Joint Legislative Committee on Emergency Management

Welcome everybody to the Joint Legislative Committee on Emergency Management. Assembly Committee on Emergency Management; Joint Oversight Hearing Critical Lifeline Disruptions. How California is Prepared for Extreme Incidents: Electricity, Gas and Public Safety Power Shutoffs thank you for joining us this afternoon.

With wildfires, earthquakes and other natural events becoming catastrophic disasters when they destroy things that we need to survive, we call these needs lifelines, which include food, water, transportation, housing, medical care, communication, power and gas, today, we're going to focus on the lifelines of power and gas. California is the most populous state in the nation. We are sustained by a vast network of power lines, gas pipes and all the infrastructure in between. In the blink of an eye, disaster like earthquakes and wildfires can wreak havoc.

On this infrastructure. The dangers are twofold. First are many terrible effects of losing power, such as our safety or medicine, food supply without refrigeration, the inability of people keeping safe in extreme temperatures without acs, heaters running and communications, medical response and wastewater treatment are all in danger when we have no power. Second, ruptured power lines can start fires, gas leaks and cause explosions, creating a secondary hazard that we must battle. In the past, malfunction, our power infrastructure have also been the cause of severe wildfires.

While electricity utility infrastructure has historically been responsible for less than 10% of reported wildfires, nine of the fires attributed to power equipment are among the 20 most destructive fires in California's history. Now imagine when California is faced with two simultaneous catastrophic disasters such as a major earthquake and severe wildfire. Are we prepared? Because of this, it is vital for all our stakeholders to participate in making our power and gas infrastructure resilient.

This includes using the latest technologies to upgrade our infrastructure and making plans for how we will handle the loss of service during a disaster. Today, we will be hearing from eight witnesses. On the first panel, witnesses representing their response perspectives will discuss the impacts of power loss on crisis management. On the second panel, utility providers and state utility regulators will discuss ongoing mitigation efforts and the expected disruptions and recovery plans that will arise in the event of a major disaster. And I look forward to learning about our progress in the future of this area with you today. Would the Vice Chair like to provide any opening remarks?

Thank you, Chair Rodriguez, for getting us started today. Great to be here. As the Vice Chair, I also want to thank all the panelists that made their way here. They are going to share perspectives with us and answer questions from us and appreciate their work really on the ground, but also in informing us. Today's hearing will look and we'll take a look at what our communities would face, not if, but when the next disaster comes along to disrupt critical electricity and gas lifelines and how the state can shore up its resources in response to those needs.

Unfortunately, I represent a district that has faced more than its share of natural disasters over the past years. I learned this firsthand during my first year in the Legislature, when the local communities I represent were devastated by utility sparks, Thomas Fire and subsequent mudslides.

As communities in the district and in rural areas like paradise and others across the state get back to their feet in the aftermath of disaster and climate fueled events, it's more important than ever to incorporate the lessons learned that we will hear about today, and also the recovery and response planning to help minimize the impact of future events. We know that fire, flooding and catastrophic earthquake events can have devastating and ongoing cost for our infrastructure.

We also know that it's important to address these issues despite the budget, the giant budget deficit this year, and we will need to be proactive in thinking about how to mitigate the threats. As we work to adapt to a changing climate, we must also do so equitably and in a way that builds more resilient communities across our entire state.

Resources for our communities must be sustainable up front so that we have the necessary tools at our disposal and also to respond quickly and swiftly to the next incident. Today, I personally hope to learn more from our speakers about the opportunities for emergency response and also our ability to partner with federal, tribal, local and private stakeholders to reduce disaster risk and protect our natural resources, as well as help our communities overall become more resilient.

I look forward to hearing the testimonies from stakeholders today and hope that we can all come together to better understand how we move forward in light of the topic today. So appreciate everyone being here and appreciate the chair leading on this.

Thank you. With that said, let's go ahead with our first panel. As a reminder, we will hold questions till the end of the presentation. The brief presentations first panel first we'll hear from Mary Jo Flynn Nevins, the Sacramento county chief of emergency services, and everybody can come forward.

And then we also have Damon Covington, chief of City of Oakland Fire Department Lori Nezhura, Deputy Director of planning, preparedness and prevention, California Office of OES and Anale Burlew, Chief Deputy Director of California Department of Fourth Street and Fire Protection, CAL FIRE. So with that, Mary Jo, you may proceed.

Is this on? Okay.

Yes.

Thank you. Good afternoon. Chair Rodriguez and Vice Chair Limon and Members of the Committee. My name is Mary Jo Flynn Nevins, and I'm the chief of emergency services for Sacramento County Office of Emergency Services. Thank you for inviting me and allowing me to discuss emergency management concerns regarding utility lifelines. I'd like to share with you some comments on past experiences of lifeline disruptions, the interconnectivity of these systems, and the cascading effects and the needs emergency managers have in preparing and responding to these events.

We know that severe utility disruptions impacting energy, water and communications lifelines can be caused by several events. Locally within Sacramento county, we have seen the devastating effects of significant windstorms, high heat events and fires, just to name a few. In the last few years, our county, in addition to other counties, was the recipient of public safety power shutoff and Community power resilience grants. Through those grants, we were able to support the development of a severe power outage hazard annex.

There is much work to be done in improving and in updating that plan and collecting data that would aid decision making. Unfortunately, agencies, including ours, were hampered by supply chain issues from the pandemic in being able to acquire generators, batteries and other equipment to mitigate disasters. Continued investment in local agencies will help to ensure readiness. In terms of staffing, planning and equipment, I'd like to share a few short examples of our experiences with significant power outages.

While Sacramento county is served by a public utility for power, we've had several large disruptions that have impacted our community, most recently as early as February 4 this year, while much of the state was experiencing significant flooding, Sacramento county saw the extreme impacts of wind. During that storm, there were 500 outage events, over 200,000 customers were impacted, over 100 Poles damaged, and over 300 downed trees that caused damage to lines.

Initial damage estimates from this storm exceeded $13 million and was added to the governor's State of emergency on March 22, but our county was not recommended for a presidential declaration. One of the biggest issues our first responders have in these situations is maintaining safety for the public and ensuring that the areas where lines are down are blocked off until repairs can be made. Many times, this takes first responders out of service to manage these scenes.

While there have been great improvements since even the 2023 winter storms scene, safety will always require valuable resources. In 2021, during a period of high winds, a fire destroyed over 25 mobile homes on Brandon island in the Sacramento San Joaquin Delta. Power shutoffs to the area were a precaution for first responders working to extinguish the fire, but also to prevent additional fires from igniting. This directly impacted the rural fire Department leading the effort to protect the island.

Their station lost power and they had no access to communications and Internet service while their station was out of power. Recently, this volunteer fire station received direct federal grant funding to support the acquisition of a generator to enable functionality of their firehouse. This generator was used on February 4, just days after it was installed.

I'll reiterate that continued local investment is needed to support local special districts who have missions to support the community but do not have the luxury of regular funding streams to acquire needed equipment such as generators or power storage systems. Another significant weather event impacting community lifelines is extreme heat. In 2017, a high heat incident left a hospital without power on the cusp of evacuation.

Evacuation was considered because the cooling systems for critical computing server areas were not on generator backup and the concern over lost patient records influenced decisions and planning for evacuation. Fortunately, that did not come to pass as alternatives for cooling were identified with significant logistical strains. Challenges were ultimately I'm sorry, changes ultimately were made to the server room because of this experience, and it is now able to have backup generator power for their server room.

Investments in technologies that protect from extreme heat events and continue to cool critical locations and infrastructure are necessary during significant outages. A waiver from the Governor as part of the State of emergency is necessary to allow alternative power generation. There may be gaps between when a local emergency proclamation is made and when the Governor adds a jurisdiction to the State of emergency. For example, in response to the February 4 storms, Sacramento county proclaimed an emergency on February 8 and ratified that emergency on February 14.

We were not added to the governor's proclamation of emergency until March 22, allowing local agencies more flexibility and authority for power generation waivers in the period between the local proclamation and the Governor, State of emergency would be helpful. Statewide, we have seen significant disruption to systems. I'll hearken you back to 2011 when there was a multi state outage that affected Southern California, Arizona and Mexico.

That same year, Pasadena experienced a significant windstorm that lasted over two weeks for some of their residents, and responses to catastrophic fires all require dedicated and trained staff to restore systems in a timely manner. While the state is practiced in sending crews in response via the emergency management assistance compact, out of state emergency managers would like to see more training and exercises related to bringing those resources into the state.

In support of catastrophic community lifeline failures, we need to answer critical questions such as who's going to be responsible for the logistics, the utility provider, the local emergency manager, and what EMAC resources or logistics will the state support. Significant disruption to community lifelines can and do cause cascading effects such as power disruption to gas pumps, credit card machines, cellular towers, broadband, and more. One area of interconnectivity is our alert and warning systems. They require power, broadband, cellular technologies ready and available.

Previous legislation has given us access to contact information from utility providers, and this has been a wonderful partnership in accessing that information to support our alert and warning systems. Rural communities rely on landline systems as well as functioning Internet and cellular to receive emergency alerts. We risk alert and warning failures to residents during critical lifeline disruptions. We cannot guarantee that multiple messages will be received by residents in order or even at all.

Also, if cellular technology is impacted, sending messages with links to additional information are likely to fail. That is why it's important to standardize message writing and delivery, to increase the likelihood that those important messages will be received, and to ensure adequate translation of messages when the technology allows. Current technology for the federal Integrated Public alert and warning system, or IPAWs, only allows delivery of messages in English and Spanish. There are efforts underway to expand the languages, but those limitations are the reality for emergency managers nationwide.

