By Robert Mullin and Hudson Sangree

PORTLAND, Ore. — Utility equipment ignited eight of the 20 most destructive wildfires in California history and six of the eight occurred in just the last three years, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire).

Those sobering statistics set the context for a “wildfire dialogue” convened by West Coast utility regulators at the Oregon Convention Center on Friday, bringing together four panels of utility and fire science experts to discuss ways to reduce a danger expected to grow with climate change.

“It’s clear that wildfires are larger, more intense,” Koko Tomassian, of the California Public Utilities Commission’s Safety and Enforcement Division, said when presenting the Cal Fire figures at the conference. “The question is: Are we as a community doing everything we can to save lives? Are utilities in compliance with standing general orders and regulations? Are we as regulatory agencies enforcing those regulations in a manner that promotes compliance?”

Brian D’Agostino, director of fire science and climate adaptation with San Diego Gas and Electric, recounted his utility’s history with wildfires. The first big San Diego fire flared up in late September 1970 and burned about 100,000 acres. At the time, it was one of the largest fires in state history. The next didn’t come until 2003, consuming 286,000 acres in just over a day-and-half and ranking as the state’s second biggest fire.

“Everyone said, ‘This won’t happen again; this is a once in lifetime event,’” D’Agostino recalled. “And it was four years later that … 13% of our service territory burned in a matter of days” in the 2007 Witch complex of fires, which authorities blamed on SDG&E.

“That’s really where it became apparent that something very different is happening here in Southern California,” he said. “This is not consistent with how our climate has behaved for the decades and century before.”

Fire Concerns Go North

The wildfire worries that plagued dry Southern California for decades have moved rapidly northward, catching many off guard. Huge, deadly blazes devastated parts of rainier Northern California in 2015, 2017 and 2018.

In Portland, a thousand miles north of San Diego, the Bonneville Power Administration is now tackling the issue as well.

Until recent years, said Robin Furrer, vice president of transmission and field services at BPA, she had been accustomed to focusing on how to sustain the BPA system in the face of wildfires.

“So the notion of looking at our infrastructure in terms of, do we contribute to a fire, or are we even a source of ignition for a fire, was a new perspective with which to look at our system and how we operate, maintain and make decisions about it,” she said.

Some of the “minimums” BPA has observed to meet reliability standards — such as setbacks for transmission corridors — may not be adequate for protecting against wildfires, she said.

“We have a set standard, but that set standard assumes a non-changing environment. And as the utility industry, we have to look at what are those new risk factors that we might not have considered before,” Furrer said.

As in San Diego, the 2003 fire season “was particularly bad for British Columbia,” representing a pivotal time for the Canadian province’s major utility, said Mike Guite, BC Hydro’s manager of transmission sustainment planning.

“We had communities devastated, houses lost … and we had a major radial transmission line out, and so several communities feeding from that line were out of power for weeks on end,” Guite said.

After that fire season, a provincial commission produced a report that made recommendations changing how wildfire risk is managed in BC. It also resulted in the Wildfire Act, which bolstered obligations for land managers to lessen wildfire risk, he said.

“The commission also made a bunch of recommendations for communities and how the communities manage that wildfire risk in the [wildland-urban] interface zone around those communities,” he said.

Danger at the Interface

Oregon Public Utility Commissioner Letha Tawney pointed to the wildland-urban interface as a key factor in the West’s growing attention to fire danger.

“Wildfires have been an issue for some of us for years. It’s endemic in the West. What’s different? Why the focus now?” Tawney asked.

“One, we have more people living in the wildland-urban interface,” she continued, noting that residential housing in such areas has increased from 31 million units to 43 million units between 1990 and 2010. “To serve this growing population, the sector’s added thousands — even hundreds of thousands — of circuit lines of electric systems across” the Western Interconnection.

The way Western forests are managed is giving fires more fuel and increasing their intensity, she said.

Climate Change Impact

Climate change has exacerbated the risks, Tawney said.

“These patterns of economic development and forest management would have increased our risk of catastrophic wildfire just on their own, but they’ve run smack into the wall of a changing climate,” Tawney said.

Even though human-caused climate change can still be controversial in the West, “I believe we cannot keep customers safe or protect long-term affordability effectively if we ignore the data,” she said.

Crystal Raymond, a climate adaptation specialist with the University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group, said human-caused climate change accounts for about 50% of the area burned in the West since the mid-1980s. The Pacific Northwest is seeing a rapid escalation in fire risk. It’s now experiencing, on average, 12 to 15 more days of high fire danger each year compared with historical averages, she said.

“We expect to see an increase in the area burned due to climate change,” Raymond warned, saying that by the 2040s, that area will increase 100 to 500% over the 2006 mean.

Referring to the “legendary” Tillamook Burn that destroyed 350,000 acres of old-growth forest in the relatively damp Coast Range of Western Oregon, Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission Chair David Danner asked Raymond: “Some will say that what we’re seeing now is a phase and will pass. Is that the case?”

“There’s definitely been variability in the past, and when you look back at this time period when we had large fires like the Tillamook Fire and the [1902] Yacolt Fire [in the Columbia River Gorge], they were drier and hotter than average periods in our climate. … The thing is, the projection of warmer-than-average isn’t going away,” Raymond said.

“We often hear [about] the Tillamook and Yacolt fires, [and] I just want to place that in context. Those were human-ignited fires under really awful conditions for fires out here,” said Chris Dunn, an Oregon State University research associate with a Ph.D. in forest resources. Although fire prevention programs have become “smarter” since the 1930s, conditions will continue to become warmer and drier, Dunn said.

“Remember that a lot of how fires are playing out is human interaction in drought, so we play a big part in that,” Dunn said. “Not just by our effects on climate change, but just how we interact with our wildlands.”

Fires in a Rugged Landscape

The sunny Southwest and rainy Northwest share mountainous terrain that makes limiting fire damage more difficult, panelists said.

The public safety power shutoffs first used in Southern California, and now being employed in Northern California, may also be used in Oregon and Washington.

But shutting off power to prevent fires has its own risks, especially to vulnerable residents of rural areas, some said. British Columbia will not de-energize lines during fires because the impacts on its communities “are so great,” BC Hydro’s Guite said.

The California PUC is trying to deal with the situation, said Anthony Noll, program manager with the Safety and Enforcement Division. The average shutoffs lasts 35 hours, endangering those who depend on medical devices that need power and cell phones that need charging, he said.

Moreover, he said, it can be difficult just to get the word out. Landlines, cell phones, websites and text messages both help and fragment the process. Utilities have primary responsibility for notifying residents they may lose power in high-threat fire conditions.

One problem, he said, is pre-emptively notifying people too much — “crying wolf” — and having them ignore future warnings.

David Lucas, vice president of transmission and distribution operations with Pacific Power, said his utility, a division of PacifiCorp that serves customers in Washington, Oregon and far Northern California, is on the front lines of fire risk that seems to be traveling up the West Coast.

But Pacific Power has been able to learn from what’s happening in California and apply those “best practices” in its Oregon and Washington territories. “We didn’t see the need to reinvent the wheel, if you will,” Lucas said.

CPUC Commissioner Clifford Rechtschaffen said his state had been forced to the vanguard of wildfire prevention. Its progress can inform efforts elsewhere in the West but remains a work in progress, he said.

“Every season we learn more,” Rechtschaffen said. “We have a lot of humility about what we’ve done. This is very much a continuous learning process.”