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APS details wildfire mitigation steps and potential public-safety power shutoffs affecting southern Taylor
Summary
APS presented its 2025 wildfire-mitigation plan to the Taylor Town Council, outlining vegetation management, grid hardening, expanded inspections and monitoring, and reporting that 65 very-high-risk lines (including lines on Taylor’s southern edge) are now candidates for public-safety power shutoffs (PSPS); APS estimated an outage could last about 20 hours.
Janet Dean, APS public affairs manager for the company’s Northeast division, told the Taylor Town Council on May 1 that APS is expanding year-round wildfire-mitigation work that it says is intended to reduce the risk of utility-caused fires.
Dean summarized multiple pillars of the program: a vegetation-management plan that clears rights-of-way and creates defensible space around equipment; a hazard-tree program to remove sick or dying trees outside rights-of-way; grid hardening that replaces wooden poles with steel, upgrades lines and uses non-expulsion fuses and mesh wraps at pole bases; and stepped-up asset inspection using trucks, drones and infrared surveys.
She said APS is also deploying weather stations and AI-enabled cameras along key lines to monitor conditions and detect smoke early. ‘‘APS focuses year-round on protecting communities from wildfire risk,’’ Dean said, and cited an example in which cameras on Mount Elden detected a smoke start within six minutes.
A major operational change Dean described is a non-reclosing strategy for select equipment and the use of public-safety power shutoffs (PSPS) on very-high-risk circuits. She said APS has identified 65 such lines and that lines along the southern edge of Taylor are now included; APS estimates a PSPS event could last roughly 20 hours to cover the wind event, darkness and two hours of morning patrols for restoration. Dean said APS expects to provide advance notice to affected customers and to update them daily during an event.
Local officials asked questions about affected areas and customer notifications; Dean said maps exist showing the lines and that customers should sign up for county emergency alerts. The council took no formal action on the presentation.
The briefing underscores potential short-term outages in extreme weather events but also describes a range of preventive steps APS says it is deploying to reduce ignition risk.