Researchers such as Doctor Jeanette Sutton from the University of Albany have developed tools such as the warning lexicon and recommended ways of structuring alert and warning messages. When lifelines have the potential for disruption, it is critical that all agencies are relying on research and evidence based criteria for developing those alerts. Investment in training, funding, additional research and messaging unique to California and training for alert originators is necessary. In summary, emergency management needs significant excuse me, emergency management needs during significant utility disruptions are many.

Investments in local grants that support planning, mitigation, and equipment can help to improve the resources available to a community. Support to rural communities, volunteer fire districts, and special districts impacted by lifeline disruptions enable them to access the tools and equipment necessary to carry out critical roles. Investment in research and technologies that protect against heat events and that provide protection from cascading events where one lifeline failure disrupts other lifelines is important.

Supporting academic research in alert and warning messaging to ensure equity, timely delivery, and investments in the resources necessary to train alert originators throughout the state is needed. And allowing local agencies temporary waivers of AQMD rules for utilization of generators in the gap between the local proclamation and being included in the governor's State of emergency would be a great advantage. Thank you very much for your time, and I'd be happy to respond to any questions you may have.

Thank you very much for your information. Next we'll hear from Chief Damon Covington from Oakland Fire Department. When you're ready, chief.

Thank you, Chair Rodriguez and Committee. I appreciate your opportunity to speak on this important endeavor that we're all involved in. As you may know, Oakland has had more than its share of natural disasters with the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 and the Oakland Hills fire in 1991, which was one of the most devastating fires in Us history.

So in the last five to six years, we've had at least eight to 10 power utility shutoffs, which in some ways has been devastating for our communities because they go without power for days at a time, which brings its own level of devastation to families who need medication, power, food, all of those things. But it has forced us to become a better partner within our region. We've had to partner with all of the fire departments and county facilities, open up our ELC.

We've gotten really good at that, activating our ELC, because we need to have a kind of a brain trust on how we're going to attack these, these situations, whether it be atmospheric River, a wildland fire, or earthquake. We've really kind of come together as a region to figure out how we're going to deal with this. And we've tried to partner and continue to try and partner with puppy utilities to make sure that our needs are being met.

One of the things that we've done from a fire Department standpoint is we've developed a local hazard mitigation plan. Our hazard mitigation plan is developed to help understand and reduce the risk from disasters to people, property, economy and environment. In understanding the risks, we identify potential hazards, determine their probability of occurrence, and identify their impact to the community. Earthquakes were ranked the highest hazard to the City of Oakland. We have three major fault lines within the City of Oakland, San Andreas, Hayward and Calaveras.

The City of Oakland lies within the San Andreas fault system, the largest one in California, and the fault line with the potential for the strongest earthquakes. More specifically, the city straddles the Hayward Fault, a branch fault of the larger system. The Hayward Fault runs along the southwestern bay of the East Bay Hills and parallels State Highway 13, making it an approximate physical boundary between the Low lying, urbanized portions of Oakland to the west and the less developed upland areas of the east.

The false two segments, each approximately 30 miles long, extend from the Warm Springs district of Fremont to Oakland and from Oakland to Point Pinal. So as you can see, it's a very large footprint. The Hayward fault is believed to accumulate strain at one of the highest rates in the Bay Area, suggesting that it is one of the faults in the region most likely to generate a large earthquake. In fact, the fault is one of the most hazardous in the world because of its high slip rate.

It demonstrates ability to generate large surface rupturing earthquakes and most importantly, its location through a heavily urbanized area. From a city perspective, we've developed our strategic plan. We've really tried to identify auxiliary water supplies. We're asking for grant funding to help facilitate some of the rescue efforts we'll need in the event of the inevitable earthquake. Significant portions of the city have either a moderate or high liquefaction susceptibility. What are our actions? Actions planned to mitigate earthquake hazards?

We've developed a plan for the City of Oakland safer housing soft story apartment retrofit program. We are still identifying funding, but we've identified 22,000 apartment buildings that need to be retrofit through throughout the city so that they can survive an earthquake of 5.0 or greater.

Continue the earthquake Safer Home program this is an opportunity to leverage the city's existing community outreach network, current pipeline of homes in need of retrofit and existing homes rehab intake process to solicit and process applications expeditiously for those homes that were that are older homes that would not survive a great impact of a 5.0 or greater earthquake.

Continuity of operations emergency planning Oakland Fire Department will continue to develop a continuity of operations plan that includes backup storage of vital records such as plans and backup procedures to pay employees and vendors if normal finance Department operations are disrupted, as well as other essential electronic files. Implement the city's energy assurance plan that is a key part of the city's emergency and recovery plan efforts.

Components of the plan to be implemented under this strategy are energy assessment of key facilities, pre wiring of rapid connection and provision of supplemental backup generators for sustained reoccupation and continuing of City Hall and police Administration buildings, community charging stations for people who need to charge batteries and vital necessities during an earthquake and energy backup at emergency shelters and communication hubs. Development of integrated preparedness plan to support implementation of and future updates to the city's local hazard mitigation plan, safety element and environmental just element.

Utilize the best available local data to identify racial disparities in the City of Oakland that can be used by the city to rank risk and prioritize mitigation strategies and incorporate a racial equity lens. We know that all disasters are not equal and some people are going to be at greater risk than others. So in order to be prepared for that, we have been preparing ahead of time to really identify who our most vulnerable population are and making sure that we get to them first.

Maritime terminal study of liquefaction potential the port has determined that in order to mitigate risk and prepare for imminent seismic events, it is necessary to conduct a liquefaction study at the marine terminals. The study will identify areas and facilities most at risk for liquefaction and outline a plan for mitigation, retrofit and emergency response.

We also have a vulnerability assessment and adoption plan in conjunction with the update or adaptation of the local hazard mitigation plan, complete a citywide vulnerability assessment and comprehensive adoption plan addressing climate risks using forward looking projections and including community stakeholder engagement. Implement key recommendations of these plans by 2025 to address major climate risks in frontline communities first and update these documents every five years with evolving climate and risk projections and adaptation and adapt best practices.

We've also reached out to PG&E. A lot of our Members are very concerned about power lines in our hills. We have a very densely populated hill environment, and of the 10,000 miles that PG&E has designated for undergrounding, none of them are in Oakland. So we've reached out to them to as high a level as we can to try and partner with them and express to them with our history. I'm not sure what the factors are that go into who has their power lines underground, but we certainly should fit that bill. Thank you.

Thank you chief. Appreciate it. Next we'll hear from Lori Nezhura, Deputy Director of planning, preparedness and prevention at Cal OES.

Thank you and good afternoon Assemblymember Rodriguez, Senator Limon, and others. CAL OES serves as the state's leadership hub during all emergencies and disasters, and part of our responsibility is to maintain the state emergency plan and manage the standardized emergency management system, or CEMS, both of which set the framework for California State level emergency response operations.

And we provide guidance, technical assistance, and resources to local government agencies to assist in their preparedness efforts because when local and state government emergency planning goals are aligned, the overall response to disasters is more efficient and and better able to protect life and property. The cascading impacts from disasters such as utility disruptions, fuel shortages, and impacts to critical lifelines have the potential to cause far reaching and long lasting impacts to our communities, especially to the access and functional needs community that are power dependent.

Over the last several years, our state has also experienced planned utility disruptions stemming from public safety power shutoffs, or psps, as you have already identified. I'll provide a brief history of Cal OEs engagement on the challenges of power shutoffs to highlight the evolution of our understanding on this issue.

In response to the energy crisis of 2001, then Governor Davis issued an Executive order directing Cal OES to develop a plan for notifying the public, public safety agencies, and the media with timely information on imminent and potential blackouts. This resulted in the development of the Cal OES electric power disruption toolkit for local government and identifies possible actions that city and or county governments can take to protect public health and safety during electric power disruptions, regardless of their cause.

The toolkit was updated in 2022 to reflect the increasing use of psps by electric utilities. While we were familiar with power disruptions from past events, the increasing utilization of psps by utility companies in 2019 brought a whole new level of expectations and requirements on both state and local governments. The fall of 2019 was tough for our communities as power throughout the state was being shut off in wide areas and for long durations of time.

Through close coordination with utility companies and a lot of hard work by Cal OES, CPUC and other state entities, we've managed to improve information sharing. So we have the vital information we need quickly. And to give you an example of how that information sharing works kind of behind the scenes in early 2021, I'll take you back there to COVID-19 when the vaccine vaccines were first hitting the state, we had a limited number of entities storing with access to vaccines.

We were also experiencing some psps and we contacted the electric utilities and we gave them a list of storage facilities and discussed with them the extreme importance that psps not disrupt the coolant so that we would not lose any of those vaccines. They worked with us very closely. We didn't have a single incident that impacted our vaccine supply. We've come a long way since 2019 regarding the frequency, duration and scale of psps events, resulting in a dramatic reduction of impacts felt by our communities.

Although it is still there, one of the ways Cal OES has helped the utilities improve their emergency preparedness and response is by creating training courses for utilities, just like we have for local governments.

Providing this emergency management specific training to utility personnel has helped them operate during emergencies within the state construct and allows them to seamlessly integrate into the state operations center during disaster disasters, as you might hear them testify to in the next panel, which is becoming a greater part of our coordination and collaboration efforts. So, to date, I'm happy to say 3046 staff from PG&E, SCE and SDG&E have completed our CEMs course.

