Prepping for 2021 wildfires, Oregon adopts rules for preemptive blackouts by utilities – OregonLive

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The Oregon Public Utility Commission has adopted temporary rules governing preemptive blackouts that electricity providers can institute to prevent wildfires, as well as new requirements for quicker and more detailed reporting to state regulators when utility equipment is implicated or impacted by fire starts.

The temporary rules, which immediately apply to Portland General Electric, PacifiCorp and Idaho Power, are being adopted in preparation for the 2021 wildfire season, which began last Saturday for some parts of the state most heavily impacted by drought. They also come in the wake of extraordinary conflagrations that burned almost 1 million acres in 2020, destroyed thousands of homes and businesses and left nine dead.

Several Oregon utilities are facing lawsuits alleging negligence because they failed to de-energize their lines over Labor Day amid forecasts of critical fire danger and a historic east wind event that ultimately fed the massive blazes that ignited around the state that day.

State utility regulators have held workshops with utilities related to wildfire planning, but the rules would formalize that process and bring Oregon up to speed with regulations governing so-called public safety power shutoffs in California, which has had such rules in place for some time due to the devastating impacts of longer and more active wildfire seasons in that state.

“With the earliest official opening to Oregon’s wildfire season in 40 years, the establishment of these rules was extremely important and timely,” Letha Tawney, a PUC Commissioner, said in a statement.

She added that the rules “are designed to help keep Oregonians safe by establishing criteria on how the utilities communicate about and coordinate” public safety power shutoffs to ensure timely information is shared.

To some extent, the PUC’s temporary rules mimic requirement in the omnibus wildfire legislation currently being considered by Oregon lawmakers, though the agency says it already has the authority it needs to propagate such rules, and it will build any additional requirements that lawmakers approve into permanent rules. The temporary rules would be in place until mid-November.

Utilities say public safety power shutoffs are a measure of last report because they can have wide-ranging impacts on vulnerable community members, emergency communications and even inhibit the ability of public agencies to respond to fires. In California, where they have been used with increasing frequency by utilities, they have been deeply controversial among customers. But those same companies are facing potentially huge liabilities for wildfire damages caused by their equipment, a reality spotlighted by the bankruptcy of that state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, dues to the massive damages from 2018′s Camp fire, which devastated to town of Paradise, destroyed 19,000 structures and caused 85 deaths.

The new rules lay out requirements for utilities related to public education, notifications to public safety requirements and customers, including outreach to vulnerable populations, as well as after-action reporting requirements. Utilities would retain the ultimate responsibility for the decision to pull the plug, but the rules require them to formalize the protocols they use to make the decision.

The PUC staff did include a temporary waiver for some of the requirements in the rules given the proximity of the 2021 fire season, but told commissioners in their write-up that they  reflected a minimum set of requirements, sometimes on a best-efforts basis, that should be in place to protect Oregonians this summer and fall.

The fire incident reporting rules require utilities to report to regulators “as soon as practicable” all incidents involving their equipment that travel greater than one meter from their ignition point as well as those drawing significant public attention and media coverage. Within 20 days, the utilities are required to provide written reports describing the incident, the involvement of their equipment, the suspected initiating event and any outage information.

Those requirements are also similar to those in place in California, and may provide more information than is typically available in the immediate wake of a fire. The cause of last year’s conflagrations is officially under investigation still, though anecdotal and eyewitness accounts implicate power lines in several. The rules stipulate that such reports cannot be used as evidence in any subsequent lawsuit for damages.

— Ted Sickinger; tsickinger@oregonian.com; 503-221-8505; @tedsickinger