Massive wildfires in the U.S. have caused widespread damage in recent decades. On this episode we’re joined by a utility executive and a state legislator to discuss the value of wildfire mitigation plans and how legislators can use them to better understand the steps utilities are taking to reduce the risk of wildfires.
Massive wildfires in the U.S. have caused widespread damage in recent decades. The Smokehouse Creek Fire in Texas this year, the Marshall Fire in Colorado in 2021 and a series of fires in California in 2020 that were the worst in the state's history are just a few examples. Over the past few decades, the U.S. has spent more than a billion dollars annually to fight wildfires, including $3.5 billion in 2022.
In the past few years, legislators concerned about this trend have asked utilities to provide disaster mitigation plans. In Washington state last year, bipartisan legislation was enacted that requires utilities to provide wildfire mitigation plans for legislators to review.
Rep. Kristine Reeves (D) of Washington state joined the podcast to discuss the origin of the legislation in her state and why it's important for legislators to review and understand the steps utilities are taking to reduce the risk of wildfires, particularly in Western states.
Also joining the podcast was Anne Sherwood, area vice president for wildfire mitigation for Xcel Energy, a utility that operates in eight states. She explained how utilities are using wildfire mitigation plans to try to prevent wildfires and also to better manage the effect on utilities when fires do start.
Ed: Hello and welcome to “Our American States,” a podcast from the National Conference of State Legislatures. I’m your host, Ed Smith.
AS: A wildfire mitigation plan is one way. A public facing plan for lawmakers to learn about what the utilities specifically are doing to mitigate wildfire risk.
Ed: That was Anne Sherwood, the vice president for wildfire mitigation for Xcel Energy, the utility that operates in eight states. She joined the podcast to discuss how utilities are using wildfire mitigation plans to try to prevent wildfires and also to better manage the effect on utilities when fires do start. I’m also joined by Representative Kristine Reeves of Washington state, who cosponsored legislation aimed at ensuring the legislature has information about each utility’s wildfire mitigation plans.
Massive wildfires in the U.S. have caused widespread damage in recent decades. The Smokehouse Creek Fire in Texas this year, the Marshall Fire in Colorado in 2021 and a series of fires in California in 2020 that were the worst in the state’s history are just a few examples. Over the past few decades, the U.S. has spent more than a $1 billion annually to fight wildfires including $3.5 billion in 2022. Sherwood discussed steps Xcel has taken recently to mitigate wildfire risk, including preemptive shutoff of power during dangerous conditions, the use of AI cameras to try to detect fires early and other strategies to try to prevent damaged electrical equipment from sparking fires.
Reeves explained the origin of her legislation and why it’s important for legislators to review and understand the steps utilities are taking to reduce the risk the of wildfires, particularly in Western states. Here is our discussion starting with Anne Sherwood.
Anne, welcome to the podcast.
AS: Thanks for having me, Ed. I’m happy to be here.
Ed: So why don’t we start by you telling us a little bit about your role at Xcel.
AS: I am the area vice president of wildfire mitigation regulatory policy for Xcel Energy Services, which means that I have a role in all eight states that Xcel serves. In this role, I am responsible for overseeing Xcel’s Energy wildfire policy initiatives, conducting wildfire mitigation program planning, promoting stakeholder engagement activities with regulatory stakeholders, with impacted communities and with other utilities. So, this often involves being out in the community or my team members at significant events, speaking at conferences and then also working to put together wildfire mitigation plans and you know kind of drive the strategy for that enterprise by basis.
Ed: Of course, we are going to talk about wildfires and utilities today. And since we are both in Colorado, we thought maybe we would ask you first about the Marshall Fire. This was in December of 2021. Hardly anyone on the Front Range will not remember that. Regarded as the most destructive fire ever in the state and I think consistent with a larger trend of increased wildfire across the country. I know I was a newspaper reporter in California back in the ’70s an ’80s and we had wildfires, but it was like a dumpster fire compared to what we see in the country now. So, I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that Marshall Fire and how that affected the energy system here.
