This week, Avista is holding four telephone town hall meetings to explain its decision to move into “fire safety mode.”
That shift in practice means, when wildfire danger is high, "if there’s a disruption on the line that serves a customer’s home, it doesn’t try to re-energize and we send our line resources out to patrol the line to make sure that it’s safe to re-energize it," said David Howell, who oversees Avista's wildfire mitigation plan.
The practice may help to prevent fires, but Howell says there’s a downside. It often takes longer to restore customers’ service while teams in the field check to make sure a tree hasn’t fallen on a power line.
Howell says Avista is able to adjust its transmission system to make it even more sensitive to potential threats as wildfire conditions become more acute.
“And when that happens, we actually notify our customers of the higher potential, if there is a higher potential for them having an outage. But it also promotes significant safety in the communities that we serve because those circuits are more apt to trip off-line before they have a problem in the field.”
He says Avista will likely remain in this mode while the risk of fire is elevated, usually through July, August and much of September.
Avista is sponsoring the telephone meetings to explain that practice. Howell says the utility will also talk about its work to remove trees and other vegetation that are close to power lines.
“What we’ve done now, there’s a term we refer to as ‘risk trees,’ but trees that are dead, dying and diseased, we want to make sure that we remove those adjacent to our rights of way so that if we do have significant weather events, where something could be blown into our system, that those trees are removed," he said.
"So we actually do that on an annual basis now and that just started a year-and-a-half ago.”
Avista will hold its meetings each of the next four nights. Each will focus on a different part of the utility’s coverage area. Tonight’s will focus on Benewah, Bonner, Kootenai and Shoshone counties. Tomorrow’s will focus on Spokane and Lincoln counties. Each meeting will begin at 6. Avista requests that you register in advance at its website if you want to dial in.
