have them identified so we can really focus on those make sure we get that done yearly and and spend our money in the right spots great thank you yeah i think that was all of us okay uh janine it's gonna gonna wow us with all the other things we're doing so up to you oh thank you for the setup rod i appreciate that and thanks for the time tonight commissioners i'm just going to walk through some of the risk mitigation actions that are already underway and some of those are going to be really familiar to you and some may be a little bit new so if you think about wildfire mitigation as a continuum you're really

29:46 starting with a strong foundation of thorough system maintenance and timely replacement for operational safety to minimize the chance that equipment failures are going to spark a fire and then moving up that continuum you're looking at capital investments that'll make the system more resilient to wildfire we know we're not going to be able to stop all fires but we can harden the grid to protect our infrastructure and the communities that surround them mitigation planning also includes situational awareness during wildfire season this can involve changing field practices with our crews what kind of work they do and where they're doing that work and then equipping them with fire suppression equipment based on different weather conditions so we can be part of the solution and not part of the problem

30:31 and then during those extreme weather events those red flag days we can take actions that reduce the chances that our equipment becomes an ignition source i'd say that de-energizing lines would be the you know action of last resort next slide i've got a couple of examples to walk through here um as rod was talking about the enhanced inspections is a really important part of the risk mitigation plan and it's also a focus of the puc rule making effort and this just really means more frequent and thorough patrols in the higher risk parts of our system as a result of this year's upriver inspection with acceler accelerated

31:16 replacement of about a hundred cross arms which is a time consuming process but it reduces the risk that a deficient cross arm can bring a section of line down in those dry windy conditions another project that's in the planning phase is to fully decommission the 69 kv line that runs from walterville the thirst and substation this line is no longer needed with the holden creek substation in service and the agreement to flow power via bpa's 115 kv line a couple other examples have to do with vegetation management and this is really critical to wildfire mitigation because when utility equipment is involved in wildfire it's often found that the ignition source is

32:02 vegetation that comes into contact with wires so maintaining line clearance even during adverse weather conditions is a pretty essential action and the pc rule making is moving towards trim cycle mandates luckily our existing vegetation management program with annual pruning and high risk areas should meet these stricter standards already this week we contracted for helicopter trimming service and this will reestablish the clearance along the heavily vegetated transmission carbon transmission corridor this method will accomplish in about five days what could typically take months or longer to complete and it frees up our tree crews to catch up on some of that in-town pruning work we're working with a bpa on this project

32:48 and coordinating a media opportunity to showcase this work tomorrow so we're hoping to have better footage to show you very soon next slide in terms of grid hardening there's a number of opportunities to use more fire resistant materials during upgrades and replacements this pictures um work at deer creek where crews are replacing the wooden transmission poles with metal ones so we've taken the opportunity to also reconfigure some distribution lines to a slimline format it's basically reframing your overhead to a single conductor which in essence reduces the number of points of contact for vegetation and really reduces your wildfire risk and in terms of underground i just

33:34 wanted to remind folks that we do have funding available to support our upriver customers with underground in their service as they rebuild as another example of a mitigation action that we're already taking so this slide might be a little hard to see but this is a preliminary design to harden the feeder that's running from the dillard substation over to willama street in south eugene so this is about a 1.6 million dollar fema grant funded project and like frank was saying this has the co-benefits of improving reliability during winter storms but also fire risk reduction through a combination of undergrounding

34:19 some sections and reconfiguration along that line this project will be in design for 2022 for construction by 2023. we've done two other similar projects in the south hills using these fema grant funds so this is the last of that series of i think 16 or 17 funded projects next slide i already talked about situational awareness in a previous slide but i just wanted to note that i'm excited that we'll be partnering with the university of oregon to install the first alert wildfire camera and the 126 corridor up at our smith ridge communications site an important feature of the alert wildfire camera system is it's available

35:04 for public viewing online so anyone can who's taking a look can report suspected fires as the host of the say ewo will be able to control the camera view with panning and tilting but we can also grant control to other public safety partners so we have more eyes in our upper watershed area and then at that top of that pyramid is the um public safety power shut-off program and in this situation e-webs made a lot of strides this year operationalizing our psps program which is triggered by a red flag warning so during red flag events we're changing the operational settings for those circuits in high risk areas so they're

