Fire Preparedness and Mitigation public meeting 051326 , part 2

[Editor's Note: A lot of information came out of this meeting, so this is part 2 of a multi-part series of articles.]

By Mary Alice Murphy

At a fire preparedness and mitigation public meeting hosted by Rep. Luis Terrazas and Sen. Gabriel Ramos, several speakers presented information for resident son how to prevent fires and how to prepare to evacuate if needed.
Grant County Emergency Manager Scot Fuller spoke next.

"As Chief (Roger Groves) mentioned, there were a lot of issues with evacuations and that sort of things in the Trout Fire, but there were several lessons learned from incident recovery. And one of the main th

ings was the important cross jurisdictional coordination during the incident. Along with lots of successes from the fire last year, there were some capability gaps that that we have identified, and we have tried to correct. One of them was with mass care and sheltering. We now have four pre-identified mass care and sheltering locations in the county, and we entered into a supportive readiness program agreement with Red Cross. We did that in August of last year, and they will manage our shelters for us. And I've already coordinated with the Red Cross and the shelters and updated all the agreements with them, so we're way ahead of the game right now than we were.

Last year, there was a great outpouring from the volunteer organizations in the county, and it's called a CO-AD, which is a Community Organizations Active in Disaster, and we heard lots of good things from some of the folks that were here. We had such a great outpouring of volunteers to help out with sandbags and other things. So we have a great list of CO AD members now, and I've been actively engaged in coordinating with them. Really good communications was an issue last year. We've updated the service at a lot of the communication sites in the county, and there's been a lot of new equipment that's been put at some of these communication sites.

Next week, we will put some communications equipment up at Glenwood and that'll give us the ability to communicate in the northwest part of the county, which before was kind of a dead spot. But now we'll have some communications up that part of the county, and the same week, we're also going to put some new a new communications equipment up at a Signal Peak that's uplat 9000 feet. So hopefully we're really getting some equipment to give us the ability to reach everywhere in the county. Another issue that was addressed my members, they lost all their power last year for quite a while, no communications, no internet service and no cellphone service. So we now have six mobile Starlinks at fire stations that don't have cellphone service and internet service. We can set them up anytime and we also have six generators too, just in case the power's out. We can power up those Starlinks with the generators and give folks the ability to have cell phone service and internet service.

Some of the issues last year were that people couldn't communicate with their family. We can do that now. Next thing is generators. We have a contract now. So the contract's been awarded to put 1000-kilowatt diesel generator in this building and a 400-kilowatt generator at the new public safety building that that is being refurbished now. It's going to be the old Aldo Leopold building near the county administration center. That's going to be our new public safety building. We also got some funding for generators for the two senior centers,— one out at Mimbres and one out at the Gila Community Center. And soon as they get the quotes from them, we're going to move forward getting those put in. And also got some funding to fund generators for 12 fire stations, some of them already have generators.

This funding will make sure all fire stations have generators. We're working on two plans, the community wildfire protection plan, which we started the updating process back in September, and we had our three public meetings and three workshops and the draft for 2026. We are also working on law enforcement protection plans that be available for public comment and public view probably next month, in June. And based on a lot of the surveys that we had a quite a robust response. We had almost 100 people provide input on the surveys when we get first with wildfire, but it was a big concern with a lot of folks, so we'll have that out probably, I said in June for folks to look at and comment on. The county's emergency operations plan was from 2014 so it's outdated.

So we have grant funding, and we're moving on getting that updated. We're going to start that process next month. Also, in addition to the operations plan itself, there's going to be seven different annexes to go along with it. Some of them will be protective actions. Annex one will be the mass care and sheltering and the debris management, damage assessment, an annex with the distribution management, annex recovery, and an annex for volunteer Donations Management. Those all be part of the and like Roger said, the way you said, Go, we're going to, we're going to use IPAWS, like we did last year to to notify folks if you have an emergency or an evacuation, IPAWS is the Integrated Public Alert Warning System i through FEMA, and we'll use that same process that we used last year.

But on top of that, the county now has textmygov, which is the new platform that the county initiated back in June, and hopefully folks have signed up for that. There were 3000 publicly available cell phones that were fed into that, and I put some information over there on the table, so you can use that to sign up to textmygov.

So we'll use IPAWS, and we'll use the alerting system on textmgov, so we'll have a pretty robust system to alert folks. If there are any issues in the county, you might get two alerts, one through IPAWS, and one through textmygov.