AS: Sure thing. Many of us were affected by the Marshall Fire and we know it impacted customers and communities that we are privileged to serve. We agree with the Boulder County’s Sheriff conclusion that the Marshall Fire started as a result of an efficient out of property affiliated with the Twelve Tribes and that this ignition had nothing to do with Xcel’s Energy powerlines. However, we disagree with the sheriff’s conclusion that Xcel Energy’s powerlines likely caused the second efficient. There was a lot of destroyed infrastructure in that area as a result of the fire. And as part of our ongoing work our wildfire mitigation plan that we had filed back in 2020, we’ve continued to do system hardening work you know in that area of the Marshall fire, but also in the other areas around state that we’ve identified as having a higher wildfire risk. So, for example, just in 2023 alone, we replayed almost 3,000 distribution folds. We made over 300 priority repairs on transmission equipment. We inspected over 20,000 distribution poles and we did this by using drones. And then we also did a foot patrol on almost 3,000 miles of transmission line. And we, you know, installed 19 substation protection relays which kind of allows to continue to upgrade our system to more sophisticated type of communications.
Ed: As a lot of people in the Front Range know, Xcel Energy initiated its first public safety power shutoff in Colorado in April of this year. This was due to very high winds and wildfire risks along the front range, and you proactively turned off power for nearly 55,000 customers. And I wonder if this is a mitigation the company plans to use in case of extreme weather in the future and what you learned from that experience in terms of feedback from customers and that sort of thing.
AS: Xcel’s top priority is to operate our system safely for our customers and our communities. And as we have experienced extreme weather and an increase in extreme weather is creating challenges. Respect to a public safety power shutoff or we call it PSPS, it is a tool used only when other methods are not enough to ensure safety of our customers. Proactively shutting off power was not a step that we took likely and is not a step we take likely in the future, and we only use it when necessary to present possible wildfire in the area. When we decide whether to run a PSPS, we consider kind of three main factors as well and then there are some other productive bad things that come into play, but it’s the extreme wind. It’s the relative humidity and it’s the fuel and vegetation moisture. And specific to the April PSPS in Colorado, we considered all three of these factors and we also consulted with Technosylva, who is an expert in wildfire spread bottling and then used their software to help us identify as narrow of a footprint as possible for this event.
I read all 683 comments filed with the Public Utilities Commission after the event and we heard the feedback. This was the first time that we had ever done it. It was the first time that we had ever done it in Colorado at least and we are always striving to do better and to improve. So, we’ve committed as a company to improve our proactive communication about extreme weather events so our customers can better prepare. We’ve committed to better educate our customers about what PSPS events are; when they occur; why they occur and how to prepare for them. We have committed to quickly publish maps of the affected areas to keep customers informed of where outages area in the state of our restoration efforts. We continue to support the line workers who rapidly respond to outages so we can restore the power as quickly and safely as possible when the state is you know safe to do so. And what we can’t say for certain if the PSPS prevented a wildfire, the system basic significant weather related to (unintelligible), any of which could have created an addition in these very dangerous conditions.
We replaced 94,000 feet of wire. We replaced 124 bowls. We replaced 186 crossarms. We replaced 34 transformers. We replaced 777 fuses. And overall, we replaced 95,000 pieces of pole hardware. And so, yes. This is a tool in our toolbox that we do not take lightly, but we feel very confident that we took the right steps in April in executing a public safety power shutoff. We also feel very strongly that we can do, we can and will do better when it comes to communicating with our customers and our communities about these events.
TM: 08:28
Ed: Yeah, I think living here in Colorado the communication piece was certainly the one that was most frequently heard. Let me move outside of Colorado. This year Xcel said that its equipment may have started the Smokehouse Creek fire in Texas and I wonder down there what happened and how is the company looking at reducing risks from that system in Texas.