35:50 more sensitive to irregularities and trip offline when these protective settings are in place we will not re-energize a line until we do a visual control to confirm it's safe to do so so de-energizing lines particularly during extreme fire weather introduces other risks to the public so there's a lot more work to do to fully build out a psps program i'd say there's two essential pieces of work to be done one is to make sure we have the best available weather data for psps decision making and then a system for advanced notice and coordination with our public safety partners and impacted customers

36:41 oh and i'm at my question so and i would just want to ask given the time should i just run through my i'd like have three or four more slides do you want to break here or should i keep going uh keep going okay next slide don't forget these questions uh you asked before about community cage engagement strategies and this is a really important piece of the work so after the 2020 wildfires this issue has really been on top of the mind for our up customers and we've made a lot of progress in our public outreach and education efforts we've got a communications plan we've got a dedicated web page we've done a social media campaign on wildfire prevention and awareness a number of newsroom articles and hopefully you got to see the brochure that was in your packet

37:28 we've standardized our red flag communications for both public and critical infrastructure partners to raise awareness of fire danger and for the potential of prolonged outages i'd say there's still a lot of opportunity for increased interagency partnership and that includes involving them and looking at our plan and the actions in the plan in our high-risk circuit so it's a two-way street i would say i have a meeting later this week with our lane county partners on a grant application they're looking out for a coordinated wildfire prevention marketing campaign so synergizing and aligning our messaging would be the goal of that project and then we're looking to schedule a roundtable meeting with area utility general managers focused on well fire mitigation plan development

38:15 next slide we talked a little bit about performance tracking and this is an area where i think we can go above and beyond the puc requirements benchmarking is really important to track progress and identify gaps we're proposing an annual review and presenting that at least by may so it aligns with your capital planning process and i've got a couple of specific metrics that are really more food for thought for you and would really appreciate some feedback on this we've got some time to think through these between now and the december board meeting where the 2022 goals will be discussed in more detail next slide and on the issue of metrics i wanted to just throw some highlights from this past year's outreach campaign i won't

39:02 read the the words on the slide but it's really an indicator of public interest when you look at that red flag warning post we had over 18 000 views on that and that's more than some of our high profile winter storm outages engagements so people are really paying attention and want to partner with us on this work and i have to just appreciate the support of our stellar communications team who translate my ideas into something that's really great content and tangible for the public and with this i'll just wrap up in closing and just say while this wildfire mitigation plan is a work in progress we're not starting from ground zero we understand the urgency of this issue to the board and to the public

39:47 and i'd say we're well positioned to leverage our strategic plans focus on safety and reliability to support this work moving forward and i'll turn it back over and look forward to more discussion great thank you janine is there anyone who wants to start us off with some questions comments go ahead matt all right uh thanks for the presentation janine and uh and for the intro there rod and and really to the whole team that put this this plan this working draft together um this working draft in my opinion is really solid that you're clearly headed in the right direction

40:33 you have all the all the pieces that need to be there and thanks for doing that work i look forward to seeing the final version as it gets further refined it's really great to see you've cataloged all the mitigation actions that eweb's already taking and it's really great to see not surprising that we're you know we're certainly investing in that already or i feel it makes me feel like way less not that we would be behind the eight ball but the the you know cataloging what we're already doing demonstrates that um we're not you know caught flat-footed here um which is great to see uh my greatest concern um is not so much about the the mitigation strategies laid out here it's about the

41:18 um the communications in preparation for public safety power shut off that um you know i think people sometimes anticipate power outages in the winter but not so much in the summer and so um you know i can see you're already leaning that way and i just want to encourage you to lean in there that uh you know that we really get creative about how we communicate that and help people prepare for that um i i hope it's not inevitable but at some level but somehow it does feel like you know we're gonna wander into territory where we're having to do that and i just want to make sure that people aren't surprised so um thank you for making sure that that's clearly laid out in the communications and i look forward to seeing um the you know the more detailed uh description of your approach there um it's also great to see that we're successfully pursuing federal funding to

