Wildfire Prevention & ProtectionWildfire Prevention & ProtectionWildfire Prevention & Protection
Contact between vegetation and electric facilities has contributed to some of the largest and most destructive wildfires in the United States and abroad. In addition, wildfires passing through electric transmission rights of way can have catastrophic effects on the strength and integrity of structures.
The public, ratepayers and regulators have the inherent expectation that electric utilities exercise due diligence to best ensure the mitigation of higher risk vegetation that could contribute to wildfire ignition and the damage/destruction of facilities in the event of a wildfire. Although these expectations are arguably unreasonable in some circumstances, it is in a utility’s best interest to have deployed best-in-class methodologies to reduce these risks, including the utilization of technologies such as remote sensing.
Why ECI?
ECI’s executive leadership team have created, developed and deployed wildfire protection and prevention methodologies used by larger utilities in the western United States. Utilizing remote sense technologies including LiDAR and high resolution and near IR imagery, this team developed methodologies to identify high risk trees with extremely high precision.
In addition, this team developed ways to utilize output from the same technologies to develop comprehensive, risk-based methods to protect transmission infrastructure from the threat of passing wildfires.
ECI has the ability to leverage and assemble a multi-disciplinary team of experts to develop solutions specific to your unique challenges including remote sense vendors, geospatial analytic expertise, fire scientists and other relevant subject matter experts. We also have experience successfully deploying solutions in partnership with federal lands managers (e.g., US Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management)