There is a reason Smokey Bear’s wildfire prevention announcement is the longest running PSA in U.S. history—it’s impossible to check the news in the past few years without hearing about the latest devastating wildfire. Since 2021 began, there have been a whopping 39,402 wildfires in the United States, scorching over 3.5 million acres of land. Plus, in 2020 alone, California saw 5 of the 6 largest wildfires in their state’s history.
While wildfires have myriad sources, including man-made events like unruly campfires and discarded cigarettes, and natural occurrences like lightning mixed with arid weather, an all-too-common fire starter nowadays is faulty electrical equipment and vegetation run-ins with old, out-of-date Utility poles and wires. In fact, faulty Utility equipment was responsible for at least 1,500 California fires from 2014 to 2017.
With Utility equipment often at blame for these deadly wildfires, what are Utilities organizations doing to curb their impact on wildfire origination, and where does data and system integration come in?
Utilities organizations across the nation, especially in high fire-risk areas, are taking several steps to curb their equipment’s contributions to forest fire risk. For one, Utilities organizations are utilizing “Public Safety Power Shutoffs” during particularly high fire-risk days. Leading Utilities organizations, like PG&E, California’s largest Utility provider, are also taking steps to increase vegetation management around power lines, add new visual monitoring of equipment and weather, increase equipment maintenance, and test the creation of new solar-powered microgrids to replace traditional equipment. Advocates say Utilities organizations must also consider replacing old, rotting wooden power poles with more durable metal poles and installing new insulated power lines.
Perhaps most significantly, PG&E’s CEO, Patti Poppe, recently announced PG&E’s new initiative to underground 10,000 miles of overhead power lines. Undergrounding lines in high-fire-risk areas will lessen the possibility of vegetation falling into power lines and sparking fires.
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Asset-intensive organizations, like Electric and Gas Utilities, deal in data—whether that be keeping track of poles and transformer locations, maintaining asset functionality and repairs, or updating inspection and maintenance notes. But, they don’t always meet these maintenance and inspection goals due to inefficient processes and systems.
As PG&E and other organizations take on huge projects to improve and meet maintenance standards, underground power lines, and update poles and wires, they need a robust system to keep track of their asset, location, and maintenance data. And, importantly, to make their processes more efficient. That’s where enterprise system and data integration come into play.
Integrating Mobile Workforce Management (MWM), Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) systems allows Utilities organizations a comprehensive and accurate view of their enterprise data. Integration between MWM, GIS and EAM systems decreases the amount of dual data entry performed by individual teams, increases the communication between field and office employees, and increases productivity throughout these resource intensive projects.
The Geonexus Integration Platform (GIP), an off-the-shelf integration platform, includes prepackaged connectors to leading enterprise GIS, MWM, and EAM systems including Esri, SAP, IBM Maximo, ABB Ellipse, ABB Asset Suite and more. Plus, GIP was architected with data quality and integrity in mind. GIP takes a full-compare approach when synchronizing data. This means that with every synchronization, GIP detects changes, errors, duplicates, and discrepancies between systems. Then, once synchronized, GIP automatically sends data quality reports via email to interested users, so organizations can always keep track of their asset and geographic data.
Learn how Geonexus can help your Utility organization manage its system and data integration during these important forest fire prevention initiatives. Visit www.geo-nexus.com/platform.
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