42:04 help with these mitigation efforts again not surprised but good to see that um demonstrated with that example that dillard example janine thank you uh you're asking about a million dollars of additional funding for fire mitigation um which knowing how much medicaid work like this costs i'm not sure how far that gets us i'm curious if we have a current kind of sense of scale of what we're spending right now and i know that's a hard question because i know it's infused with all kinds of things we already do which whether it's you know replacing and maintaining our equipment or doing other things that have other benefits so it's not easy but are we spending 20 million dollars on wildfire mitigation

42:49 activities or a hundred million dollars i don't really have a sense of scale it might help me think about whether a million dollars is the right additional amount tyler you're on mute is it there there you are all the good stuff comes out when you're immune right um no one thing i was going to say is jeanine's right on that a lot of the things we're doing right now um we'll be

43:36 kind of turning the dials up on of course overhead to undergrounding was mentioned and you brought the dealer example that one you know originally was 2016 storm related but obviously will help with this effort too so it's kind of we can kind of double count some of these especially if they fall in the high risk areas um things like she talked about uh streamlining or i call them rolling taps but i liked what what janine talked about with going to the single phase where it's more of a vertical orientation that's something that that we do um right now that will crank up on also the equipment replacements um you know that's replacing poles replacing transformers uh ailing equipment based on inspection that that we accelerated some of that work for

44:21 this year i'd say it was on the order of a couple hundred thousand dollars for uh you know accelerating that work and then the other things that were mentioned here there'll be new things on as you know monitoring equipment that can get expensive like you're talking about really quick communications infrastructure and more automation as far as scale to our our plan um you know yearly our our distribution work in that kind of arenas in the um in the renewal replacement replacing old things or ailing equipment that's found inspection um that's about 3.3 million a year so you know 30 million over the 33 million over the whole plan and then

45:06 some other stuff we do the enhancements additions is the category in the budget if you saw about uh that would be the reconfigurations and the overhead to underground you know right right now that's on the order of around depends on the year and what project but 500 000 to a million and that's one we'll be turning the dial up on so all to say really that that it's it's gonna you know in increase that group of work maybe 20 with the million dollars and so it's probably going to be made up of lots of smaller efforts like we talked about those different tools in the tool bag but i think you're totally right on that if we do crank that up a lot or underground a lot that's going to be a bigger dollar amount that we would come back in the budgeting cycle it's just this one million dollars we know we can we can

45:52 turn some things up and get benefit out of it right away it's kind of the thought great thanks and mindy st i'm out of time i um have a couple more questions or comments when once others have had a chance all right great i think i saw sonia's hand up okay great uh so real quick i had um looking back at the at some of the other questions and kind of thoughts here so the feedback on mitigation um priorities and focus areas that seemed you know fine to me um i do agree with matt that you know communications is going to be very key that was one of the things that you know

46:37 really it always comes up how do people get information especially in those times of crisis i'm i'm really pleased to see that more people are paying attention to those different channels and kind of figuring out how to do that um ahead of the crisis so that they can get that that information and stay connected um i do hope that our portal is functioning that you know emails and such are a good way for people to get that information too um the psps i know that i understand that that has the you know community risks associated with it when you turn power off and i appreciate that we're doing you know certain things to make sure that we're getting

47:23 that kind of communication to people it does seem like there are definitely going to be times when it that's critical and i'm wondering if um i know that part of the plan that you talked about ramping up you know visual inspections of the region i wonder if there's a place for actual video surveillance of different areas that are higher risk that are closer to different communities is that something that's being considered you know technology versus having people up in windy dry conditions because that puts staff at risk too that that's in essence kind of what the the pilot project that that janine was talking about but if you look at what the

48:09 california utilities do they've invested a lot of money and a lot of artificial intelligence and a lot of it's not just visual it's also the weather stations and they've they've been pretty successful with those programs and so they also follow that up with daniel so once they go through these steps of triggering that that the camera tells them something then they also have people involved too before power shut off so they have people on site so there's a whole series of things but but you're right um you know we we need to throw a lot of stuff at this to to really get good at it yeah and so you know to matt's point to a million seems like i'm not sure how far that goes if those are some of the kind of technologies that we