AS: Again, we know this fire affected our communities and our customers greatly and we always keep them top of mind. But I actually wanted to take a moment to thank the first responders that worked to fight these fires when they incurred around the country. In the days after the Smokehouse Creek fire began so late February of this year, we publicly acknowledged that our facilities appeared to have been involved in ignition of the Smokehouse Creek fire. We dispute claims that we acted negligently in maintaining operator infrastructure. And we encouraged people who had property destroyed by or livestock loss in that fire to submit a claim to Xcel Energy through our claims process. We’ve been working through the process for several months now and are pleased with how efficient and constructive that process has been. And I think this is really important too that we you know came forward as a company. We took responsibility and we did what we could to help our customers avoid having to go through years and years of protractive litigation.
And so similar to Colorado in Texas, we are working diligently to reduce the risk of our infrastructure being in the ignition of a wildfire. So, some of the different aspects of what we are doing include grid hardening such as pole replacements and you know replacing conductor system protection type of events. So, using fault indicators and upgrading reclosers so we can more concisely sectionalize our system while when we are doing things that may impact customers. Kind of one of the final areas and one that I’m really excited about is our AI cameras that identify smoke plumes. So, we work with a company called Pano AI. We have 42 sites in Colorado, and we are already starting installation in Texas by the end of this year. And these cameras rotate 360 every minute and they use artificial intelligence to pick up smoke plumes. And then an alert is sent to our public safety partners whose jurisdiction it is as well as to the company via text or email or both depending on you know what you’ve chosen to do. And what I’m really excited about with this pact is that this is one of the first things that I’ve seen that affects the consequence part of the risk equation. So, if you think about risk is likelihood times consequence. Most of the work that we are doing has to do with the likelihood of an ignition occurring. This tool is reducing consequences and we know it is working. We know it is working because back in June, there was a fire in the Bear Creek area that one of our cameras and one of electric cameras picked up and when two cameras pick it up, they can triangulate, and they can provide a very specific lat long to the first responders. So, then the first responders get an alert. So now they know exactly where this incident is, and they know how big it is so they can right size their response to it. So those fire departments sent 40 people. They hiked for 2 ½ hours to get to the location. So that’s how remote this was. After that 2 ½ hour hike, engaged in the firefighting and had air attack as well to support. And what could have been a catastrophic fire was merely three acres and completed extinguished by 7 p.m. that same evening. And its event after event like that that we saw just week after week just this past summer that you know make me excited about this new technology out there and you know what’s coming in the future.
TM: 12:22
Ed: Now wildfire risk is a yearlong threat really in Colorado and throughout the West and Xcel recently proposed for 2025/2027 a wildfire mitigation plan in Colorado a 1.9-billion-dollar investment. What are the key elements in the plan and did Xcel consult with other utilities about what steps are best to take to reduce this risk.
AS: You are right. It is a big plan and it’s rightsized to address the risk that we are facing in Colorado. It underscores the commitment that we as a company are making to address the wildfire risk in Colorado and this plan really builds off of the foundational work, we put forward in our 2020 wildfire mitigation plan. And so, when I talked about it, I see these four different buckets. There is the situational awareness which includes those pano cameras I was just talking about. But also having fulltime wildfire focused meteorologists, risk mapping for our entire service territory, weather stations out you know a lot of territory because especially in Colorado where we have all these microclimates, we really need much more granular weather data in order to inform a lot of our operational decisions so that is the first piece. And then the second piece is our community kind of engagement and outreach. And you know as we were just talking about that April public safety power shutoff made it clear to us that we’ve got a lot of work to do when it comes to education and engagement and outreach with our customers, our communities, our public safety partners. So that’s another very significant piece of this plan. The third piece of it is what we call our operational mitigations. So that includes the PSPS, but also what we call wildfire safety operations where we put the system on more sensitive settings so that let’s say a tree falls into a line on a high fire risk day the line deenergizes. It doesn’t attempt to close back into you know make it just a blend. It completely deenergizes until we have somebody go out there that visually inspects the entire line and confirms that it is safe to reenergize. And that is something that we started this year. And included in that is kind of a more sophisticated version of that which is we call it EPS or enhanced powerline safety settings. Now what that has is a whole bunch of different pieces come together where we have remote capabilities so we can control the line from our control center. It is sectionalized so we can control you know portions of that line as needed in terms of energizing/deenergizing. We have completed protection studies so that the devices we’ve installed are all talking to each other. We are really excited about that. We started with a pilot in our first wildfire mitigation plan and are looking to expand that to all of our feeders in the two highest risk tiers in Colorado by the year 27. The fourth bucket is what we call system resiliency or system 9. These are actions that have benefits outside of just wildfire mitigation. And it benefits through a liability. They have benefits to resilience, so this involves actions such as targeted underground bank of powerlines in certain areas where we’ve done the studies. Designed the engineering you know all the pieces that go into that and we underground those lines. We know that’s very expensive.