Additionally, back in March, I think, PNM installed six fire detection cameras out in the county, six different locations. Couple up towards PA, one out towards White Signal, I think one out at Mimbres. They are monitored. How they work is they do 360 degree scan every two to three minutes, constantly. And then when they pick up an anomaly, which could be smoke, could be dust, send that to their technicians. And their technicians will look at and verify, is it smoke? Is it dust? Would it be? Then they'll send out alerts to the Forest Service and myself and Chief Groves. And it's incumbent on us to send folks out there to verify what it was. And it does work. bBack on April 13, Sunday night, 930 to 945 it was a structure in Mimbres and it was about five to 10 minutes before the actual 911 call came in. So it works really good. And I guess that here with PNM, he's going to kind of do a little bit of 30,000 foot view of what they've done.

Terrazas said Fuller had answered one of his questions. "What did you learn from the emergency? Because we always learn when you have hiccups in an emergency.you don't know where it's at, what's going to happen. And so I really like what you said in how you already adjusted and done that.

He also thanked Sabrina Pack. She's here. She was instrumental also in the communications of putting that stuff together, and in having those conversations so forth, and having a one place to find your information, the right information, so that you actually know what's going on. I'm going to also say that having the radio, that was probably the only form of communication out there. "You have no internet, you have no cell service, you have no power. So maybe in their cars they were able to listen to the radio. And I think that we forget how that makes a difference. One of the questions that I have been asked is, why are you doing all this stuff, you know, and and is it because you know whatever is going on, because you're scared. After the Black Fire, I supported House Bill Two, which gave $2 million to restore the Black Range and I sponsored legislation to recover it for $3 million and we ended up with 2, working with Senator Diamond Brantley."

He went on the describe how he had worked with other representatives in other areas to do fire mitigation, flood mitigation, watershed restoration, forest and Water Restoration. And it really, really made a difference in the projects. "We also changed legislation to amend the old Forest and Restoration Act. And so it would enable us to to help communities or forest projects that gets closer to our communities.

Terrazas introduced the next speaker and asked him to talk about the camera system, "because I had a lot of calls from residents saying they're trying to see in my house, and I know that's not what you're trying to do. And at the time, I didn't know anything about it. Now I know a lot about it because I've been asking questions. But if you can explain that to an extent, I really would appreciate that."

"First, I just want to introduce myself. Thadeus Petzold, Thad. I'm the Associate Director of wildfire risk and vegetation management for PNM. Thanks for coming out." Petzold said. "One of the things that I hope you walk away from this is the amount of interagency cooperation that goes on anytime there is a fire in one of our service areas. We've got people on the ground. We've got people in incident command. And I witnessed myself just how much cooperation there is between all these places trying to make sure that everybody's safe. That's the reason that we're generally there, making sure that if we have to de-energize power lines, it's for first responder safety. So I just appreciate all the folks at the table here

As for the cameras, we had been looking at getting some fire detection cameras for quite a while. We were looking at a couple of different companies, and the governor's office decided that they wanted to get involved also, and so they signed on with a company called Pano, P, A, N, O, and they were going to put 11 cameras throughout New Mexico, and we wanted to assist in that, in trying to help their view shed, to make sure that all the areas of concern were covered. We've got a couple of Pano cameras in Santa Fe. There were certain areas that we consider high fire risk, areas, such as Silver City, Ruidoso that were overlooked. And so we decided that we were going to do a project where we were going to use a different company, separate from the the governor's project.

And so we have six Alert West cameras here in Silver City; these cameras do run 24/7; they have AI technology, so they're able to recognize certain keys, whether it be fire or smoke, and then it is actually viewed by a human person that looks at it to determine whether or not it is a fire or not. There's going to be some false positives, which do happen occasionally, where you have a cement plant on a windy day and you get all sorts of dust in the air. But I, after speaking to the first responders and folks that are getting the information, it's really incredibly accurate as far as where the area of concern is, as opposed to calling in and saying it's in between mile marker x and y, and look around. Well, this gives coordinates, gives lat, long coordinates, and so that the first responders can get out there immediately to take a look. And that's essentially what it's for. It doesn't prevent fires, right? But it does shorten the time that folks can get on it and either put a shovel on it, or whatever they have to do to make sure that this fire doesn't grow to become catastrophic.

The cameras are not open source. So this is not something that you can go in and look at. You can go into Alert West online. It's was born in California. There's hundreds, if not 1000s of cameras in California that Cal Fire and PG and E, SDG and E and Southern Cal Edison, they've all got them throughout their landscape. And like I said, most of those are open source. We're new to this, and so we wanted to try to make sure that we did respect people's privacy. And because we are putting cameras in the landscape, and we're not looking in anybody's window, it's overlooking stuff. And anytime there is any kind of a building or a house, it's pixeled out. Everything is pixeled out. So you can't see, you can't really see the house. All you see is that there's pixels. So you know, there's something there.

