PGE’s Tree Work: Safety and Reliability

Before I climb into this month’s topic, an update to last month’s column on park/parking passes. A faithful reader reminded me that you can get a free day-use pass to any of the several Clackamas County Parks, including Barlow Wayside, through our local public library system. To reserve, you’ll need a library card and access to the library web site, www.ci.sandy.or.us/library (click on Cultural Pass Express). Note that your pass must be printed out and displayed on your vehicle’s dashboard. I recommend reading the Cultural Pass Express FAQ — frequently asked questions — for more information. Passes to a variety of other venues also are available, such as the Oregon Garden and Portland Opera.

You’ve probably noticed numerous crews trimming trees in our area, often using bucket trucks to lift crew members high into tree canopies and grinders to turn limbs into chips. If those crews are working around power lines, they are probably from Portland General Electric (PGE) or Asplundh Tree Expert LLC, and they have two main goals: the overall reliability of our power supply and protecting us from wildfire. 

PGE and its contractor, Asplundh, have performed such work for many years, but the 2020 Labor Day wildfires led them to redouble their efforts. None of the several large wildfires that year started in PGE’s service area. Other power companies, where fires were found to be caused by sparks from downed power lines or other equipment, are still dealing with the aftermath. In November, PacifiCorp reached a $150 million settlement with 1,434 plaintiffs associated with the Labor Day 2020 fires; so far, the company has settled nearly 4,200 wildfire claims for $1.6 billion.

Overall, the Labor Day fires destroyed more than 3,000 homes, killed at least 11 people, and burned more than one million acres, mostly in western Oregon. The Riverside Fire, which burned in Clackamas County, was started in or near a campground along the Clackamas River, probably by an abandoned campfire.

PGE serves an area with a population of about 1.9 million. Asplundh, which provides tree-care and power-line clearance services nationwide, was founded nearly a century ago by the children of Swedish and Swiss immigrants. In Swedish, asplundh means “a grove of aspen trees.”

In our forested area, falling trees and limbs pose a threat to power lines, poles, transformers, and other equipment year-round. Most of us have experienced power outages in winter, when storms blow trees and branches onto power lines. In summer, downed power lines falling on dry vegetation can cause fires. PGE spokesperson John Farmer told me how the company is managing that threat during wildfire season.

“With our Enhanced Powerline Safety Settings system, or EPSS, we operate our electric system more conservatively when there is increased fire risk due to factors like high winds, dry conditions, or high temperatures. Operating the system more sensitively during fire season helps prevent utility infrastructure from becoming the source of ignition,” Farmer said. 

“We have devices on our power lines called reclosers, kind of like a circuit breaker, and if a branch hits the line, the recloser de-energizes that line. Sometimes a branch just hits the line and falls down to the ground, and the recloser checks the line one, two, or even three times and, if it’s safe, reenergizes it,” he said. “If it’s a hundred degrees outside and a fir branch that is dry as a bone falls onto a power line and gets stuck there, you don’t want that power line to re-energize itself. So instead of two to three chances to turn power back on during fire season, those devices get one chance. And if that issue is still there, it stays de-energized and we send crews to go check it. In that situation, we’re not willing to have any level of risk associated with an automatically repowered line.”

PGE’s EPSS web page, at tinyurl.com/h8ua7zdc, explains more about how it works.

The PGE and Asplundh crews work year-round to reduce the risk of trees and branches setting off the EPSS.

Alex Konopka, PGE Senior Manager, Vegetation Management, said the company’s Advanced Wildfire Risk Reduction Program has been in operation since 2019. 

“Property owners are seeing us more frequently on an annual basis, as we’re making multiple patrols before fire season during the active growth period. We work to make sure we have appropriate clearances around poles and overhead lines,” he said. “Sometimes we identify trees that a customer or property owner might consider otherwise green and healthy, but we’re performing more detailed assessments on these trees, looking at growth habit, whether it’s a dominant or co-dominant tree, whether it has multiple tops, cracks, conks, decay, root rot — the kinds of things that might be signs that it is unhealthy and thus potentially a risk to the power line over its lifespan.”

If trees need to be removed, Konopka said he and his colleagues see working with property owners during this process as crucial.

“We’re doing a lot of knocking and talking, a lot of education,” he said. “We make an effort to notify customers about this work. We typically send letters to property owners about our assessments, and the first line says, hey, in Oregon, we love our trees. And that’s certainly true. PGE is one of the largest at-scale forest managers in the state. We’re managing close to three million trees up in the Highway 26 corridor, from Sandy to Government Camp, and about 225,000 or so of those trees have the potential to fall onto the power lines. So we have the opportunity to work with customers on a daily basis. By and large, our interactions go pretty smoothly. I’ve been in this role for 10 years, going on 11. There’s nothing I haven’t been able to accomplish with a customer through meeting in the field at their tree and having that conversation.”

Konopka noted that PGE customers can request wood chips, which crews will deliver for free. See tinyurl.com/5y27tn6t.

Have a question about PGE’s tree work? Want to know where you should NOT put wood chips?

Let me know. Email: SWilent@gmail.com.