That's our standardized emergency management systems course, which teaches the state construct for running emergency management. Additionally, 15 staff from the various utilities have completed or are in the process of completing what we call a type three callow ES emergency operations center credential. The 2019 to 20 Budget act included a $75,000,000.01 time General Fund appropriation to support state and local government efforts to protect public safety, vulnerable populations and improve resiliency in response to utility led psps actions.

You already heard my colleague from Sacramento speak to their receipt of that particular grant. Under the auspices of CPUC guidelines and in close partnership with the California independent System Operator ISO. Cal OES Today plays an integral role in consequence management due to psps events as well as unplanned utility disruptions.

Cal OES responsibilities during psps events include supporting alert and warning efforts when a PSPS is imminent, identifying and prioritizing critical facilities identifying the populations most vulnerable to power shutoff, especially persons dependent on electric power for medical needs, and executing the response operations through the state operations center during an active event. Additionally, utilities are required to notify the California State Warning center at Cal OES Prior to initiating a PSPS event and must provide relevant outage data.

Caloes coordinates efforts through public private partnerships to identify unmet needs for all impacted communities with a special emphasis on vulnerable populations. Depending on local conditions, these needs could include data on impacted populations, registries on volunteer resources, and capacity for direct services such as backup generators, bottled water, and cooling centers. The power disruption toolkit that I mentioned earlier contains the concept of operations that Cal OES uses during all power shut off emergencies, including psps.

As emergency managers, we know all too well the cascading effect of power disruptions occurring simultaneously with elevated wildfire risk. Chief among these are disruptions to the fuel supply and communications lifelines essential to first responders. So the extreme temperatures response plan that was developed by Cal OES in partnership with other state agencies is yet another tool in which we have sought to anticipate impacts and develop response strategies for extreme weather events that tend to disrupt critical lifelines, including causing power disruptions.

Cal OES leads a fuels task force that serves as an information hub for fuel availability during and before an emergency, including power disruptions. This task force includes representatives from key state agencies such as the California Energy Commission, California Military Department, the Department of General Services, and Caltrans. The fuels task force includes representatives from the California Utilities Emergency Association, or CUEA, acting on behalf of individual utility companies.

Through a memorandum of understanding, the CuE A acts as an agent of the state to provide emergency operations support for gas, electricity, water, wastewater, telecommunications, and petroleum pipeline utilities. CUEA staff are permanently located at Cal OES and work alongside state emergency managers in the state operations center during disasters. While CUEA are great partners of ours, there are times we work directly with utilities to meet the needs of California residents.

As recently as two weekends ago, when responding to a slip out on highway one in the Big Sur area, Caltrans and CHP worked with local law enforcement to evacuate campers and residents utilizing escorted convoys. The California Emergency support function for communications, or ESF two, as we call them, led by Cal OES's Public Safety Communications Division, coordinated directly with private sector communications companies to bring in portable comms solutions to ensure public safety.

Agencies effectuating the evacuations could communicate with each other in an area of the coast that has known spotty coverage. Maintaining this two way communication channel, pun intended, with the private sector, is crucial to ensuring that emergency response efforts are comprehensive, agile, and effective. Cal OES has made substantial investments in catastrophic incident planning, which include our strategic and tactical approach to power disruptions. Included in each of our catastrophic plans are assumptions that disruptions to critical lifelines, utilities, and the fuel supply will occur.

The 2022 Southern California Catastrophic earthquake Plan is the most recently signed example of our anticipated impacts and response strategy for for disruptions to critical lifelines. Appendix c seven of the plan examines interconnected infrastructure systems, the important role the private sector plays in that network, and the recommended multi agency coordination group, or Mac group structure for allocating scarce resources. The plan outlines how a generator or temporary power task force would support temporary provision of power dependent lifeline services until power can be restored.

Services discussed include communications, health and medical, transportation, commodity supply and distribution, public safety and security, sheltering, finance and agriculture, and commercial food facilities specific to lifeline disruptions. Refined petroleum pipeline services represent a distinct focus in collaborating with private utility companies to avoid cascading impacts. Through targeted action by the Fuels Task Force, solutions are found such as drawing down local Reserve supplies, bringing in additional trucking capacity, or enhancing intelligence gathering on regional supplies.

Thanks to these efforts and the close coordination by state and local government and the private sector, we are able to avoid significant impacts to the state. Our challenges are increasing. As with other evolving hazards facing California, effectively managing fuel and power disruptions requires good information, comprehensive planning, and collaboration at all levels. As our partners in the utilities sector will tell you, greater resilience and redundancy in utility critical infrastructure is paramount.

I'm happy to answer any questions about Cal OES's efforts in this area and look forward to hearing my colleague's testimony. Thank you for the opportunity to testify.

Thank you very much for that as well. And finally, we'll hear from Anale Burlew, Chief Deputy Director from CAL FIRE when you're ready.

Good afternoon. Thank you, Chair Rodriguez, Vice Chair Lee Mullen and the Committee Members. My name is Anale Burlew and I am the Chief Deputy Director for CAL FIRE. Thank you for the opportunity to testify today on the topic of critical lifeline disruptions and more specifically how CAL FIRE is tied into planning for catastrophic events and CAL FIRE, excuse me. And how CAL FIRE prepares for utility caused wildfires. I'd like to begin by outlining what resources CAL FIRE brings to the table.

CAL FIRE is responsible for protecting 31 million acres of California and its jurisdiction extends the length and the breadth of the state. We are known for extraordinary response to emergencies and are always ready to respond, whether to wildfires, structure fires, automobile accidents, medical aids, swift water rescues, civil disturbances, lost hikers, hazardous material spills, train wrecks, floods, earthquakes or terrorist attacks. CAL FIRE responds to over 500,000 suburgencies each year.

At the heart of our emergency response and resource protection capacity is a force of 12,000 full time and seasonal firefighting professionals, foresters, law enforcement officers, inspectors and administrative employees, plus 3000 California National Guard Members, California Conservation Corps Members, inmates and youth offenders that currently partner with CAL FIRE in the staffing of our hand crews. CAL FIRE operates over 1000 state and local government owned fire engines. Resource, excuse me, rescue squads, paramedic units, hazmat units, aerial ladder trucks, bulldozers, mobile communication centers and mobile kitchen units.

From the air, CAL FIRE operates 231200 gallon airtakers, 11 helicopters, 17 air tactical planes, an intelligence gathering plane and starting this year, we are happy to be operationalizing the first of seven CAL FIRE owned c 130 air tankers which will be capable of delivering 4000 gallons of fire retardant Cal fires, firefighting airplanes, helicopters, fire engines, bulldozers and other resources are specifically designed and strategically located throughout the state.

CAL FIRE's type one all hazard incident management teams are routinely relied upon to respond to and manage catastrophic events through throughout the state. For example, during the 2023 winter storms, CAL FIRE teams were activated for 53 days supporting Mono and Inyo counties and the flooding in Tulare County. In addition, our incident management team was also deployed to the County of Maui on the Hawaiian Islands for 28 days where there we supported their emergency operations center.

CAL FIRE is an active participant in the state's emergency plan like my partner Lori from OES talked about and is identified as a resource provider for 10 of the 18 California emergency service functions listed in the plan. While CAL FIRE's obvious functions include fire and rescue and emergency management.

I would like to call attention to some of the lesser known functions that the department's resources, construction and engineering we provide inspectors for building damage and life safety inspections, mass care and shelter sheltering mobilizing mobile feeding units we have 11 mobile kitchen units can be activated throughout the state to help provide feeding, public health and medical we provide for medical and other associated emergency response personnel training and planning assistance. An example of this was during the COVID mass vaccine sites in Oakland and Los Angeles.

CAL FIRE was called upon to assist OES and female in the standing up of those sites and providing personnel to help with providing vaccinations. CAL FIRE's Sacramento Command center is strategically located at the state Operations center at OES headquarters. This allows for 24/7 coordination between CAL FIRE and OES in support of all incident types. This support was evident during the 2023 winter storms when CAL FIRE resources responded to 20 missions totaling 206 tasks in 33 of the 58 counties throughout the state.

In addition to CAL FIRE's state level response, each of CAL FIRE's 21 administrative units maintain automatic and mutual aid agreements with local communities and municipalities to expedite assistance and resource response to local incidents. In regards to CAL FIRE's preparation for utility caused fires at the local, regional and statewide level, CAL FIRE is continuously monitoring weather and fuels in an effort to identify conditions in areas that are high risk for wildfires, regardless of the cause.

CAL FIRE pre positions resources and augments incident responses based on those threats. One of the resources that CAL FIRE utilizes for weather and fuel monitoring is the wildfire Forecast and Threat Intelligence Integration center, otherwise known as the Wuftik. In 2019, SB 209 tasked Cal OES and CAL FIRE to jointly establish a first of its kind center focused on wildfire forecasting, wildfire risk, hazard and threat assessments, fire weather and fire behavior, and intelligence gathering, analysis and dissemination.

To ensure a collective approach to determining wildfire forecasts and threats, the California Public Utility Commission, Calgarge, the National Weather Service, US Forest Service, the utility companies, and academia all participate in the Wuftic. In addition, CAL FIRE's utility mitigation program works closely with the Office of Emergency Infrastructure and Safety and the California Public Utility Commission to review utility wildfire mitigation plans to try to reduce the occurrence of new wildland fire ignitions.

CAL FIRE also participates in state Executive level public safety power shutoff briefings hosted by the utility companies during PSPS events. These briefings assist in ensuring that all agencies are tracking forecasted conditions and allow CAL FIRE to identify and address any impact to operational capabilities based on the planned power shutoffs. Cal fires experience in recent years with some of the most destructive wildfires in our recorded history has illustrated the importance of preparedness, partnerships and collaboration at the state, local and federal level.

