“Over the last five years, Southern California Edison—the utility that serves Los Angeles—has been testing a way to prevent downed power lines from starting fires. The technology, a kind of power diverter called Rapid Earth Fault Current Limiter (REFCL), detects a current surge caused by power line fault, such as a line struck by a tree, and instantaneously collapses the voltage before a fire can ignite,” reports IEEE Spectrum:
According to SoCal Edison’s testing results, posted in December 2022, REFCLs work. In all four testing locations, which the utility conducted among the scrub that grows in the mountains and high desert regions around L.A., the power diverters made the system release 99.99 percent less energy from ground faults compared to Edison’s typical designs. But when devastating wildfires erupted around L.A. last month, the utility hadn’t installed the experimental system more broadly across its territory….
SoCal Edison has acknowledged that several of its transmission lines running over Eaton Canyon experienced a surge in current around the time the fire there began. Although that spike in electrical current could suggest Edison’s equipment was responsible for starting the Eaton Fire, the utility maintains that was not the case.
Electrical infrastructure has been identified or suspected as the ignition source for several of California’s enormous wildfires over the past several years. And even when it’s not the cause, infrastructure is vulnerable to destruction or interruption during wildfires, resulting in blackouts in areas already reeling from the flames.
Some California environmental laws had the perverse effect of shifting development into fire-prone areas. The massive fires around Los Angeles sent large amounts of toxins from burned houses and cars, and other pollutants, into the atmosphere. As Quillette noted, “A UCLA study found that California’s wildfire emissions in 2020 were twice the total greenhouse-gas reductions the state achieved from 2003 to 2019. Decades of Californian climate change advocacy has, quite literally, gone up in smoke.”
In southeast, unlike California, states do a sufficient amount of controlled burns to get rid of flammable material, and keep wildfires from raging out of control, as NPR explained back in 2021.
Bigger, better drones are being built to fight large wildfires. Artificial intelligence recently spotted a wildfire in a canyon in California’s Orange County, and alerted firefighters, who were able to put out the fire before it could spread widely.