There are other tools that we are using along with that. Sometimes … we need to rebuild a line. Sometimes because it’s old. We’ve got a lot of infrastructure here from post WWII. We prioritize that where again based upon some more risk modeling and you know the risk tier the theater might be in. Those are kind of the buckets.
And so, to your second question about other utilities absolutely. This is one of my favorite things about the utility industry is that we are always willing to share our experiences with each other. We want to help pay it forward and help you know other utilities as we move east especially you know get ahead of this risk. And so, I’ve spent time, hours with utilities through California, major utilities with Pacific ore with Portland General, with Idaho Power. And then we also within the state itself about a year and a half ago stood up in the Colorado Utility Wildfire Consortium. So, we have a monthly meeting with other utilities within the state. So not just the big ones like an Xcel or a Black Hills, but also our communities and our coops so we can all come together and talk about experiences that we’ve gained you now best practice proceeding. You know maybe there’s new technology out there that a smaller utility is you know more agile and they are piloting and seeing great results that we can scale up and also take advantage of. One of the things I love about the industry is just that always willing to pick up the phone. I think by sending a text to a colleague at another utility, I will have an email with two people cc’d on it within 30 minutes you know. They are two subject experts in some particular technical aspect that we were we had some questions about. Back in the end of February, I remember being on the phone with colleagues at Pacific Gas and Electric who you know we said if you were in our shoes, the tools we have today with the conditions we are seeing today, what would you do. Taking that advice and being able to apply that all across the system.
TM: 17:57
Ed: I wonder how Xcel works with legislators whether we are talking the many, many state legislators or legislators at the federal level. And are there things you are looking to legislators for to help you in that effort.
AS: Yeah. I think that’s a great question. I think one of the interesting challenges of wildfires is that there is no single stakeholder. Whether it’s the utility company. Whether it is the state. You know the federal land managers, communities, emergency management. You can’t individually solve this problem. We all need to be in this together and it is going to require a comprehensive response from all the stakeholders. One of the things I like to talk about when I’m having conversations about wildfires in the state of Colorado alone, there are over 400 entities that touch on wildfire. Federal, state, local, tribal and that’s on the Colorado state force site. You know when you think about that. You think about the magnitude of that. I can’t talk to 400 people individually. I can’t just talk to 400 people at once and expect us to make progress. And so, you know I think this collaboration you know one example I’ve seen of it is I was appointed to the Colorado Wildfire Resiliency Code Board, so I am one of 21 interests represented on that Board. We meet once a month and we have been tasked with putting together a building code for homes built in the wildland urban interface. And so, I’ll have a fire chief on my left and I’ll have an architect on my right. And you are now an insurance professional and another fire marshal, and we are coming together with a lot of different experiences as well as different interests or focus and coming together to build this out to you know have this new building code for new bills you know in the wildland urban interface. And so, I think the building code piece is a place where state legislatures can be helpful. Unfortunately, with that said with all the collaboration, utilities have become the insurers of last resort. So, when I say that you know when wildfires occur and there’s impacts of those wildfires. The utilities have been you know defendants in multiple lawsuits across the country. And with that in mind though, we’ve seen different states have created backstop funds for the utilities so that they aren’t the insurer of last resort. And these funds can help stabilize the financial health of the utility which in turn results in lower bills for customers because you can keep a higher credit rating. And so, we know this is being discussed at the federal level as well and so you know we are working engaging with some industries well as other industries at the same time. But another area where I think you know the state legislatures could