My son is a high school baseball player, and I often send him motivational material that elicits a lot of eye-rolling. It’s usually well-worn coaching maxims like, “You can’t control playing time, but you can control your effort.”
Even if my son doesn’t appreciate my enthusiasm, these sayings have a lot of relevance far from the baseball diamond— such as with our response to wildfires.
There are many things electric utilities cannot control when it comes to wildfires. We cannot control the weather or how long our fire season lasts. We cannot control where people throw cigarette butts and build campfires, or how public and private land near our systems is managed.
But we can control our own effort. As our feature story illustrates, when it comes to wildfire mitigation, Oregon’s electric cooperatives are doing more than ever before. All of Oregon’s electric cooperatives have board-approved wildfire mitigation plans, and we work diligently to implement those plans. Safety— especially when it concerns how we mitigate wildfire—has always been our priority. But it is also undeniable that, for a variety of reasons, the threat of wildfire has exponentially increased.
Oregon electric co-ops are meeting the moment by burying power lines where possible, hardening their systems by using more fire-resistant poles, undertaking aggressive vegetation management and using cutting-edge technology such as drones to manage their systems.
I am proud of our effort, just as I am proud of my son on the baseball field. But here is where the parallels end. Unlike an exciting baseball season with lots of home runs, we want wildfire season to be boring and uneventful—permanently stuck on the end of the bench.
Executive Director Ted Case