We have recognized that we can't do it alone and are dedicated to collaboration in the successful response to and mitigation of all catastrophic events across Star state. Thank you for your time and I look forward to answering any questions you may have.

Thank you, Senator. Any questions?

Thank you. So I just want to thank you all. And I think as I hear you all give a presentation and certainly you recognize and you each kind of talked about just the different geographical aspects of California, Oakland. We talked, you know, rural areas and how that shifts. You talked about the coast, the resiliency issues. I mean, there were a lot of geographical mentions made. How would you characterize the ripple effects of what we've learned from some of these situations?

I think that, you know, in a world where we're thinking about budget and the ripple effect that the lack of a budget is going to have, I'm also thinking about the policy ripple effects of being able to deploy resources to one area faster than other for a variety of reasons. I'm thinking of highway one right now and the fact that for a day there were 15,000 people stuck there and those things are not getting better.

So geographically, can you speak on any ripple effects that you're seeing of how you understand this? Are there certain regions or geographies that we should be paying a different attention? I don't want to say more because I think they all need it. And again, absolutely, in the urban areas we need it too. But I'm just thinking of all of these examples in the urban areas, very likely to see more human impacted by something like an earthquake. Right. Because of the mass and the density. But just thinking about geography a little bit more.

Well, I'll jump in. One of the ways that we've done this at Cal OES, and of course it's an all of state response effort, is we've created the priority populations task force. So the intent behind that is, I think, gets to similar to what you're talking about, and that is to make sure that we are looking down the road and addressing the needs of vulnerable populations before they arise. So that's one.

And then moving, or what we call pre positioning resources to where they need to go. My colleague at CAL FIRE also mentioned the wuftic and how it is used for data and background in order to successfully pre position our wildfire and even Swiftwater rescue resources to locations. We've done that all winter long.

Really, every time we have a storm in California, you can be assured that we've pre positioned resources based on our weather Intel so that we can cut that time to response that you're talking about.

Can I ask you about that really quickly? Priority populations task force? I'm not actually sure that I knew about that. Is that something that's well known? Is it not? Is it internal?

It's a couple years in the making. It's made up of various state agencies, public private partnerships. It's led at Cal OES kind of a tri leadership from our office of access and functional needs, our office of diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and our office of private sector and non governmental organization coordination. So they kind of put this all together. But I actually have a colleague sitting behind me that knows a whole heck of a lot more about all the membership that's behind this effort. But they've been.

That's another one that you can be assured of. Any time the SOC is activated, that group is going to stand up, because we've learned in disasters that there will always be that portion of our population that is just doubly or exponentially impacted by the disaster. So we try to get out in front of it.

Sorry, can I ask one more follow up clarification? So I'm just curious. So in the priority populations, it could be age, ethnicity and geography, too? Is that what I'm hearing, that it's anything that happens to be the priority for that particular disaster?

Exactly.

Okay. Thank you.

You're welcome.

I just had a few questions. One of them, we're talking about the power safety shutoffs and what that's going to do to our community. So how do we put the message across to our communities when power shut off? If we don't have any way to communicate, so to speak, what's the process to communicate with those communities if there isn't any power, right? I'm just curious how that would work any for anyone.

We try and use the alert and warning system when we know something's going to happen. Our goal is to get advanced notification and let our communities know with as much advance warning as possible once those systems are out, if there's no backup power available to cellular towers or other resources. One of the other ways of getting in touch with folks is just to make announcements via radio and broadcast TV and hope that they're listening.

We hope that the message systems that get across on cellular devices are enough to, at least for those that receive it, share the information with others. That means something to them in their lives and they can share that information. But it is a huge challenge to anticipate things happening and to not be able to communicate with the public and let them know.

And it's not just letting them know what's going on, it's letting them know what's going on so that they can make decisions for themselves and for their families. And it really is an opportunity to empower them during a disaster and not let them feel victimized because they don't have that information. So it's personally important to me, and that's why I study the actual research and I hang out with the people who are studying this because it's personally important to me that we are doing this well.

If we only get one chance to send a message, what should that message be if that's the only one that we receive? Imagine if you knew that something catastrophic was about to happen and you were going to call your loved one and you were going to let them know, and that might be the last message that they hear from you. What would you want that message to be?

That same kind of weight is on emergency managers to communicate to the public and let them know what to anticipate, the steps that they could take to be personally prepared, and ways that they can seek help if they need it. So those kinds of things are challenging for us.

And outside of providing redundant backup power supplies to that infrastructure and ensuring that alternatives such as broadcast radio and TV are available, I actually don't know the best ways to communicate outside of what we used to do in the forties and fifties, which is radio and PA announcements out of the car. And we talk about utilizing our volunteer networks. I will give a plug for ham radio volunteers.

We utilize those as emergency managers and we rely on them to provide additional communication to our residents in the community. So we do actively practice with our ham radio volunteers. They just don't get the credit that I think we should give to them.

Good ....

And if I may add, you asked specifically about PSPS events, and that is the responsibility of the utilities to communicate with each and every one of their customers. And you'll hear probably in the next panel how they do that. And what my colleague here from Sacramento is sharing is the intense need for emergency management to amplify. And actually, it's a local responsibility. Right. That they take very seriously to amplify that message.

Because we don't know, we don't have an assurance during an event that every single customer is getting the message. And so one thing Cal OEs does to kind of support our local partners is as soon as we get wind of, again, pun intended, of a PSPS event coming, then we'll convene mean OA calls, operational area calls, and provide all the information that we're getting from the utilities with them so that they can make the most informed decisions regarding amplifying those messages. So that's another one of those behind the scene things.

Okay, chief, you had a.

I was gonna say, I think Jessica Fow, who's our emergency manager, does a really excellent job at preplanning these. So our core programs, our Cert programs, if we really want to have a community based fire service and a fire safe city, we have to train our citizens in advance so whether they hear the message or not, they can spring into action and start helping their community and their neighbors in the event of one of these natural disasters. And they have the tools that they can use to help the community as a whole.

Okay, get it? You know, chief, kind of going back, obviously, I visited with you a while back and you talked about the different faults there in Oakland. So it's a very unique place. I know my colleague talked about the different areas we represent. So I look at Oakland and how you talked about it earlier with the different fault lines there, then the issues with Oakland Hills regarding those issues. So what's the population of the Oakland Hills area? Because that's a pretty well developed area, right?

I don't know. Just roughly. I'm just figuring worst case scenario, something happens. I mean, the population there would be pretty huge, I would think it is.

It's densely populated. And the ingress and egress is a major issue for us because when we had the last huge fire, everyone's trying to get out while we're trying to get in. So we've worked diligently, population wise, we have to be at least over 50,000 in the hills. We've worked diligently on access routes for funneling people out a certain way while resources are coming in a certain way, shutting down freeway on ramps and off ramps to get people out of the area.

That's still going to be very coordinated. One of the things we've learned is that we also have to prepare for tsunami alerts as well, because in a major earthquake that could also become an issue. But there's a lot of different aspects of emergency hill wise that we don't necessarily have to adjust to in the flat lens that we do have to in the heels.

Well, thank you very much for your presentations. I'm always thinking about, you know, California. We're a disaster prone state. I'm sorry. Things are going to happen here. Right. We always learn from, whether it's the fires, the floods. And I look back, we talk about earthquakes. We haven't been tested an earthquake in decades. Right. And what that's going to do to our infrastructure, depending if it's up here or down south. How do we prepare and look at California as being the leader in preparedness response?

I know we've come a long way. We're doing really good, but I don't think we have a major fire somewhere then that major earthquake. What's going to do our resources. Right. How are we going to prepare for that? I think now more than ever we can start looking at that and how we can help. Right. I know you guys are the boots on the ground, so to speak.

But then what we can do at the Legislature to make sure you have funds and whatever needed to prepare yourself, it's going to take time. It's not going to happen overnight. But if we start going that way to be a leader, we like to be the leader in a lot of other things in California. Right. Let's be the leader in response, preparedness to take care of our community. So once again, I want to thank the first panelists. Senator have any questions, then we'll move on to our second panel. Thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it.

Thank you very much, Chairman Rodriguez, Vice Chair Limon, and other staff members. My name is Angie Gibson. I am the Vice President of Emergency Preparedness and Response for Pacific Gas and Electric, responsible for all of our risk assessment and hazard identification for service disruption, as well as the development of all of our plans and procedures, training and exercising, partnering with our public agencies and other stakeholders, and supporting the delivery of restoration of service to our customers in a safe manner.

We have learned a lot from our Public Safety Power Shutoff Program. As you've mentioned, Chair Rodriguez, that California is a very complex state and it's recognized nationally. NIMS, which is used as the National Framework, is CEMS, you know, and oftentimes California is the innovator in emergency management, and that's accredited to our partners at Cal OES and our partners in FEMA Region Nine and our counties, tribal governments.

As we look at preparing to support restoration of service disruption, we have to start with hazard assessment and hazard awareness. We have to understand the threat landscape. So at Pacific Gas and Electric, we perform--just this year, performed our first threat and hazard identification and risk assessment.

One of our tenants that we're focused on is really leveraging the public constructs that our public partners use as they prepare for and respond to emergencies to allow us to have a foundational understanding of emergency management, its core principles, and then develop a better coordinated and collaborative approach to how we respond. The THIRA is just one of those public constructs.

In preparing to develop our THIRA, we reviewed the THIRA of our 47 counties within our service territory, FEMA Region Nine, and Cal OES to get an understanding of the perspective for which these agencies review threats and hazards across the threat landscape. Through this THIRA effort, we intend this year to visit all 47 counties, Cal OES, and FEMA Region Nine, and share our THIRA so we can start focusing on integrated planning.