48:54 really need to implement um i'm also curious you know obviously we got some funding for the undergrounding portion does any of the fema money go to transitioning to metal poles or is it really just only for undergrounding um that's a good question but normally what you do is you apply with the design and this cost benefit kind of things and then if they approve that then they pay for a certain portion usually seven up to 75 percent of it so i imagine that would be part of it too as well as materials and so forth okay otherwise the metrics look good um annual review in may i only wonder if that's enough time to hit the the june

49:39 deadline but maybe it is um and yeah other than that looks good to me thank you [Music] yeah go ahead yeah president rosberg i think it's a really good conversation around investment um you know one of the things that um the the modifications to the strategic plan really emphasized was resiliency in both water and and on the electric side and and therefore if you didn't see a really heavy dose of things that would contribute to the resiliency of the system wildfire being just one piece of it then that would be concerning because that's what what um you've identified as strategically

50:24 important and so now some of these like i mentioned earlier they have a stacking of benefits um but there are also some types of projects that will be very specific to things like uh wildfires you know the situational awareness now the difference between a red flag warning and a red flag event actually happening um will trigger a response from us as a utility and so we need to to have a better way of determining what's actually occurring on the ground in the system and so those types of investments could be very specific to things like wildfire mitigation so in some cases it's a stacking you'll

51:10 probably see a really heavy dose of things that look like their resiliency but then there's also some things that um would would be very specific to understanding climate and wind and situational awareness relative to to wildfires on the funding side i have a feeling that there's going to be a lot of different opportunities to explore and it depends on how we apply for particular grants um you know i i could see metal poles being part of that potentially commissioner carlson i could see undergrounding be part of that i could see um things such as better communications systems and and things like that janine just talked about a partnership with the county around coming up with standards for communication so i think there will be a

51:56 lot of different opportunities that we can use to supplement um what we ourselves and our customers are investing in on their on our own so um and and i i absolutely agree when you look at the importance of the communications in in especially psps situations um is incredibly important and it's not just during the event but it's well before and well after the event where that becomes really critical um and so i think that that will be an emphasis going forward but thank you for the opportunity to weigh in i'll just just add on real quick to i can't remember if we've talked about it at the board yet but we we recognize the federal money um and in the flow of its um

52:41 there's some potential there and so we we've actually hired a person to help us with grant applications and um and pursue that kind of money so that that's pretty exciting for for a number of people here so so we're we're pretty happy about that and we'll be pursuing it and wildfire is definitely one of the areas all right john barofsky if you have any questions or comments it is your turn all right thank you um yeah first question is uh on the inspection of the like the cross members and the polls and stuff is that in house or is that contracted

53:26 the inspection is contracted and then the data and all that get processed and the design packages done internally and sent to internal crews to complete okay so a couple of my things would be you know with with the shortages in the labor market you know frank has talked to or we've we've talked about the fact that we're a little bit behind on vegetation because there's not enough crews you know maybe at some point we might want to look at i know it's more expensive but might look at you know do we bring in dedicated crews that are our own that we can control rather than having contracted ones that we we do have control over them but it's it's has a little bit of limitations so that would be one thing i would look at

54:11 another thing that i would like to have maybe in the metrics is when we go to the higher level for a psps and we go to the higher level of tripping you know and then you have to get it inspected it would be nice to know what the time it takes to get that back online you know where how long it takes each time we have to go out and physically inspect uh when we're at the higher level of risk so that we know that going forward third thing would be actual numbers of times when we really have to shut down the system and do psps if that is increasing year to year then i think there might be some other

54:56 opportunities for other types of mitigation and what i'm thinking here is if we're having to shut the system down totally shut it down that has implications that are far-reaching you know to people that have health issues to businesses and stuff like that so would there be opportunities for us let's say to uh you know use our resources to help buy generators and sell them at a reduced cost or you know if we can buy them at you know by 50 of them and give our volume discount to people who might need the generator for when they're when their power does go out things like that

