PG&E crews bury lines outside Santa Rosa as part of ambitious statewide objectives

Square in the footprint of the devastating 2017 Tubbs Fire, and the nearly identical footprint of the 1964 Hanley Fire, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. workers are slowly digging toward a safer electrical grid.

At Porter Creek Road and Loch Haven Drive in the Mark West Springs area, a crew Tuesday morning was digging a trench 3 feet deep. Over the next two months they will extend it 2 miles to bury power lines along the winding, hilly roads.

The project is a fraction of the utility’s pledge to bury 175 miles of power lines in 2022, and an even smaller fraction of its ambitious proposal for submerging 10,000 miles in high-risk fire zones in the next decade.

But for the PG&E employees at work Tuesday, and surrounding residents, it's 2 miles of electrical line they won’t have to worry about.

“If a spark happened right in this area what would that spark do?” said Ron Richardson, vice president of PG&E’s North Coast Region.

In these hills still crowded with blackened tree trunks, reminders of what a spark can do abound.

PG&E’s work site is just downhill from the Safari West wildlife preserve — where buildings burned, but an exotic collection of primarily African animals survived the Tubbs Fire’s devastation. Cal Fire investigators ultimately found the Tubbs Fire was ignited by a private electrical system, but they have tied other blazes during the 2017 firestorm back to PG&E equipment.

Burying electrical lines in fire-prone territory is the investor-owned utility’s ultimate answer to its growing legacy of destructive wildfires. PG&E’s electrical equipment started fires that in the last 12 years that burned nearly 1.5 million acres, destroyed 23,956 structures and killed 113 Californians, according to a federal judge’s January estimate.

PG&E officials say sinking the lines underground reduces the risks of fire starts by 99%. By eliminating the chance for high winds to snap lines or damage other electrified equipment, buried lines also ward off the need for preemptive power shutoffs during high fire danger.

While few contest the dramatic gains in safety, critics are skeptical the utility can achieve its ambitious goals and question whether the billions of dollars it will cost is an undue burden on ratepayers.

But Richardson cast undergrounding as a chance for PG&E to show California residents its commitment to a safer electrical grid as climate change drives longer and more devastating wildfire seasons seemingly every year.

“When I think about us trying to rebuild our brand, I think that when we say we are going to do something, we have got to do it,” he said.

The most recent skepticism has come from California’s Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety. The new agency, which opened its doors in July 2021, is tasked with overseeing California utilities’ efforts to reduce wildfire risk.

Late last month, the office sent PG&E back to the drawing board on aspects of its annual wildfire-risk reduction plan, including several of its goals for burying lines. PG&E and other electrical utilities have been required to submit an annual Wildfire Mitigation Plan since 2019, but this is the first year the safety office has had the opportunity to weigh in.

PG&E’s plan failed to demonstrate that the utility can “meet its aggressive undergrounding goals,” the office wrote in a May 26 filing, which gave the company 45 days to revise its wildfire safety plan.

Of the 175 miles planned for this year, around 70 are in the North Bay. By 2026, the company has said it hopes to be burying as much as 1,200 miles a year to meet its goal. Engineers and officials on the job in Sonoma County this week say they believe speeds will accelerate as workers and engineers become more practiced at trenching and burying the lines.

While the pace in hilly, rocky areas like the Mayacamas Mountains is slow, there are areas where the company can use machines that cut through ground and scoop out a trench at the rate of 1,200 feet a day, Richardson said. In the Mayacamas, crews with a backhoe are digging between 200 and 600 feet a day.

“We’re just at the tip of the iceberg right now,” Richardson said, “we have the opportunity to learn.”

The Utility Reform Network, a San Francisco-based advocacy group and PG&E critic, has labeled PG&E’s undergrounding project an overly costly proposal that may not be the best use of resources.

The group questions whether the $5 billion the utility plans to spend burying power lines by 2026 would be better spent on inspecting lines and equipment for possible failures, the organization wrote in its own filing with the safety office.

“While PG&E clearly views its proposal as serving the interests of the company and its shareholders, it is the responsibility of (government regulators) to ensure that the proposal is in the public interest,” organization legal director Thomas Long wrote in the filing.

Safety office officials found PG&E’s most recent filing did not indicate it had a plan to meet its mileage goal each year.

“There are large discrepancies between PG&E’s undergrounding plan and undergrounding goal,” the filing read. The agency also asked the utility to revise its plan to better prioritize high fire risk areas, writing PG&E was “far behind” other California utilities when it came to focusing on the most wildfire-prone parts of the state.

The Tubbs Fire footprint where crews are working today is in the utility’s highest tier for wildfire risk.

In a statement, PG&E said the request for revisions from the safety office was an expected part of the wildfire mitigation plan process. The company was reviewing the agency’s request and preparing a response, a spokesperson said.

“We appreciate Energy Safety’s thoughtful review of our 2022 Wildfire Mitigation Plan and share the agency’s commitment to improve safety for our hometowns,” the company statement read.

Both the Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety and the requirement for the safety plans were put into place by the California Legislature in the wake of the deadly 2017 and 2018 wildfire seasons.

In part to pay for wildfire mitigation work, but also to cover a range of grid maintenance and upgrades, PG&E submitted a proposed rate increase to the state’s Public Utilities Commission last June that would raise the average consumer’s bill by about $1 per day from 2023-2026.

To cover the wildfire mitigation work, customers will see their electricity bills increase a little more than $6 a month in 2022 compared to the previous year’s bills, according to PG&E officials.

You can reach Staff Writer Andrew Graham at 707-526-8667 or andrew.graham@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @AndrewGraham88