As a responder and as a utility operator in the State of California, we are responsible for ensuring we can mitigate the risk of service disruption. We know we have to do that in a coordinated manner with our public partners and key stakeholders.

The only way to do that is to have a conversation, and it may not be perfect for us to have one plan as a state, but we can certainly have respective plans that are coordinated and integrated so that we can respond together towards whole community recovery, which is the intent of the National Response Framework. These frameworks also help us align with our public partners, in particular, the foundational constructs that PG&E leverages in whole. We don't change these, we don't privatize them.

We use them as they're built for our public agency partners with the understanding that they are the foundation for how we will respond together. We use the FEMA traditional plan model, which is a base plan in hazard and functional annexes. Currently, we have 19 hazard and functional annexes to our base plan. Some of those hazard annexes that we have are Public Safety Power Shutoff Annex, Wildfire Annex, Earthquake and Tsunami Annexes, Extreme Weather Annex. We have an Access and Functional Needs Annex.

We believe in taking care of our Access and Functional Needs community. We use the Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program to plan and execute our exercises. Next week, we'll be having our annual five-day, full-scale Public Safety Power Shutoff exercise. In conjunction with that Public Safety Power Shutoff exercise, we will concurrently be exercising our Wildfire Annex. This is something that we have done given the volume of hazards within our service territory where we will partner annex exercises together as concurrent hazards because as we've learned in 2020, hazards don't happen individually.

In 2020, PG&E responded within a two week period at the same time during Covid to a capacity shortage event, a lightning event, a heat event, and a public safety power shutoff event that happened simultaneously, and we were able, through our plans and preparedness, to respond effectively with the engagement and support of our county, tribal, federal, and state partners. We leverage the CEMS ICS frameworks, and we leverage them, as I've indicated, wholly.

We've partnered with Cal OES and the California Specialized Training Institute, leveraging FEMA training and SCSI training to ensure that our folks are ready to respond and understand the elements of each of their roles within the ICS framework. We focus on continuous improvement.

One of the elements that we execute post an event or post-exercise is to conduct a hot wash and understand where were our gaps, where were our strengths, and then how do we resolve those gaps? In compliance with the General Order 166 with California Public Utilities Commission, we also evaluate after-actions from other industries and other utility members across the nation to understand if those hazards or those challenges in response or strengths also exist within our state and whether or not we should be improving or incorporating different methods to how we respond and prepare.

When we look at hazard awareness from a situational awareness perspective, we're blessed at PG&E to have our Hazard Awareness Warning Center, which is a 24/7 365 warning center with analysts that are monitoring radio traffic and monitoring all sorts of social feeds to understand what's happening across the state. This--the Hazard Awareness Warning Center was initially formed post-Camp and post-October 17th fires as the Wildfire Safety Operations Center, and it was intended to just focus on wildfire ignitions.

Now, through the advancement of all-hazards planning, they are now an all hazards awareness center. So monitoring for tsunami risk, earthquakes, solar storms, flooding, avalanches, debris flow, and they're pushing some of those public messages out to our county partners to help ensure that if we know something, they know something. In addition, we have one of the best meteorology teams in the nation, supporting how we prepare for emergencies.

Through the MET Team, they've developed the Storm Outage Prediction Project, which allows us to have a ten-day view of the weather incoming to the state and understanding how it will impact our customers and our divisions. It gives us an assessment of the risk of the weather, as well as understanding a potential forecast for how many outages may occur, how many customers will be impacted, how many troubleshooters we'll need, and how many crews we'll need.

This forward view allows us to step into an integrated series of calls within the company, as well as with our counties and state agencies to understand how we need to respond to this type of hazard. We will proactively reach out through our mutual assistance agreements for additional contractors and mutual assistance ahead of the storm, ensuring that we have resources in place in the areas that are forecasted for the highest risk before the outages occur.

And we saw this demonstrated during the February 4th storm where we had over 700,000 customers impacted simultaneously based on the significance and complexity of the weather, and we were able to restore 1.2 million customers within 24 hours, and that was because we executed that plan and had resources in place where we needed them. Our public-private partnerships are a huge element of how we respond, and I think I've shared that in my testimony to this point.

We conduct field drills jointly with our first responder community on how to respond to a gas emergency. We did 33 of those drills last year, and we'll do 20 of those drills this year. We support joint exercise planning and exercise play with our public partners. Last year's Public Safety Power Shutoff exercise also included 211, which is our state phone number for Access and Functional Needs support during a disaster.

It also involves Cal OES, Department of Water Resources, as well as many other stakeholders that all participated in the this very large exercise. This year's exercise, as I indicated, is next week, and we're very excited about that because we always learn something from these. Ongoing engagement with our public partners is really important. We have very strong alliances and support through Cal OES. In fact, I will have a call generally with Cal OES staff before an incident is when we're preparing for an incident, for example, that February 4th storm.

We were having back and forth conversations for several days before the storm hit, and I was sharing with them how we're preparing, where we're moving resources, if there's anything I'm worried about, anything they're worried about, because it takes both of us. It takes all of us to respond.

We provide EOC support from PG&E staff to the activated county EOCs within the state, as well as we keep somebody staffed at the SOC while the SOC is activated. During one of our low snow events in 2022, we developed in collaboration with Cal OES the idea of what we called the Downtree Task Force. Nevada County, we expected to get hit very hard from the snow, and in the previous year, we really had a hard time getting access to the work locations to be able to more effectively restore service. So this is part of that continuous improvement discussion.

We partnered with Cal OES and the county in Nevada County, and through this task force, we partnered up PG&E troubleshooters, PG&E crews and vegetation crews, along with public works, which allowed us jointly to focus on restoring ingress and egress to the areas where our main line distribution lines were located so we could restore those--that service first.

The advantage to the community of restoring that service was that it also energized the community centers, which included grocery stores and gas stations, which then allowed customers to shelter in place. It also gave them a safe ingress and egress to that support that they would need. Then we partnered on how we address the other access needs, and PG&E put its the entire weight of the company behind that, providing access to snowcats and other equipment to the county.

We've talked a little bit about our seismic risk, which is one of our top five risks within the company. We're very lucky to have at PG&E a very strong geoscience team of 21 geologists, geotechnical engineers, and seismologists to help us prepare for and respond to seismic risk. We have a very robust planning and preparedness process. PG&E has been a longtime supporter of earthquake early warning, which is an incredible state program.

We are members of the Earthquake Early Warning Committee as well as we were a utility pilot member of ShakeAlert. We've also been supporting Earthquake Early Warning in the installation of elevator and public announcement automation that will be triggered by the Earthquake Early Warning notification. So it'll stop an elevator at the next level when the notification is received.

And what we've seen is that the notification will give us anywhere from five to ten seconds notice before we start feeling the earthquake itself, obviously, depending how close to the epicenter you are. In addition, we are also partnering with Lawrence Livermore Labs to collaborate on drift sensors, which we have installed at our Oakland General Office. We're the only commercial building in the United States to have drift sensors. The second other building is at UC Berkeley.

And through the drift sensors, the intention is to be able to monitor the performance of building structure during seismic activity, which will help strengthen our building protocols and building guidelines. This is one of many innovative research efforts that PG&E partners and in some funds to help support seismic risk mitigation for the State of California and for our customers and communities.

We have--there is a new group that is formed out of University of Oregon in the Pacific Northwest called CRESCENT, which is a research and academic group that is looking at tectonic plate movement, focusing on the Cascadia Subduction Zone, which will influence the northern half of California when that fault line ruptures. And I'm very happy to say that Pacific Gas and Electric has an advisory board member from our geoscience team on that team because it's a very under-discussed seismic risk to the State of California.

We do also our seismic exercise series. We just completed the first phase of that last year, which included a first responder drill at Treasure Island with our fire agencies and law enforcement agencies within the bay. It included an exercise with the Maritime Administration and their roll-on/roll-off fleet.

It included a full campus evacuation of our Oakland General Office as well as it was a two-day exercise, which we like the multi-day exercises at PG&E. It was very complex, and we will continue to build from that, and we will start that series again in 2025. I'd like to also share a unique element of our seismic program which is called DASH, our Dynamic Automated Seismic Hazard Notification System.

DASH is unique in that it's a homegrown modeling system which integrates our seismic risk models with a USGS Mercalli risk profile of seismic events, and it allows us to push out notifications to each of the functional areas within PG&E that identifies the assets that they have meeting peak ground acceleration or PGA criteria, and it basically will help them pre-stage or pre-start their assessments.

So rather than starting with an assessment of all assets, the DASH notification will come out within five to ten minutes of the seismic event, and it will tell them exactly which assets received the highest level of PGA. So we know where to start our assessments.

And this was really instrumental, along with ShakeAlert, during our Humboldt earthquake that we had in 2022, when I was woken up at 2:30 in the morning in my hotel room by a man talking to me, and the man said, 'earthquake, earthquake, drop, cover, and hold, shaking expected,' which was my ShakeAlert notification. And across the banner, it said 6.4 magnitude up in Ferndale. I was immediately able to call our grid control center and ask them if we had relay transmission, relay activity in that area.

They confirmed. So we immediately started mobilizing resources to assess. I was able to make those same phone calls to our distribution control center and gas control. We activated the EOC, all within 15 minutes of the notification of the earthquake. And I'm really proud to say that's the same performance we expect to execute, regardless of what fault line the earthquake is on. Some of the enhancements we'll be moving into the DASH system is leveraging AI, as we have done with the wildfire cameras.

