YAKIMA, Wash.- Fire season is upon us, and it has already come with seven power outages in Yakima County, affecting nearly 40,000 residents in one outage.
That’s the plan, according to Pacific Power.
Established in 2021, a team of meteorologists forecast potential fire weather that could disrupt electricity service. Looking for dry conditions, wind gusts and anything else that could help a fire grow, the meteorologists pass that information along to the operations team to prepare to de-energize the area.
“We’ll create the outage and then it will require someone to patrol the line before we restore the power and, in that effort, to balance out the risk that fire risk that we’re trying to mitigate, that we’re trying to reduce versus keep the power on,” says Allen Berreth on the Transmission and Distribution Operations team.
Meteorologists use real time data from weather stations attached to power poles to track fires that could reach power equipment.
“Why is that?” says Berreth. “Well, it’s for the safety of the first responders. It’s making sure we’re not making the situation worse if that fire actually burns into our corridor or actually burns our structures down and it was energized, it can make the situation worse.”
Turning the power off can be done remotely but can take hours to restore. Waiting for it to be safe to turn power on, Pacific Power says it will affect more people for longer.
In an effort to limit outages caused by equipment near fires, the power company has invested in fire-resistant poles and conductors to limit sparking. Putting equipment underground away from the fire risk would cost four to five times as much as this investment.
“In meteorology, my top job is to stay ahead of the forecast,” says Chester Lampkin with Pacific Power. “Stay ahead of the weather and keep our community safe.”
Forecasting fire weather also predicts certain areas at higher risk. Fires gravitate uphill when burning, making wooded areas at higher risk.
By Pacific Power’s estimate, the Yakima area is not in the top 15% of wildfire risk.
“It’s not to say there’s no fire risk,” says Berreth. “It’s still an area that has the ingredients. When you look at the humidity, winds, every area has the potential and have the ingredients for a catastrophic wildfire.”