55:41 down the road thinking you know if if it happens once every five years that's not a thing but if we start seeing these things getting shut off once or twice a year maybe there's an opportunity to help mitigate the people that are affected by that in those corridors not at our full cost but to just keep that in mind so those are a couple of things and then the last thing i want to say is i when i saw the helicopter trimming as a as a a strategy i had to go online and look at that and i youtubed them and it was it was pretty impressive i wouldn't want them to trim the trees around my house it's pretty uh it's pretty brutal but uh it it looked like it was pretty effective and quite a

56:26 quite an interesting uh way of doing vegetation control yeah i'd really say hats off to tyler he recognized um that uh him and his team recognized that the this opportunity there's some they were apparently this crew was working in the area the helicopter crew and offered to come up and and i can't remember how it saves like uh weeks and weeks of of trimming time and a lot of money so we were really able to jump on this and make it happen so i think it's going to be really good um but the things you're talking about john around the uh the the assistance for um uh powershed offices

57:11 is a big part of the the work that the california plans have and actually in the ious right now are really there's a lot more requirements around how you do that and how you notify and how you take care of people and and so i expect that we'll we'll have some requirements to do some of the things you're talking about but we'll also have some opportunity to to have some creative programs that kind of coincide with our whole resilience um in plan preparedness kind of things so and we're already actually i think got a generator program where we chip in and and help people so i think those are really good comments and it's that's a lot of work that's going to be one of our gaps i know it is

57:56 yeah commissioner barofsky one of the things that i know that the ious have had to do in california is to is to do a probability analysis um which looks at uh analysis of of not just the risk assessment pro territory but looks at past weather events so that they can actually uh lay that over the top of their system and say there's you know based on history there's x percent chance that this particular area might experience a psps over you know that's obviously that's statistics and they might have one the very next year um or two years in a row now you don't know but they've they've had to do that i don't i mean we we haven't done that um we we may get to that point as it evolves i

58:42 i don't know um whether it'll be more statistically looking backwards or whether we'll just take the approach and kind of draw the line in the sand and say here's where we go forward looking and here's the types of communications here's the kinds of different tools that we can use to mitigate this psps is just one of a lot of different tools and so um and i think janine's pyramid says it's really the last thing you want to ever have to do is to shut people off for all the different reasons that you talked about um but it does have to be in the tool bag and um used when it's appropriate um and we we just need to refine it further as to when that actually is

59:29 and is there a you know i know like when we have an outage it's like okay it's been outaged for this long do we have have that metrics for when we have to shut it down at the higher risk and the person has to actually go out and inspect the line are we tracking that and seeing how long that that takes as opposed to doing it internally um i know tyler can probably give you a feel for when we have to go out and do an inspection how long that might take for a typical feeder um it's going to be a little different whether it's upriver or in the south hills but tyler can probably tell you at least a bit give you a ballpark on that kind of i i just want to make sure we're clear that we are we have not and don't have a

1:00:16 psp we have not done psps's yet and we don't have that that process formalized so but when we do definitely keeping those metrics on the but what we do have like janine talked about is that red flag response you know with the protection settings and just so we're clear too the the requirement to go do a visual inspection after a trip is a is a normal thing we do for every trip a troubleshooter after after that we'll go out and make sure um before it's energized and report back to dispatch that there's not a tree on the line or or a wire hanging or anything um like frank said travel time is probably the biggest one for upriver you know you put 40 minutes on that um the troubleshooters they're kind of amazing individuals uh you know response wise

1:01:02 they each take about 120 calls a year and their response time to answering the phone and then leaving their houses on the order of two to three minutes average so they're on call all the time so um you know you for upriver i'd say you're you're getting 40 minutes up there a lot depending on whether they you know sometimes they have to assess the situation see what's going on get the instructions and then you're into another you know up to an hour or two for patrolling that area so sometimes they run across it really quickly and it's easy sometimes the thing is uh there's nothing on the line and it's just safety energy energized but uh that is a normal process we do for every every outage um the the step we do add for red flags though is a confirmation with with the

1:01:48 911 supervisory number to make sure that we're not heading into a dangerous situation make sure there's no fires in the area of course south eugene area in this high risk map would be you know a lower response time because of the travel times a lot less commissioner barofsky i'll just say that i don't think you're going to see helicopter trimming on fox hollow road in south eugene just just so you know i don't want to i don't want people to to jump to that conclusion agreed very good for the back country but yeah that's not our our intent to use it for dense populated areas maybe at 40th and hilliard

