Power lines get little priority in fire prevention

Long before an arcing power line sparked the Rice Canyon fire last month, fire officials and utility executives wrote a detailed plan to reduce the threat posed by the state electricity grid.

The surest solution is to bury lines in areas likely to burn. But at a cost of $1 million or more per mile – and technical challenges to boot – regulators have been reluctant to impose that safeguard. The cost would be passed on to customers, who in San Diego already pay among the highest rates in the nation.

Even the boom in technology has overlooked the national power grid.

The Electric Power Research Institute, an industry think tank, hasn't fully examined the problem of fires sparked by transmission and distribution lines.

“We don't look at fires per se,” said Richard Lordan, an EPRI director. Instead, the institute seeks to improve reliability and avoid short-circuits, which can also cause fires.

Nor has the U.S. Department of Energy focused on new solutions.

“There's not a whole lot of research going on in that area,” said Tom King, an engineer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. “To a certain amount it's, do you bury the lines or go overhead?”

State Sen. Christine Kehoe, a Democrat from San Diego who served on a commission that studied the 2003 wildfires, said last month's fires may finally prompt regulators to consider requiring more underground power lines in areas vulnerable to fire.

“We have to balance the safety issues and the loss of property versus an unknown expense at this point,” she said.

Power lines do not have to fall to start a fire. Arcing wires ignite dry tree limbs. Kites and Mylar balloons hit wires and cause fires. Even birds spark fires by shorting out lines.

High winds present the biggest risk, however. Gusts such as those that swept through San Diego's backcountry last month can push limbs into live wires and cause power lines to collide, creating sparks.

“One way to prevent all arcing is to heavily insulate everything on the pole,” said Raffy Stepanian, a safety and reliability manager with the California Public Utilities Commission. “But that is so expensive no one has ever done that.”

Like most utilities, San Diego Gas & Electric says it removes vegetation that could interfere with its 18,000 miles of transmission and distribution lines.

Crews regularly inspect the lines, cutting and trimming brush, company officials said. State code requires clearances of four to 10 feet, depending on the voltage of the wire.

“The number one thing is our aggressive vegetation-management program,” said David Geier, the SDG&E vice president of transmission.

The utility maintains a database of more than 380,000 trees to track its trimming program. SDG&E said it shares that record with Cal Fire, but Chief Hillman said he does not have access to the data.

Residents of Rainbow, a tiny community outside Fallbrook, say the utility failed to properly trim the area where the Rice Canyon fire started Oct. 22.

Early that morning, Travis Butler said he watched howling winds drive power lines into overgrown trees high above Rice Canyon Road. “It looked like someone was welding up in the trees,” he said.

Hillman expects the state will try to recover the costs of fighting the Rice Canyon fire – and potentially others – from SDG&E.

Residents outside Ramona also reported power lines as the cause of the Witch Creek fire, which killed two people and claimed more than 1,000 homes.

State investigators have not announced how that fire started, but power lines have been linked to the blaze.

“Numerous new starts in the surrounding areas due to spotting and electrical wires falling due to high winds,” states an incident report from 3 a.m. Oct. 22 – 15 hours into the fire.

Utility companies typically wait until their equipment breaks down before making repairs, so the process of replacing wooden poles with fire-resistant steel has been slow.

SDG&E says that will change because of last month's fires, which burned about 1,600 poles. The company plans to replace 95 percent of the damaged high-voltage-line poles with steel. Twenty-five percent of the lower-voltage-line poles also will be steel.

The industry standard for a century has been to build above-ground power lines in rural areas. Utility executives worry that burying those lines would make repairs more expensive, as well as increase construction costs.

“The one problem is the dollars,” said Armando Perez, a vice president of the California Independent System Operator, the Folsom nonprofit that manages most of the state grid. “The (cost) difference is 10-to-1, and it could be 20-to-1 and 30-to-1.”

For years SDG&E has sought to add a third major transmission line to complement existing links that run up the coast and parallel to the U.S.-Mexico border.

The latest plan is the $1.3 billion Sunrise Powerlink, a 150-mile overhead line through the San Diego County backcountry – some of the same land that burned in the Witch Creek fire.

In its application before regulators, SDG&E said the fire risk from the Sunrise project would be “less than significant.”

But the Mussey Grade Road Alliance, a group of backcountry residents opposed to the power line, has a different view.

“The fact that the proposed route passes through flammable vegetation for a considerable portion of its path would INCREASE risk,” the alliance said in written testimony to the utilities commission. “The fact (Sunrise) traverses particularly windy areas of the county would INCREASE risk.”

Alliance member Joe Mitchell is a physicist from Ramona who has studied the relationship between power lines and wildfires. He says that while electrical lines have caused only 3 percent of California's wildfires, they ignited 15 percent of the worst fires.

The 2001 “Power Line Fire Prevention Field Guide” lists the minimum steps utilities should take when guarding against fires. It also advises utilities that additional precautions are recommended and often appropriate.

But according to lawyers who have battled the companies in court, the legal standards aren't always met.

“As a general matter, the primary focus in corporate decision-making is on the goal of generating profits, not on environmental or social responsibility,” said Jenny Ross, a former prosecutor who won a landmark criminal case against Pacific Gas and Electric after the 1994 Trauner fire in Nevada County.

Ignited when a high-voltage wire touched an untrimmed tree, the Trauner fire destroyed a 19th-century schoolhouse and 12 homes in the Gold Rush town of Rough and Ready.

During her investigation, Ross discovered that PG&E had diverted $80 million of vegetation-management funds into profits – even though the company knew of the resulting fire danger.

PG&E was convicted on 739 counts of criminal negligence and fined nearly $30 million by state regulators.

SDG&E settled a vegetation-clearance case in 1996 when the company paid $770,000 to resolve a civil suit in the wake of the Guejito fire east of Escondido. That fire also started when a power line ignited a tree. It burned 18 homes and 20,000 acres.

In that case, the state alleged that work crews arrived soon after the fire had passed and began to chop down overgrown trees and limbs. Butler, the Rice Canyon Road resident, made the same allegation last week.

Guidelines for brush clearance are generally established by states and municipalities. In some cases, utilities set their own standards.

In Ada, Okla., where high winds and ice are recurring threats, the People's Electric Cooperative clears 20-foot corridors for its distribution lines.

And whenever the 14,000-member cooperative installs new poles, they're made of metal and built closer together to reduce “galloping,” or mechanical vibrations, in the lines during heavy winds, co-op vice president Monica Cowart said.

This year's wildfires already are prompting new scrutiny of the rules and policies regarding electricity transmission and distribution.

Robert Mitchell, chief executive of Trans-Elect LLC, a Maryland-based builder of high-voltage power lines, predicts regulators will take a closer look at requiring more wires to be buried.

“Even though the underground transmission lines might cost two or three times as much, the transmission amount is a very small portion of the electric bill,” he said.

One consumer advocate is also using the recent fires to boost his case against the Sunrise application, which is expected to be approved or rejected by state utility regulators next year.

In a motion filed Thursday, Michael Shames of the Utility Consumers' Action Network urged the utilities commission to compel SDG&E to testify about the recent wildfires during the next phase of the process.