We also have new meters that all have accelerometers. So basically, it's a mini seismograph at each house. So we'll be able to incorporate those into the network that will help us dramatically improve our modeling, particularly in areas of liquefaction. We are also going to be partnering with our MET Team to model fire following: earthquakes. This is a little bit more difficult meteorologically within the urban areas, but it will be instrumental in the potential to have a wildfire event that gets ignited from an earthquake.

So we'll be looking to incorporate that. Our geoscience team is also partnering with several of the academia community to help build a better debris flow and slope and stability model. And then, with respect to the comments about, from our public partners about the need for generation or for dedicated supply, we do have a very robust temporary generation system for primary and secondary generation.

Primary generation, we've been able to mobilize 50 megawatts up to Crescent City when they were out of power last summer to restore 13,000 of their customers. And then finally, in conversation to the questions, Chair, that you asked, PG&E does initiate our Public Safety Power Shutoff messaging to our customers. We have a whole series of messages that go out.

It's not just a single message, it's multiple messages, including door knocks, that we perform when we can't get--when we can't reach AFN customers, and then those messages go out in 17 languages, including American Sign Language.

Okay.

And that's--I just thank you for being able to share what we're doing to prepare to help support our communities and customers, and thank you.

Thank you very much. It's quite a bit. Thank you. So next we'll move over to Thom Porter, the Director of Emergency Management from San Diego Gas and Electric. Thom, good seeing you again.

Good to see you as well, Chair Rodriguez and Vice Chair Limon. My last time in front of you was not in this uniform. It was in a different uniform, and it's been a while. I do appreciate the work that you've been doing in my time, moving on to the utility work. I also wanted to recognize that the staff's report that was put together for this: very in-depth and well done.

There were very few things that--I might have changed a word here and there--but it really was comprehensive and I think really painted a very true picture of what we're looking at, and all of the panelists have reflected that, I believe. I wanted to kind of maybe step back just a little more to a broad sense of as a utility emergency manager now, some reflection both from past and to present.

There have been a lot of changes, and you've heard already, both from our regulators--my words--our regulators that you heard from in the first panel and some of the other partners, as well as from PG&E just before, and a lot of that was reflective of the regulations that have been put in place in the last several years and really around PSPS and kind of using PSPS as that springboard.

I wanted to drill into a couple of things that are maybe below the surface, but very much important in the long-term for us to get right. I think OES, Cal OES representative and others have mentioned this, but the coordination and partnership that we have before events, particularly when they get to be big events like we're talking about today, is critical.

And it's critical because we each have our list of what is a critical resource or a vulnerable population based on what we know about the populations that are in our jurisdictions, and I'll just give an example of this, and it's in your notes. So it's not uncontemplated, but it is still something that we need to do and make sure that we're doing better, and that is things like wastewater. If wastewater plants can't get electricity, that's a problem.

That is a big problem downstream, literally, but it is a big problem. But what might not be thought of by some in the room in the discussion is that power generation might be that thing that's needed ahead of the wastewater getting their power. So we need to have those conversations upfront and identify clearly what the most impacted areas are and the way we would get them back online most effectively to protect the communities that we're all here to serve and protect.

So that's one example. That leaves us with needing to partner with local government, tribal governments, state and federal resources, and government agencies all together developing plans to access areas. So we have the big one. We can't get power and gas back up unless we can get to those places to either make safe or then restore and repair. So those are the things that we need to continue to work on.

We had just last year, the snowstorms in the Southern California mountains, particularly the Big Bear areas, Lake Arrowhead areas, and that was an all hands on deck from Southern California perspective. SDG&E, we sent our snowcats up. We have snowcats and they were needed there, so we sent snowcats up to assist. Conversely, we needed some--we needed to get people to one of our communication sites that happens to be up in Kern County.

And we flew in a PG&E helicopter, contracted helicopter to do that needed service. So we are very much interdependent and need to remain so. We need to continue to work under NIMS SEMS ICS structure. We're all, by regulation, put into that space now, and we need to maintain that, and I really loved that our OES colleague called out CUEA, the California Utilities Emergency Association.

We're members of such, and we're right now in the process of hiring a new director for that space and really building that out to be a more--a position that will be at the SOC and much more capable and well-resourced than has been in the past. So that is something that the Utilities together are working to make happen. I think we can look at programs like the Emergency Management Accreditation Program, EMAP as a standard.

There are only three EMAP-certified EOCs or SOC in the state. Only three: Cal OES SOC here, Riverside County, San Diego County. No utilities are. We're in the process of--at San Diego Gas and Electric of--we've applied and we're going through the process of becoming accredited. I know that's something that other utilities are also in the process of getting to.

It will really show us how and where the gaps are in our ability to work together and work seamlessly within the system that we are given. And I wanted to just--one little side note story: 2017, we heard about a fateful time. Senator Limon mentioned the Thomas Fire. There was one night during that incident that early on, we had the Rye Fire burning in LA County. We had the Thomas already burning, and I was the Region Chief. This was my jurisdiction.

And I, lo and behold, had a 3:00 a.m. CNN interview about the fires and what was going on. Governor Brown mentioned the day before that that it was the first time ever that we had seen a zero percent relative humidity. Zero. And dry, dry, dry. It was the first Purple Day that ever showed up on the Santa Ana Wildfire Threat Index, and I was doing an interview about that. About two hours before that in my hotel room, I was on the Rye Fire. About two hours before that.

This is 2017. My phone started blowing up. Messages. SDG&E. SDG&E. What's going on? SDG&E knew what was going on. The winds were starting to move to the south. They were hitting criteria, and SDG and E was doing Public Safety Power Shutoff before Public Safety Power Shutoff was named as such.

And the reason I bring this up is as the Region Chief standing on a burnt out home, smoldering ash pit behind me, doing an interview, I was viscerally comforted to know that there would not be fires starting from the electrical system in San Diego. And lo and behold, there were not. Also, since SDG&E had its problem fire, the fire that we started, I was on the other side.

But in 2007, that Witch Guejito Fire, that fire turned things around for the company, set us on a path to be better, to not have any more large, damaging fires. And while we've had fires that have been caused by electric system, we have not had in SDG&E service territory, another large, damaging fire caused by electric systems since that fire. And it's been the commitment, the commitment that all of our utilities are now deeply committed to.

But SDG&E, for the last 15, 17 years now, has not been in that space because of the work that's being done. And I know that I will eat the words that I said, and there's a meme: every acre can and will burn someday. And it will. We need to be prepared, but we also need to be prepared together and know that the systems that we're putting in place are working.

Today, a Public Safety Power Shutoff in San Diego territory that would have been 20,000 five years ago is now about 5,000 because of all of the hardening and the different methods that we've used to reduce the impacts of Public Safety Power Shutoff, including not only the traditional hardening covered conductor, sensitive relay settings, and falling conductor protection, but also strategic undergrounding. If we put power lines underground, the chance is nearly zero and you'll never have to do a PSPS.

It won't--so if we're trying to get away from PSPS, that's the way to do it. SDG&E at some point would like to have PSPS as something in the rearview mirror that we barely remember. Those being said, I'd like to go on for days and days on all of this, but I also know that we are limited in time, and I just wanted to say that SDG&E is forever committed to continuous improvement and resilience of our system, as well as the affordability of electrification that we are all striving for. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Mr. Porter. Now we'll hear from Forest Kaser, Deputy Executive Director, Safety Enforcement and Policy at the California Public Utilities Commission.

Great. Good afternoon, Chair, Vice Chair, and Committee Members. My name is Forest Kaser, and I'm the Deputy Executive Director for Safety and Enforcement and Safety Policy at the California Public Utilities Commission. CPUC regulates investor-owned public utilities spanning a variety of industries, including electric and gas utilities that are the focus of today's hearing. There are three main modes the CPUC uses to ensure that investor-owned energy utilities are appropriately preparing for, responding to, recovering from, and mitigating risks associated with natural and human-caused disruptions. And I don't--do you have the slides? Do you have the handouts that have the slides on them as well?

These ones, right? There we go.

So I will show them on the screen here, but if you have them in front of you, there's going to be more detail in the slides. I'm just going to be giving a verbal summary of what you see on the slides. Okay. So the three modes that CPUC uses are shown here. So first, CPUC establishes policies and rules to guide and direct utility actions.

CPUC monitors compliance with its own rules and applicable state and federal laws, and CPUC investigates and takes enforcement action to correct behavior and deter future noncompliance. So you'll see all three of those modes in play across the three major program areas CPUC has established to oversee utility preparedness. So the first program area is all hazards, emergency preparation, which falls under CPUC General Order 166, which has been mentioned previously today.

So a General Order at CPUC is a standing order, similar to a regulation that establishes ongoing requirements that utilities must follow. The second program area is grid reliability, which is really a suite of different programs and cross-cutting activities across multiple agencies meant to ensure grid balance during periods of high demand. The third program area is Utility Wildfire Risk Mitigation, which includes Wildfire Mitigation Planning, Public Safety Power Shutoffs, and Wildfire Investigation and Enforcement.

So I'll speak to each of these programs now in a little bit more detail. So, starting with the program area of All Hazards Emergency Preparation, I wanted to first note that there's a separate federal requirement for gas utilities to maintain emergency plans. CPUC enforces federal gas pipeline safety rules on behalf of the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration, including the emergency plan requirement. I'm happy to take questions about that, but my focus here is going to be on the electric utilities.

