How Can Utilities Best Approach Wildfire Risk In The Nort…

Challenging and ever-changing weather patterns mean that utilities across the United States have to adopt wildfire strategies and technologies that are specific to the geography of their region. Wildfire risk is indeed no longer just a problem for utilities in the western part of the United States.

While the recent Wildfire & Resiliency Strategy Summit highlighted how PNM leverages Firescape technology for 100-meter line-segment simulations in the Southwest, DTECH Northeast will examine how similar data-driven frameworks can apply to the distinct challenges of the Northeast.

The Approaches to Wildfire Risk in the Northeast: Situational Awareness and Emergency Management session will detail how Avangrid successfully adapted western wildfire risk models for northeastern environments. To get a better sense of what’s in store for attendees, we caught up with Holly Eagleston, CEO and Founder of Firescape. We explored how Firescape technology is being applied in the Northeast, why localized risk modeling is becoming so important for utility resilience, what’s in store for attendees at DTECH NE, and much more.

Jeremiah Karpowicz: How do changing weather patterns and distinct vegetation in the Northeast alter fire behavior compared to the dry brush models typical of the West?

Holly Eagleston: The biggest difference is timing and fuel. Wildfires in the west tend to occur around vegetation that had dried out over a long period of time, with severe fire behavior being driven by strong winds.

The Northeast is mostly hardwood forest, so the risk concentrates in short windows: in the spring, after snowmelt but before leaf-out, and fall, after leaf drop, when there is dry leaf litter on the ground. In those windows you have dry leaf litter on the ground, sun reaching the forest floor, low humidity, and wind. Add flash droughts the one behind the fall 2024 fires in New York and New Jersey, and conditions can go from benign to dangerous in days rather than months. Fires here tend to be less intense than in the West, but they start much closer to homes and infrastructure. 

We are seeing the alignment of drought, available fuels, high temperatures and winds come together more and more frequently in the area, than we did in the past. 

For utilities that haven’t traditionally dealt with wildfire as an active threat, is the bigger challenge around changing the mindset to actively consider these issues, or more about the technical friction of adapting or adopting a new mitigation framework?

Mindset comes first. Most of the technical pieces already exist. Many Northeast utilities have SCADA-controlled reclosers that can run protective settings. The harder shift is accepting that wildfire is a real operating condition, and not just a Western problem.

It also means being willing to trade a little reliability on high-risk days for safety. Northeast utilities have built strong reliability cultures, and a fast-trip setting that causes more outages feels a step backward until you frame it around consequence. Preparation is key, we saw wildfires in the Southeast this last year, and eastern Canada in 2024. Utilities need to be prepared for the hazard before it arrives.

The other real friction is ownership. Wildfire touches operations, protection engineering, vegetation management, and emergency management, and someone has to own the program.

When starting a wildfire program from scratch, what does it mean for utilities to create an initial roadmap to get going without getting stalled by lengthy or expensive capital investment requests?

The easiest place to start is with operations. Utilities should be able to answer: when is risk elevated, what part of my system is impacted, and what do we do about it? That means defining your high-risk conditions, choosing which circuits get protective settings, and writing a clear operating protocol.

That work runs on operating budget and gets you real protection in the first season. It also produces the data you need to make capital requests defensible later. Instead of asking for a large hardening budget on day one, you come back after a season or two knowing exactly where the risk is and what reducing it is worth 

When Avangrid evaluated Western utility playbooks, how much of what they learned from utilities in the West transferred over in a direct manner? And then what challenges needed to be worked through from the ground up?

It’s never a simple copy-paste. When it comes to wildfire programs, there is no one-size-fits-all. The framework transferred well: risk-informed protection settings, declaring elevated-risk days, treating public safety power shutoffs as a last resort, and documenting decisions for regulators.

What didn’t transfer were the numbers inside the framework. Western fire-weather thresholds, fuel assumptions, and fire season timing don’t fit Northeast conditions. Customer and regulatory tolerance for outages is also very different. Those pieces had to be rebuilt from local data.

The biggest lesson has been to use localized climatology data to set regional thresholds for high risk, and to consider wildfire behavior and consequence modeling instead of weather alone.

What specific operational case studies or pilot results from the Firescape tool will you be breaking down in detail during the session?

We’ll walk through our approach to setting operational protocols for wildfire protection settings, and how the tool delivered forecasts enabling enhanced communication across the organization, and ultimately reduced wildfire risk.

There was a Red Flag Warning during the pilot, and the day before it occurred, operators already had circuit-by-circuit, hour-by-hour forecasts showing where to stop work, where to disable reclosing, and where conditions were most severe.

What’s the single biggest takeaway attendees of your will be able to bring back to their own engineering and operations teams after sitting in on this session?

You don’t need a massive capital program to start protecting your system from wildfire. You can start with the assets you already have, a granular situational awareness tool that accounts for wildfire consequence modeling, and be operational within a season. Capital investment should the data, not come first.

Learn more about theApproaches to Wildfire Risk in the Northeastsession at DTECH Northeast, orregister to attend.