1:02:39 all right um so it's my turn and then um i heard that matt had a call for more questions afterwards but um i just have a few questions i think that this is a very well thought out draft plan and i really appreciate that um i am curious on the public side how do we know how many people so far are taking advantage of our undergrounding for people who are rebuilding up there is that something that's been popular is it too early because people are still having not enough rebuildings happening or what do we know about that um commissioner schlossberg we are tracking those metrics and i would have to check with my team to get you the right number but it feels like

1:03:25 it's maybe around 10 or so so far and i think part of it is that it's just early got it um you might have already said this so i apologize but how many customers around total are we talking about in these like high wildfire areas that's another number that we have access to but i'd have to look it up um you know and it's really more a number of meters that we can give you account versus people and houses but i could get you a number of meters based on those high-risk circuits okay i wanna say it's in the

1:04:13 tyler about five or six thousand maybe a little bit less i think that it was 5500 customers that were out the holiday fire and those were the high risk circuits essentially okay great thank you um so i'm just curious on the on the outreach side i know that one of the metrics that you're using is by like how many social media posts or how many views and that's all really great um but i don't know like is there a way some kind of metric or something that we can measure that people are actually doing the things that we want them to do so it kind of makes me think a little

1:04:58 bit about our pledge to prepare i think i've brought this up before but like i thought that was a really great campaign that we did for earthquake preparedness and i know that like people posted their own things on social media it's not really a great way to track how many people are doing it but um is there like a plan to do something like that where people can then like show that they've done their whatever their preparations are or do we have like a like a step that people can take individually to prepare i really appreciate that question because you know a part of our key messages is that wildfire preparation is a shared responsibility like we can do our part but you know people also have to be smart when they go out in the woods

1:05:43 during wildfire season or even in their own backyards they're creating defensible space and as frank was saying about stacking of benefits the place to prepare program can easily be expanded to include wildfire preparation because it's really some there's a lot of similarities it's just that if your power goes out in the summer you're really thinking about how do you keep cool how do you keep hydrated how do you maintain refrigeration and then those vulnerable populations if they've got medication or on medical equipment that needs to be powered that they have really special needs in those situations but in the basic framework is already there so it really is building on some of those

1:06:28 existing campaigns and the idea of kind of show us what you're doing is a great idea so i'm gonna take that and try to run with it great um and do we still have the low or no interest loans for generators out there did that that program still going on yeah and i'd say one of the other thing that's caught my eye is you know there there's just so much money flowing in from the state and federal government um and which is great that we now have a grant coordinator who's i think starting next monday so we're really excited to welcome her to e-web um we're probably gonna bury her in ideas but one of i think odo has a program with many millions of dollars for a combination of solar and battery

1:07:15 technology and i've been kind of throwing this idea out to some of our upriver partners about it is there a way to develop a program where you could put some of that at one of like a recovery center so if people have to evacuate and the power is down that there is some kind of combination of solar battery storage at like the high school or something so people can have communications and it provides that measure of safety so it could be done at the household level or you could think of it more at a community level great um i guess my last thing is i'm just really happy to see that we are coordinating with other utilities because obviously we can do all that we do in our service territory but if the adjacent service territories if we're not kind of all

1:08:01 doing the same thing i know that there's minimum requirements um but it's important for everybody to kind of work together so glad to see that um and that's it for me but um we can start a second round i don't know if other people besides matt have questions or comments but um maybe we can keep them brief because we are around our stopping problem is that okay with the other commissioners if we do another go around okay all right so matt over to you all right i will try and be quick here um a good move to hire an additional staff person to work on grants thank you for doing that that will undoubtedly

1:08:46 more than pay for itself i wonder um also if we might incentivize the troubleshooting staff that you mentioned tyler thrilled to know we have people doing that not surprising i wonder if we might incentivize a staff person to locate upriver just to reduce that travel time or that response time just something to think about um you know we've talked about the one million additional dollars and i just for the record want to state that i support the use of an additional million dollars for wildfire mitigation getting started right now i don't think we should wait to do that and i'd also be interested in evaluating additional investment if staff see short-term opportunities to significantly reduce risk perhaps once this plan is further refined

