This is the common council, the town of Payson.

Work study meeting March fourth, two thousand twenty-five.

Father, we also asked that thou bless all of our first responders, both here locally and throughout the country.

Um, as we have had a um the dry season that our lakes and streams can be filled, and we saved things in the city of Jesus Christ.

Yes let the record show that all council members are present except for vice chair codes and council member players purpose of a meeting goes right to item APS public safety power shutoff presentation.

Good afternoon from the podium and I think it should be loaded for you there is well good afternoon mayor counsel I'm Janet Dean I'm the public affairs manager for APS for the northeast part of the state which means I help support our local leadership and division with working here in Payson.

Also with me tonight we have Mike Shaw who is our local supervisor he runs our local dock and is the one keeping your lights on.

So we really do appreciate the time in front of you tonight or this afternoon.

We want to talk to you about what really keeps us up every single night and that is wildfire and how we as a utility prepare and mitigate against wildfire and then what all of the different um tools and tactics we use to make sure we're doing everything possible to keep our community safe because with electrical infrastructure there is an inherent risk and so we have been working very very hard for many years now on our wildfire mitigation program.

So today with your indulgence I want to talk at a very high level about what our wildfire mitigation program looks like the components of it because we want you to understand everything that we are doing and then we will get to what we really know you're interested in and that is the newest tool in our toolbox which is a public safety power shutoff and how that is going to come into play in the PESI area this year.

So our comprehensive wildfire mitigation plan has five primary pillars and this is a program that we've been building I've I've been with APS just over 10 years.

We've been building this program the entire time I've been with APS.

And really one of the hallmarks and foundations of it is that first pillar which is vegetation management.

And that is our comprehensive right-of-way clearance that we do along our rights of ways and we do this on a cyclical basis and every couple of years we are going through all the rights of ways our forestry team is and doing every in clearing anything out of the right of way making sure they're safe we also have been building what we call defensible space around poles.

So all of the poles on our sit on our system that have equipment on electrical equipment that could spark for some reason we're clearing defensible space a 10 foot perimeter around the base of those poles so that if something does happen if there is a spark we have a fuse blow it's the the spark's going to fall on clear ground and we also have what we call our hazard tree program and this is a program where we're working outside of our right of ways to proactively identify trees that look unhealthy that might be dead that are tall enough that if they fall they could impact our system and this is a program where we really rely on our partners like the Forest Service state land departments because in our rights of ways we can clear whatever we think we need to outside of our right of way we have to work with our partners we identify we um we notify them that we've found these trees and then we have to get permission to take those out so we're working very closely in partnership.

And I'm just going to say Mike if there's anything you think I'm missing jump up and add with me.

So that's our vegetation management pillar and like I said this is kind of the foundation we've been doing this for many many many years.

The partnership also comes from the residents too as well not just that's right we're working with the private property owners because it could be that the hazard tree or vegetation that we need to clear is on their property so we're working very closely with them.

Correct okay a second component is grid our grid hard hardening investments that we're making and we're spending I think it was something like 110 million dollars last year on this fire mitigation program and part of this is grid hardening so we're doing ongoing updates to our distribution system.

We are with some of our poles, we're doing a fire wrapping, mesh wrapping of our poles.

And you can really see an example of that between here and Pine Strawberry, because that line was just rebuilt a few years ago.

And you can see it almost looks like black chicken wire that goes up, you know, so high on those poles.

And that is equipment that that mesh is designed when it gets hot.

It the way I've heard it described, it kind of expands like those old worms that you would light at 4th of July and see them crawl, kind of expands like that and protects the infrastructure.

And we've seen where fires come through on one of those fire-wrapped poles or one of those these poles that have the defensible space around them, and we'll see those poles are still standing.

And that really helps.

It protects the system and helps us keep power on for customers.

Anything on this there?

Okay.

Um we're adding fuses, trying always to reduce any risk of sparks, and then when we can, we're replacing wood poles with steel poles.

Now that can't happen on every wood pole because steel poles aren't climbable, and so they have to be where we can get a truck up to them for access for our troubleman and linemen.

So that's the grid hardening.

Asset inspection.

Really, what this means is that every year on the lines that we've identified as being in areas through vegetation that has a much higher risk of fire, we are doing annual inspections on those, usually coming out of winter before we hit high fire risk.

Mike and his teams are patrolling those lines and making sure that we've identified anything that maybe got broken from wind or snow or is on the verge of breaking, so that that is repaired prior to going into heightened fire fire risk times.

And we're using what foot patrols, truck patrols, helicopter patrols, drones with infrared cameras.

We're using a wide variety of techniques to make sure we get those inspections done, and then any work that we've identified through the inspections finished before fire risks get gets really high.

This year, of course, is an anomaly.

We all know we're already in fire restrictions in February, which we haven't seen before.

Anything to add there?

No, yeah, we should do a year-round patrol too, not just for the fire season, but we also go to lines year-round.

Yeah.

Sure, that comes first year.

We don't have to do this on a mass.

Yeah.

Um, an area that I am very excited about is our pillar of monitoring and awareness.

We have put a lot of focus into this area, and this is really to help our team of fire specialists and system engineers.

It's to help us make data-driven decisions about our system as we think about it in relationship to wildfire.

Um, through these 10 years, we've built an internal fire mitigation department that has about 18 people in it.

We've got three meteorologists, I believe, right now, and multiple fire scientists, and then support staff.

So that is the team that is really guiding everything we're doing in the fire mitigation space and advising our operations teams, like what the teams Mike has here.

But in the monitoring and awareness, we needed to have data.

And what we found a few years ago is we had one weather station that we could get weather data from within one mile of one line, and that's all the weather data that we had for our team.

So over the last two to three years, we've been installing our own, and we have close to a hundred weather stations now that are situated at different places along our system so that we know exactly what the weather is, the wind speed, the humidity, whatever it might be.

We've got data coming in all across our system so we can make decisions related to anything, but especially in the wildfire space.

We also have cameras that we've been installing.

We've got two kinds of cameras.

One of them is a panel tilt camera, and those are those cameras are installed right on along our lines, and they're watching our lines.

So we can see what's happening, we can see some of the what you know, not just get the data, but see the weather, we can see if there's a fire in the area, what might be impacting the system.

And then our most um our newest tool is a series of AI cameras that we have we're installing not on our system but at high points across northern Arizona, and we've got about we're gonna have about 50 of those installed, right?