So CPUC's General Order 166 requires that electric IOUs submit emergency preparedness plans every year. These plans detail how utilities interact with local, state, federal, and tribal authorities during any type of emergency incident. Utilities are required to use the California Standardized Emergency Management System established by Cal OES that was also mentioned earlier. Utilities also are required to conduct training activities, including conducting exercises to ensure staff are familiar with the protocols when a real event occurs.

CPUC reviews IOU plans every year when they are submitted and meets with IOUs to provide feedback and identify areas for improvement. CPUC also monitors IOU performance and compliance during and after emergency events. If appropriate, CPUC may also take enforcement action. So the next program area is reliability. A reliable grid is a very high priority for the state, and multiple agencies work together on many different programs to ensure that reliability.

The full spectrum of this coordination is a topic too large to cover here and is the subject of numerous other hearings, but I will speak to two subsets of that activity that are more directly germane to the realm of emergency management. The first sub program, rotating outage protocols or the Electric Emergency Action Plan, addresses the very, very rare instances in which the demand for electricity on the grid exceeds the available supply, and all the many, many other layers of protection that we have in place as a state are not able to solve the problem first. In those rare instances, utilities must closely coordinate with the California Independent System Operator to temporarily turn off the power to different groups of customers to restore grid balance.

Every year, utilities submit their protocols for implementing this coordination to the CPUC, which the CPUC reviews. In the exceedingly rare event that an IOU must execute its protocol, CPUC conducts an after-action review to assess IOU performance. The second subprogram is oversight of power plants, also called Generating Asset Owners. CPUC is in regular contact with the 190 power plant operators under our jurisdiction, particularly before the peak summer season to ensure they are maintaining their facilities and are prepared to respond to unplanned outages.

The third program area is utility-involved wildfire risk reduction. There are three programs under this umbrella. The Wildfire Mitigation Planning Process is the primary purview of the Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety, and I'll let my colleague, Deputy Director O'Rourke, address that in more detail. Some of the CPUC's main roles there are to ratify plans approved by the Office, review implementation costs, and take enforcement action when appropriate.

The second program under Wildfire Risk Reduction is the Public Safety Power Shutoff Program, which we've heard a lot about already today. So CPUC has established a detailed set of guidelines for utilities to follow in implementing PSPS events, and closely monitors utility actions before, during, and after the events. If utilities do not comply with CPUC guidelines, CPUC may take enforcement action against utilities, including issuing penalties.

An important part of the PSPS Program is the Access and Functional Needs Plan, which utilities submit to the CPUC every year. This plan details how IOUs work with AFN state leaders and local, state, and community-based organizations to ensure effective communication and support for affected customers. There we go. Okay, so we've been pleased to observe the dramatic reduction in the number of customers affected by PSPS events over the past few years.

In 2020, we saw 24 different PSPS events, affecting over two million customers or customer accounts. In contrast, last year, we saw just seven events affecting under 40,000 accounts. So the third Wildfire Risk Reduction Program involves wildfire investigation and enforcement activities. CPUC investigates every utility-involved wildfire to determine whether any CPUC jurisdictional orders or rules were violated. If appropriate, CPUC may then take enforcement action against the utility, including penalty enforcement. Recent enforcement actions have penalized utilities as much as 1.6 billion dollars.

Over the past seven years, CPUC has typically had at least a dozen open wildfire investigations, reaching a peak of 32 in 2019. So far in 2024, I'm pleased to say they are down to ten. As a final note, in addition to these three programs, CPUC also continuously monitors Cal OES and federal sources for information that could eventually lead to a state response, such as weather events. CPUC supports Cal OES statewide disaster operations.

We've developed an internal senior management activation protocol for creating a common operating picture for sound situational awareness when the CPUC is implicated in a statewide event. We exercise this protocol regularly to refresh expectations, communications pathways, and communication tools. That concludes my remarks. Thank you again for the opportunity to present today, and happy to take any questions that you may have.

Thank you, Mr. Kaser. Finally, we'll hear from Shannon O'Rourke, Deputy Director of Energy Safety at the Office of Energy Infrastructure and Safety.

Thank you, Chair Rodriguez and Vice Chair Limon. My name is Shannon O'Rourke. I'm Deputy Director for Electrical Infrastructure for the Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety or Energy Safety. I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you today. I'd like to share just a little background on us since we're a relatively new agency. Energy Safety was established in 2020 by Assembly Bills 1054 and 111 in acknowledgement of the significant risk utility-caused wildfires posed to Californian safety.

We were initially the Wildfire Safety Division within the Public Utilities Commission, and in 2021, Energy Safety transitioned into a new agency under Natural Resources. We're charged with a specific mandate: to ensure investor-owned utilities have a robust and rigorous process for understanding and mitigating their wildfire risk. In 2022, the Underground Safe Excavation Board, also known as the Dig Safe Board, moved from the State Fire Marshal's Office to Energy Safety, broadening our mission to both utility wildfire safety and excavation safety.

But to align with today's hearing topic, I'll keep my comments focused on our role overseeing efforts to mitigate utility-caused wildfires. So, as I mentioned, our mandates to ensure the utilities have a robust process for understanding and mitigating their wildfire risk. We coordinate closely with the CPUC, as both agencies have wildfire safety responsibilities, as Deputy Executive Director Kaser noted, and our responsibilities are related, but they're distinct.

In this area, Energy Safety evaluates utility wildfire mitigation plans and assesses the utilitiy's performance to those plans through inspections and audits. And the CPUC determines whether a utility's proposed wildfire mitigation programs and investments are just and reasonable and should be funded by ratepayers. They also have enforcement authority for noncompliance to plans. So since 2020, the utilities have been required to submit three-year forward-looking wildfire mitigation plans with annual updates within the three-year cycle.

Every year, we've been pushing the utilities to ensure they understand exactly where their wildfire risk is and to target strategies to address that risk. These are significant analytical and planning efforts and have driven massive utility investments in system hardening, enhanced asset and vegetation management, and changes in how the utilities operate their systems.

Our team evaluates the plans to ensure that they're comprehensive and technically feasible, that they demonstrate an efficient use of resources, that they also demonstrate forward progress and maturity of understanding their risk, and that they're addressing the areas from the previous year where we directed them that they needed to improve. We're now four years into the Wildfire Mitigation Planning Process, and while there is still work to do, we are seeing progress.

At the top level, overall, annual ignition numbers have decreased since the utilities started their mitigation work in 2020. In 2023, overall, across all utilities, ignitions were reduced 25 percent lower from the numbers when they started. We would hope and expect to see this kind of progress at this point, given the level of investment. At the same time, we also know that there are many factors that go into creating an ignition, significant ones being weather and environmental conditions.

And as climate change continues to worsen and we see more weather extremes, it only takes one ignition in the wrong place under the wrong conditions to have a catastrophic fire. So I don't want to give the impression that anyone has solved utility wildfire risk, but the utilities are definitely in a better position today than they were five years ago to reduce the likelihood of their infrastructure causing a catastrophic fire.

In addition to the measures to mitigate wildfire risk itself, we require the utilities to address how they'll support customers, and specifically their most vulnerable customers: Access and Functional Needs customers during wildfires and Public Safety Power Shutoffs. We also require the utilities to target their grid hardening to the circuits that most frequently experience Public Safety Power Shutoffs to reduce the need for and the impact of those events over time.

As my colleague from the CPUC identified, the utilities have made significant progress since 2019 in reducing the frequency, the scope, and the duration of the Public Safety Power Shutoff events. They've done this through targeted sectionalizing of their distribution circuits, which limits the number of customers impacted, and by improving the granularity of weather forecasting so they have more specific and timely weather information to guide their decisions to de-energize. As I mentioned before, these plans are filed annually.

The large utilities have just submitted their updated wildfire mitigation plans for 2025 to us, and we'll continue our work to to drive them to mitigate their risk and protect their customers. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today, and I'll stand by for any questions.

Well, thank you very much. Senator, any questions?

Thank you, and thank you all for your presentation. Certainly, this is an issue that I regrettably know more than I'd like to know about because of the Thomas Fire and because of just the nature of that. And I mean, we've had many more fires, but the Thomas Fire clearly was the biggest one and probably reflected somewhere in that particular graph that's there.

But one of the things--and I have three different kind of sets of questions--but one of them has to do with undergrounding, and it absolutely reduces PSPS and it reduces the chances of a fire being started by utilities. On the other end--and I've struggled with this a little bit--it also means that electricity is cut off longer if something goes wrong with the underground because it doesn't--you can't fix it as fast.

So are the trade-offs for undergrounding still significantly better than when your undergrounding infrastructure goes down--which doesn't go down as often, but when it does, I mean, you're looking at 72 hours versus a three-hour average--help me think about that.

Vice Chair, I could start. Angie Gibson. There's other benefits besides the wildfire mitigation that comes from undergrounding. You know, in these areas that we're undergrounding, they're the Sierra foothills, they're the high risk areas, usually higher in elevation. So in addition to the wildfire risk, you're also mitigating risk from wind, risk from snow, risk from a whole bunch of other environmental factors. The 72 hours that you mentioned in response, I think that's-- it depends on what the fault location is. It really does depend on that.

It's not a definitive 72 hours. It could be much less. And that's the same case with overhead. I think the, as you mentioned, the advantage with overhead is that you can see it, and in many cases, it's easier to find the fault. I think this is where the innovation in infrastructure, we have some of that already with the fault indicators. So we can put equipment in the underground infrastructure just like we put in the overhead infrastructure.

That would allow a troubleshooter to open up a lid and see is the fault beyond this point, which is going to speed up the assessment. And so there's already things in place, but maybe that's more innovation space where we could identify.