have some consideration have to do with liability limits on the amount of economic damages. Over 90% of the damages against PacifiCorp have been for non-economic damages. There’s permitting improvements that can be made so we can expedite or vegetation management work. There’s been conversations and I’ve seen some legislation where utilities that have a wildfire litigation plan and are executing that plan in accordance you know the steps it says to take are deemed to be prudent in their actions. It is a higher bar in terms of negligence because you are executing on the plan and there are a lot of things that nature and you know just climate change that are out of our hands. So those are a few different things that I’ve seen, but I think could make a significant difference in this wildfire work. I think requiring utilities to have plans is a threshold to the access. Any sort of a backstop fund is a great way to encourage utilities that maybe more you know immature on this journey so far. I encourage them to start accessing that risk or the way that I’ll talk about it with some of my colleagues in the upper Midwest is you guys are doing a lot of resilience work you know whether that’s for winter storms or tornadoes. But that has wildfire benefit too. So how can we start thinking about that in a little bit different way that we can see okay we actually are doing wildlife mitigation work. Just an ancillary benefit from you know all the other work we are going to be doing and you know maybe we need to increase it because of this growing risk. But until you access what your risk is, you don’t know what steps to take.
TM: 22:41
Ed: As we wrap up here, I do want to ask you about one other aspect of legislatures. Another guest on this show is Representative Kristine Reeves and I discussed with her a new Washington State law that requires utilities to provide the legislature with their wildlife mitigation plans. And I wonder if there are other ways state lawmakers can learn more about what utilities are doing in terms of wildfire planning.
AS: That’s a great question. A wildfire mitigation plan is one way. A public facing plan for lawmakers to learn about what the utilities specifically are doing to mitigate wildfire risk. I know here at Xcel Energy we are always happy to have conversations and I like it when people ask me what we are doing. I like to share. I’m proud of what we are doing and obviously I’m very passionate about this work and so I’m always happy to be a resource for legislators anywhere and connect them with the you now appropriate contact person at utilities because there’s a small group of us out here that you know this utility wildfire mitigation work that work together quite a bit to collaborate on things. And another thing that we are doing is you know as a company we participate in community events and we hold some time halls. For example, back at the beginning of October, a couple of my colleagues were at the fire adapted Colorado conference. And you know fire chiefs are there, fire professionals and your elected officials. And so, you know being able to engage those different opportunities I think is yet another way that our elected officials can learn about the wildfire mitigation work that we are doing. And then finally and this is what I fear of things to do is let’s go see. So, let’s go on a field trip. Let me take you out to Indian Hills and so you can watch how it takes a helicopter to fly in a pole that has to then go 7 feet into granite, 45-foot pole to replace that pole. And that’s one pole. You know and you got to do this whole line of them and it’s just its spectacular. I am awed by the skill of my colleagues that are executing this work but ask them to ask utility to take you out there. We really enjoy doing it and our teams are really proud of the work that they are doing and they really enjoy being able to share it with our customers and our stakeholders and to educate on the risks that we are mitigating with these massive steps.
Ed: Well Anne, I know my audience appreciates you sharing today all of this information about what Xcel is doing and I appreciate it too. Thanks for taking the time. Take care.
AS: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Ed: I’ll be right back after this short break with Representative Kristine Reeves of Washington State.
TM: 25:40
Representative, welcome to the podcast.
KR: Thanks so much for having me Ed.
Ed: So, you cosponsored a bipartisan bill enacted last year there in Washington aimed at improving the utility’s ability to mitigate wildfires and ensuring the legislature has the information and I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the reasons the bill was introduced and what the goal is.