And we have had a couple of situations where we were asked to move a camera, and we did. We don't fight about it. We want to make sure we're doing what's best. The reason that the cameras are where they are, is because we did a view shed study to try to get the most bang for our buck. And then you have to deal with cell coverage, because you're using cell technology. And then you have to make sure that we're putting them on our poles. You have to make sure that the poles themselves can withstand the additional load, and so everything has to go through just right. We try to do our best to place them where they're not interfering with anybody. It's not public. The only people that can view this are folks in the firefighting community. We wanted to try to respect people's privacy as much as we could, but use technology to try to eliminate the catastrophic fire, if at all possible. Not always a perfect solution, but I think that the idea that that we're getting firefighters to ignitions faster is always a good thing.

One of the other things that we've done is we've installed a number of weather stations throughout our service territory, all over New Mexico and here in Silver City, that helps us in decision-making for System Settings during fire season. We say fire season. It's traditionally April through September, but it's year round. We wanted to make sure that we had good information on what's actually happening on the ground, and not use forecast for us to make those decisions.

So we do have a number of different platforms that we use. We have eight different weather models that we use. We have long term, we have midterm we have short term, high resolution platforms, and it does give us really good information. But when we get to a point where we're considering shutting power off to a community, we want to make sure that we're getting accurate information in real time information, so we're using that, the data that we're getting from the weather stations to help us make those decisions.

Some of the other new things we've got going on, we hired a new utility forester for southern New Mexico, Mike Finley. He is in Silver City quite a bit. He handles the Silver City, Ruidoso areas. We also have him in Alamogordo, but mostly our two big fire communities. And so we've got much, much larger presence down here in Silver City, which we've been looking for. Really glad we've got really good folks on the ground here that live in this community. They love this community, and they're here at all times. And so they're just, they're just a great resource. Some of the other stuff that we've been working on, we started recently a five year cyclical vegetation management project throughout all of our high fire risk areas, which are Clayton, Las Vegas, Santa Fe East Mountain, the Bosque, Ruidoso, Silver City, and a couple of transmitted corridors to Mexico.

So we're about a year into that. We're finishing up these mountains, and we head down south. We've been working on a lot of the lines in the Gila forest, matter of fact, about a 100-mile project where we work in cooperation with the Gila Forest Service. We expanded our physical rights of way of 40 feet on our distribution lines. Most of that work has been done. Still some private land we're working on. In addition to that, we went back because we put in new wind roads, essentially we opened up the right of way that now those particular trees are there's a bit of potential danger because you took out a group of trees. Now you have some scans that aren't used to certain wind levels. So we had a tree risk assessment looking at over 5000 trees to determine if these trees would be the ones struck. We get about 30 seconds here. These strike trees, and we're in the process of mitigating any of those trees that we felt were a hazard.

So just a number of things going on, we have a table over here with some information.

We'd love for you to sign up for our alerts, our PSPs alerts, and I'll be around for any questions. We're trying to mimic, sort of, you know, the National Weather Service, the Ready, Set, Go, sort of different levels of urgency. So you have the watch advisory warning, right? The watch means that we know we're going to have fire weather. We're looking at it. We're not necessarily initiating a PSGs, because we haven't hit our thresholds. But we want you to be aware s that there's fire weather coming, and the advisory is we're starting to near our thresholds.

We're starting to move ourselves into a position where we may shut the power off. We're probably going to go into a what we call wildfire safety mode, which means we're going to go to non -recloser on the background system so that we're not going to have multiple Reclosings on our three phase lines, which could mean if there's a fault, it could be a longer outage potentially, because we have to patrol the whole line. So we want to make sure people are prepared for that, and then obviously the warnings, the data, where we're like, everything's go. We're going to look at our weather stations. We're going to look at the information we have before we make any final decision. But it could certainly happen that we could turn them off.

So we're trying to get that information now. If you sign up on, go to pnm.com , sign up for that, you'll get those alerts so that you have more information. I know it sometimes can be alert overload, and especially during fire season, it's all kind of stuff happening at the same time. Because we know if we've got red flags and we have all these things, it's those are the things that we're paying attention to, and you're going to get a lot of those warnings, and once again, I'll be glad to answer any questions afterwards.

Next came state and federal forestry updates.

[Part 1 can be viewed at https://www.grantcountybeat.com/home/news-articles/fire-preparedness-and-mitigation-public-meeting-051326-part-1 ]