You know, if I were thinking what would need to be true for us to design a piece of equipment, a fault indicator that used an application that would actually show on our map of our infrastructure to our troubleshooter where all the fault locators are located and then where the flashing light starts, because then that troubleshooter doesn't have to lift all those lids to get to that one point. They can go directly to that point.

And so I think undergrounding, I don't think is going to affect the reliability to our customers on a day to day. I think the offset of the other risks is going to overshadow the risk of a longer duration outage, given the percentage of that risk that exists for that. Does that make sense?

Yes, it does. And this is part of what you hear, you know, I think are what you hear from-- really from different stakeholders, not just like hear random, right. Like you actually have stakeholders at the table who kind of think this through. And I guess that, you know, this was going to be my third question, but I can kind of bring it up.

You know, I'm looking at the budget for the state, and I'm looking at what early action looks like and programs like the home hardening, community hardening to build disaster resilient community programs. Like, the list just goes on. I mean, right? Like, I was-- This is what I was trying to do. I was like, wait, which ones are the funds that are about to be delayed, deferred? I mean, there's quite a number of words that are associated with them, right?

And so I'm just thinking of the fact that, you know, what does this all mean in light of the newest and best kind of direction we're going into in a world where the funds to be able to be innovative-- right, you mentioned innovation-- might not quite be there on our side. And so what does that look like? And what does that look like to the transition? Like, just generally speaking.

And are there trade offs that are worthy of considering in a tough budget year that maybe weren't considered three years ago, kind of in that bigger space? And it's a concern to me. I mean, it's certainly a concern. The state budget is what it is, and we will deal with it.

But I am just very aware that as you look at what early action looks like in April, there are programs there that our communities have relied on to help build this resiliency that we've talked about, to help rebuild after quite a number of years of challenges and that will impede or slow down some of the progress that we've made. And I'm trying to just, again, think of this, and you really was smiling. So I feel like you should just say something. Go for it.

Sure. I mean, I'll just offer that-- I actually wanted to go back to a comment that you made earlier, which is about geographic variability. I mean, we have huge variability in the State of California. There's really different conditions in different parts of the state and even in territory, like PG&E's territory, tremendous diversity even within that territory. And so I think just asking the question about, like, what solution? Is undergrounding good?

Maybe I think a better question is, like, where is undergrounding the right solution versus other kinds of solutions? I think you really have to look at it on a case by case basis. Every different location might have different conditions, might have different levels of resiliency in that community, might have different reliability impacts. And so I think it really takes a granular case by case analysis to answer your very important and valid question.

And to that end, we do have the SB 884 program that actually both of our agencies are jointly charged with implementing, and it requires that kind of analysis. So when utilities bring 10 year undergrounding plans to our agencies, staff will be charged with reviewing those kinds of details. Utilities that bring those plans to us will be responsible for explaining in detail, you know, where is undergrounding the right solution? And where is it something else.

Thank you. And I wanted to go to one of your slides. It's the one that's-- It's not this one. It's "Mitigating risk of utility caused wildfires" and you went from 2020 to 2023 to the change. And there's been a lot of change and I mean millions, and change in terms of those that are impacted.

And I was wondering if you could just dig a little bit deeper on what you attribute-- That's a positive change just for everyone to make sure that they know, that's a good thing. Less customers are impacted by PSP events. Is it because we are now also doing undergrounding? Is it because we got our system down? Is it because we're doing translation? Is it all of the above or is there something there as well that we're not thinking above that contributes to that positive change?

Yeah, no, I think it's an all of the above response. I mean, I think there's been a lot of hard work. And you heard from Cal OES at the earlier panel, you've heard from Utilities here.

There's been a tremendous amount of work by multiple agencies and Utilities to get a more fine tuned process, to get more granular data, to understand where the weather is happening, how it's going to change over time, to get more granular control over the actual circuits themselves, to have better and clearer and standardized expectations for how the information is being communicated to public safety partners, to customers, to all the agencies, and to understand what the expectations are in terms of operational performance.

I think there's been improvements from every stakeholder in this process. And to be perfectly honest, we've gotten some benefit from Mother Nature as well. Over the past couple years we've had some nice rain and wet weather. And that's definitely helped as well. And it's just getting the rain and the precipitation before the winds pick up. When that timing happens, then you see much less chance of the PSPs happening.

I can't agree more on the weather. I think there's a lot of weather in that. But I think if we look at numbers like what I reflected at 20,000 down to 5000 for the same kind of event. So we can go back now and look at our past events and run analysis of what our sectionalizing capabilities are and what we would shut off now with that same set of data that we used to shut people off.

And we can come up with numbers that are the real kind of numbers to look at for this, how are we changing the effect on the people with looking at the same event then and now?

Yeah, I mean, that would be really interesting. I think one, PSPs are just more-- It's more common, right?

It's more known. Our constituents know about it. I think there was a question about how we get the information out. And I was just thinking, you know, as someone who lives in a district that has these on occasion, like, we get notices. And so I would be interested because we can't predict the weather. We can't do a whole lot about the weather. Despite that I think I just read Dubai is doing like some rain, right-- But we don't have that capacity or budget for it.

But I mean, you know, looking at those things that we can control and that precision, you know, the precision of just getting to the constituents. I think our constituents know what it is more today than they did a decade ago. And our constituents prepare for it, I think, differently. And when I say constituents, it's not just the individual in a home or in a business. It's also the community, local government there. It kind of has a plan. So I'd be curious to--

If I could reflect on that as well. PSPS as named PSPS is still relatively new. As I mentioned, SDG&E was doing it about five years previous, and the pushback was immense in those early years. And now some of our greatest supporters are the same people that were being affected by PSPS in those early years or didn't want to hear about it, didn't want to see it; the backcountry or up in the country areas of Southern California, San Diego.

And so I think that there is a story there that we could build as a state that this is truly the last resort to keep you and your families safe.

Thank you.

I mean, obviously, we can go on and on with all the things that are being done. And obviously climate change is real, as we're seeing year after year, right?

And it's very hard to predict what the future holds. But I'm really impressed with everything you're doing there in San Diego and PG&E, those plannings and how you've grown to really look at what the weather patterns are doing in our areas. I just have one question. With everything we're doing and preparing for worst case scenarios, so to speak, what does AI work in this arena?

Because would that be very helpful? Is that something you guys are looking at? Because it's coming-- It's here, right. So how could that help us or help you to better prepare ourselves for the worst case scenarios?

Yeah, so that's a really great question. It is something that we're continually evaluating. You know, we've learned a lot from the implementation of AI in our wildfire cameras. You know, there's 1040 cameras in the camera network and PG&E sponsors over 615 of those cameras. And when we implemented AI on June 1, you know, we had to let the system learn. And our partners at CAL FIRE provided a lot of really great information about what they've seen.

And what I've seen from some of that information is that we're getting the opportunity to more quickly respond to ignition, and that's allowing us to have a greater success rate when the fire is in its incipient stage. And so AI can bring that same value to a lot of other disaster type modeling. You know, as I indicated, we're looking at using, adding AI to Dash, which is our seismic modeling.

That would allow us to better understand the variation of geology within the service territory and how the seismic waves would be accelerated or decelerated by that different geology. There's just so much opportunity for that. And with that though, there has to be some caution, right, because it's still quite unknown. And I just think that that's always going to be something that's in the forefront of our minds at PG&E, is how to leverage AI to learn faster than we can learn ourselves.

And I want to just add, while the camera network statewide is doing the AI, so anywhere you're looking at the mountaintop cameras is now using that AI for smoke detection. Also in SDG&E territory, we're using AI application over our weather modeling in order to better predict what the changes in the weather are going to be based on the last 15 years of data that we have in our bank to kind of mirror that.

So we're starting to see a very, very close trend line down to the minute of what that weather change is. So then we'll be able to tell when Santa Ana's are likely to peak based on all of that previous activity. And we are also looking at many other ways to use AI.

Any other questions? I think that was it. I think I had a very good discussion on a lot of these issues. Like I said earlier to the first panel, obviously, like I said before, and I always said, we're a disaster prone state, right.

And how do we prepare ourselves? Lessons learned year after year. And really what can we do as a Legislature to make sure you guys get what you need. Obviously funding is one thing, but when we're having years like this year, it's not too good. But nevertheless, we need to stay on top of this and we need to be a leader in disaster response and recovery. Obviously we're doing it, but always looking at the worst case scenarios, right.

And last year when I toured one of the areas where from the flooding, and they had reached out to me and talked to me about, we didn't know this was going to get this bad, I'm like, okay, shouldn't you be thinking ahead that worst case scenarios that this can happen or will happen on top of other things, right? Let's always make sure that we're educating ourselves. And like I said, at the end of the day, we're all going to rely on one another to help.

Resources and data and everything else we can do to prepare our communities. So with that, that's all our questions. I think I should open up for public comment if there's anybody in the public that has a comment and then I think we'll wrap it up after that.

Hi, good afternoon. Laura Parra with Southern California Edison. I just want to highlight a few of the work that we've been doing on the ground for Edison, as is highlighted in your background or document from the Committee. We've focused a lot on Covered Conductor as one of the options that we see that could help mitigate wildfires. So I just want to point that out and provide some data points there.

As of December of 2021, we were able to install 2500 miles of Covered Conductor and we've seen a huge improvement at reducing risk. And that's helped us, along with PSPS and other of the mitigation efforts to hopefully reduce the probability of catastrophic wildfires from 55% to now 65%. So we continue to improve on that and that's something we'll continue to focus on in our wildfire mitigation plan at the CPUC. So thank you.

Anyone else? Seeing none. I want to thank everybody for participating. Thank you, Senator, for joining me as well. And this hearing is adjourned. Thank you.