1:09:31 i also understand that the oregon department of forestry will be updating their wildfire risk maps and the methodology they're using to develop those maps i suspect that's on your radar i see rod nodding his head great i think that will be important for us to yeah to incorporate into this in terms of metrics the metrics that to me i think would be most meaningful would be um one just for context the number of red flag days that we're having in our service territory um including going back historically i think that'd be useful for us to see how that's evolving over time the miles of tree trimming per year the money spent on tree trimming per year the miles of undergrounding per year and perhaps the percent of system that's undergrounded and hours of public safety power set off

1:10:19 per year thankfully that's zero right now but if that starts to happen i think tracking that would be useful you asked about the level of review it seems to me like an annual review seems about right perhaps that tapers off after a few years once we all get more comfortable with all of this um and just one other question is how are we working with the city of eugene on wildfire mitigation efforts in the south hills then i'll wait for the question or the answer on that and then i'm done thanks very much ron do you want me to take that yes please okay um we've had a a preliminary conversation with

1:11:04 a number of staff at the city of eugene and mostly the park staff who are in charge of the urban forestry and we've been talking about aligning some of our leveraging some of their work because they're doing a bunch of fuels reduction work so can we look at some of the areas they're doing fuels reduction what area that we need to do tree trimming and combine and leverage and get more bang for the buck so that's one area of work that we're looking at um we're also going to be working with the fire department more closely there on our list for when we do the protective settings so they're alerted and notified that those productive settings are in place but i think there's more opportunity to work with our fire partners and have them participate maybe looking

1:11:50 at our maps and get their sense of are these high risk areas do they make sense to you do you have areas that you're really worried about keep you up at night that we should be paying closer attention to so i think there's more opportunity there as well critical infrastructure would be the last area that i just talked about we've been talking to our private telecom companies and getting a sense of where their critical infrastructure is so we have it mapped in our system and we know if the if we need to de-energize that we're able to call them ahead of time and let them know so they can get generators out most of these towers already have generators and backup power but they have alarms that go off and that's another area where our local partners are involved in that because they have communications for

1:12:35 and sheriff's office dispatch so that's another area of coordination between us and our city and county partners there's probably more i just haven't explored them all oh it's great thank you jesus and just to clarify um commissioner mcrae it sounds like in your metrics um thoughts that really understanding the the patterns of use of all the tools you know and when i think about that i think about things like um when you know how often and for how many line miles do we have the extra sensitive settings set you know so you know last year we did it for this many

1:13:21 line mile hours or you know just to to see patterns develop um and then associate those patterns with the what is likely going to be a very different climate in the future versus what we've seen in the past just to understand the correlation um of which also you know gets back to i think some of the importance of being able to check on what i'd call microclimate um you know situations within our territory so um you you can't just look at the eugene airport and go here it is um you're gonna have to be able to look at things with a lot more precision so that that's that was my interpretation of some of your metric comments was was to look at really how we use the tools and correlate those with different patterns

1:14:08 yeah yep perfect thanks frank yeah some really good ideas thank you all right john or sonia do either of you have another go around of questions or comments i see a no from john barofsky sonia nope great and none from me did you all get what you needed from us yes i think so i got a lot of good feedback really appreciate it great thank you very much um so we're just moving on to board wrap up i don't know if anybody has any last words that they want to say

1:14:57 go ahead matt i i yeah i would just say again um thanks for all the work here this is uh really solid and um i appreciate all the work that went into it all right anyone else i'm sure if we go around everyone's gonna echo maths thank you and appreciation yeah when are the helicopters trimming they started this week actually and they'll be done either over the weekend or early next week i wonder if they'll be up near fin rock at all on friday all right uh anything else from you frank

1:15:42 no thank you commissioners i think this was valuable appreciate staff and all the work they've put in on this and it really is important to get your thoughts on kind of direction and and guidance and so we appreciate your time and your investment in the process with us so thank you very much great well we ran a little over but i appreciate everybody hanging in there and thank you to staff also for working this evening and um with that we will adjourn our meeting [Music] thanks everyone thank you