With Southern California Edison (SCE) a no-show at Los Angeles County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl’s first Woolsey Fire Recovery Forum, a representative was on hand Sunday at the Pepperdine session to answer questions about undergrounding electrical wires and the utility’s response after the fire.
Tammy Tumbling, Director of Government Relations for SCE, addressed the possibility of grounding wires—saying the answer is no.
“After the company assessed the topography of the Malibu area, it’s been determined that the steep, rugged terrain and rugged roads doesn’t permit us to do undergrounding,” Tumbling said. She said the other issue is cost. According to Tumbling, it would cost $3 million dollars per circuit mile to underground, versus the $400,000 per circuit mile with current overhead structures.
SCE also was under attack for replacing burned wooden poles with more wood pieces. The utility’s answer was that it took two things into consideration when restoring power: first, public safety of its employees, customers, first responders and other agencies; second was immediate and fast restoration of power, which meant using “existing poles we had in our inventory.
“In the medium and long-term, we are going to be looking at what we can do in our wildfire risk areas and determine if composite poles can be used, but our top priority at the time of restoration was expediency and safety,” she said. Tumbling did mention that, in hardening the grid, SCE put in 1,873 poles and 290 transformers with 173 miles of covered conductor wires in replacement to “mitigate risks of wildfires.”