KR: Well, I think the bill was introduced first and foremost as an opportunity to as you just said work to coordinate a system of utilities to engage in consumer protection; to engage in consumer awareness and just educate the public on the work that these utilities are doing to mitigate wildfires. As you know Washington like some other west coast states has experienced unprecedented wildfire seasons over the last couple of seasons due to the impacts of climate change and in some situations due to challenges that utilities have potentially presented in those spaces. And so, wanting to make sure we were working together with utilities to both hold them accountable to the public in that education process, but make sure that ultimately the public has the information necessary to make smart choices about the work that their utilities are doing to protect them.
Ed: I wonder if you can talk about how you worked with cosponsors, legislative colleagues to get this across the finish line and as I mentioned earlier it was a bipartisan bill. That can always present some challenges, but can you talk a little bit about that.
KR: Yeah. Well in Washington both our Senate and our House are majority led by the Democratic party so when you say bipartisan just putting that into context that this work was really done in concert with a couple leaders from within both parties, but within all four caucuses. So, the Democratic caucus and the House and the Senate, Republican caucus and the House and the Senate. And then of course the governor’s office. And actually, it was work that had started the year before led from conversations on some massive legislation that came out of the Department of Natural Resources. And so, the fact that you had key informants and stakeholders from multiple sectors within industry, within the non-profit sector, etc., I think was a good footing to being able to lead from a bipartisan win and what I would tell folks is mitigating wildfires is not a partisan issue. It impacts Democrats. It impacts Republicans. It just impacts people and so starting from that premise made the work a little bit easier to be bipartisan. But it really just requires relationship and conversation and dialogue and all of the sponsors really came to the table with that in mindset that this isn’t a partisan issue. This is about how we protect people.
Ed: But in every piece of legislation, there’s going to be challenges and obstacles. If not within your colleagues, then with stakeholders outside the legislature. What did you run into there. How did you kind of work with the utilities and maybe the other interest groups to get this done.
KR: I really want to provide credit to the prime sponsor, but I would say it was getting the utilities to come together in their association and have dialogue. They obviously had some concerns with the regulatory frameworks that were being presented initially which as you can imagine lent itself to just the general small seat conservative dialogue around regulation which I think you saw some our Republican counterpart’s kind of lean into on behalf of the utilities in the dialogue. Again, I think it really helps though to remind folks that the work we were trying to do wasn’t to overregulate utilities and mitigate you know require these mitigation plans as punishment. But rather to say this is about how we are protecting people and ensuring that people who are at the center of these impacts get the support and the resources necessary. It’s not to say that there weren’t challenges. It’s not to say that there wasn’t some disagreement. But it was really about reminding people what that central mission was in this process and then really listening to one another throughout the process to understand how we get to that shared goal.
Ed: As I alluded to earlier, one aspect of this, it’s a little unusual is that the utilities need to supply these plans to the relevant committees in the legislature. And I’m wondering what you are looking for in those plans and how do you think reviewing them is going to be able to help your legislature and maybe for other legislators who might be listening how they might find it useful to have those plans in hand.
KR: I’m a data analytics person. I do economic development for a living, community development for a living and then my academic background is in organizational psychology practioner and so for me I think a lot of the work in having a plan and having it come back to the legislature is really rooted it the benefit of putting the plan together in the first place and part of what those plans are really requiring is people to have dialogue with one another to really be thinking strategically and systematically about how to address these pretty big challenges. So, for me, a lot of the benefit is in the process that the utilities will go through to even just design that plan in the first place. And so, for me, the initial, the benefit, the primary benefit in my opinion again as we get to that end goal of how we are protecting people in this process is pushing the utilities to go through the planning process in the first place. Getting them to engage in that dialogue with community. Getting them to engage in that dialogue with their partners and put the plan together. The legislature will use it I think mostly in a data analytic exercise relative to what is the key aspect of how we hold them accountable and then how is that data tracking over the course of time so that we can try to be proactive as we see trends within the reports across the system. Are there things that we can be doing on a legislative level whether it’s resourcing; whether it’s you now different regulations and things like that that might be useful.
