As the threat of wildfire becomes an ongoing concern, West Oregon Electric Cooperative (WOEC) leads the way in management strategies.
By Scott Laird
Mike Cafferata will likely never forget Labor Day weekend 2020.
As a district forester in Forest Grove for the Oregon Department of Forestry, Mike was responsible for fire protection for a region that stretches from the Columbia River to McMinnville and west to the crest of the Coast Range. After an already bad summer for wildfires in Oregon, the unusually dry fuel load and relative humidity, along with 20 to 30 mph easterly winds with gusts up to 60 miles per hour, had everyone nervous.
“We saw a weather pattern coming in,” Mike says. “We knew that was a really bad fire forecast. I was actually in a different part of the state working on a fire, and I came home to be here to try and help. Everybody did all the preparation work that we could do. We evacuated the Tillamook State Forest, and all the operators shut down their timber harvest to prevent a fire. And then someone asked about the power lines.”
Mike, now the executive director for the Oregon Small Woodlands Association, says the community of power companies in the northwest corner of Oregon and ODF hadn’t faced a situation with these kinds of conditions in recent memory. So he started reaching out and asking them to shut off their power to their customers.
“I remember getting a hold of West Oregon Electric,” he says. “They’re used to shutting down the power if there is a fire, but we didn’t have a fire. And of course, their lines run through forestland in some of the worst spots. I talked to (Operations Manager) Don Rose, and I told him I was worried about this windstorm. He told me they would shut the power off.”
Throughout the next several days, as the high winds persisted, WOEC shut off power overnight in the more rural parts of its service area. Meanwhile, fires broke out all across western Oregon, causing massive amounts of damage. One fire started near Haag Lake during daylight hours, but a quick response by nearby Bighorn Logging workers and Stimson Lumber crews at their mill—along with ODF crews and local firefighters—contained it to about 100 acres.
“I truly believe WOEC saved the Coast Range when they decided to turn their power off,” Mike says.
An Ongoing Threat
As Oregon’s climate becomes hotter and drier each summer, the question is no longer if there will be a dangerous wildfire, but how many fires there will be and how much damage they will cause.
Wildfire threat has forced electric utilities to acknowledge and face the potential safety and financial risks their power lines can create. Utilities now need to be proactive in finding innovative tools and technologies they can implement to protect their customers and service areas.
WOEC has taken the lead in mitigating wildfires. This summer, WOEC was featured in RE Magazine, a publication highlighting electric utility news from across the country, in an article focused on nationwide wildfire preparation efforts.
“It’s inevitable that more trees are going to fall into our right of way,” WOEC General Manager Billi Kohler said in the article. “We’re doing everything we can to not be the cause of the wildfire.”
For Billi and WOEC Operations Manager Andy Larson, the idea of shutting off power is the exact opposite of what they believe their job to be—keeping power on for their members. But in dangerous situations, it makes sense.
“Much of the credit really goes to Andy and his crew,” Billi says. “If you think about it, they’re in the business of keeping the lights on. When you have lawyers and policymakers asking them to turn the lights off, getting their buy-in is half the battle. Our guys have been great.”
Management Strategies
One new tool WOEC has embraced is a programmable electronic for pole-mounted equipment that automatically shuts off a line’s power feed if a line is disturbed.
“Our goal was to get to a point where all of our main feeder breakers were programmable so when we get to fire season, our engineers can put them on a more sensitive setting fast enough to deenergize the line,” Andy says. “The only trouble is, those are pretty much installed at every single feeder to give protection to all overhead conductors that we have in the air, and those breakers are so fast they shut off power to every customer that’s on that line.”
Andy says that was the issue this past summer in the Chapman service area, where 350 people lost power 5 times in less than 3 weeks. To prevent it from happening again, WOEC is investing in new technology, and engineers are working on solutions that include strategically placed trip savers along the lines.
“I think by installing all these electronically controlled breakers, we’re providing protection for the system and doing our best not to start a fire,” Billi says. “Now, we’re just going to try to reduce the number of members that are affected during an outage.”
Vegetation management also continues to be a key part of WOEC’s wildfire mitigation planning. Each year, crews have cleared and trimmed about 130 miles of the utility’s 700 miles of power lines. That work involves mowing the brush under the lines, trimming limbs that extend into the utility’s right of way, and—when necessary and with the property owner’s permission—removing potential danger trees outside the right of way. The goal is to get the system on a 5-year rotation.
WOEC also continues to invest in installing lines underground when and where possible to protect them from falling limbs and trees.
“We’re doing a job right now where we’re going to remove a mile of overhead, reroute it, and replace some bad cable,” Andy says. “It’s going to end up with the whole thing underground.”
The co-op has taken its innovative efforts even further. In 2024, WOEC bought a mobile fire trailer with a 500-gallon water tank and some firefighting tools, which allows crews to immediately begin work to contain a fire they find when responding to an outage.
“We had ODF come out and give all of our crews some wildland firefighter training,” Andy says. “Now, if an outage has already started a small fire, we can clear the electrical hazard, and a couple of our guys can start putting water on it and mitigate that risk. There’s a handful of other utilities in the United States that have done this. For us, being so rural, we’re often the first ones to the scene. Now, we can do something about it.”
The final piece in WOEC’s wildfire plan is the installation of a Remote Automated Weather Station at its pole yard in Vernonia, which is used by ODF to monitor local and regional weather conditions, model potential problems, and help make decisions about whether to shut off power if the situation becomes dangerous.
“We built our wildfire mitigation plan in 2020, and we continue to build on it each year,” Andy says. “Every year, we learn something new that’s going to help set us up for success in the following year. I don’t think a wildfire mitigation plan is going to protect us 100%, but we’re doing everything we can.”