Ed: Yeah, I can’t tell you how many times in speaking with legislators we talk about legislation and the number one thing they say they have to have to be responsible in their work is good data. So, I think what you are saying right there is seeing what the data is that the utility has is really useful to you.
KR: Yeah, I mean I think what people forget is that at least here in Washington, we are a citizen legislature. So, when you get hired, I think people sometimes forget that we are not experts in all things. We can know certain policy portfolios. We definitely have lived experience that we are bringing to the table, but you know I’ve never worked for utility. My career has not been dedicated to partnering with the regulating utilities and so to some extent, you want this to be a trusted relationship where you are trusting subject matter experts in this space to do the work; to design the plan; to say what’s best for them. But then to provide kind of that stopgap if you will or that backstop for the public so the public has some trust that there is still somebody reading the report, processing that report, analyzing it. And again, what I’m really looking for as a legislator is if I take all of these reports together, are there trends that I’m seeing across the utilities. Does one of the utilities stand out as kind of a model around some of the mitigation strategies that its using and if so, how do I then amplify that across other utilities. Am I seeing gaps int eh system where maybe I notice a utility who you know and I think remembering that not all utilities are the same shape and size and resource, how do I then think about what those trends look like at different levels, different geographies, etc. So, I get a little bit more into the data piece of it, but I think that’s what our staff is looking for. I think that’s what other legislators are looking for and I think that’s what really lends itself to making better policy.
TM: 34:51
Ed: Well, speaking of other legislators certainly other legislators in the West, what’s your advice for them as they try to understand more about this and might want to possibly model some legislation in their state along what Washington has done.
KR: What I would say is this is a great piece of the ecosystem conversation, but it is an ecosystem conversation. And I mean that to say we also introduced legislation around mitigating impacts of wildfire liability insurance conversations. We introduced legislation similar to like floodplain mapping looking at how the geology has changed relative to wildfire and addressing some of that risk management. And can we be thinking about that in the development space and like how do we make sure people aren’t building their houses in places where we have seen consistent data over time. So, it’s part of a larger spectrum of legislation to tackle this challenge. This one bill isn’t you know the silver bullet. It’s not the thing that’s going to solve the problem. But what I would say to legislators who are working on this issue is be hopeful. I think I’ve been working on this policy for a couple of years and initially just having the conversation about whether or not it was due to the impacts of climate change was a sticking point for us to get to that bipartisan agreement. I think more and more people regardless of party affiliation are seeing the impacts of climate change and recognizing that wildfires are playing a role in that whereas a few years ago, the utilities really took it as based on the lawsuits in California and stuff that we were just trying to say well utilities start these fires and this is the problem. We’ve come to realize it’s a much larger ecosystem and we’ve got to do several different things withing the ecosystem to try to address how we put people first in that process. So, but I think being inspired that it’s a problem that needs to be solved – a big one. But it is in bite size chunks we can tackle this together and make sure that people are protected.
Ed: Well Representative thank you so much for walking us through your experience there in Washington with this legislation. It is certainly a topic of enormous importance to tens of millions of people in this country, so thank you for your time. Take care.
KR: We appreciate it, Ed. Thanks so much and have a great day.
TM: 37:11
Ed: I’ve been talking with Anne Sherwood of Xcel Energy and Representative Kristine Reeves of Washington state about efforts by utilities to mitigate wildfires and the role of legislatures in that effort. Thanks for listening.
You can check out all the podcasts from the National Conference of State Legislatures by searching for NCSL podcasts wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast “Our American States” dives into some of the most challenging public policy issues facing legislators. On “Across the Aisle” host Kelley Griffin tells stories of bipartisanship. Also check out our special series “Building Democracy” on the history of legislatures.