Fire prevention and the Clean Energy Corridor
Ensuring the New England Clean Energy Connect is a safe and responsible part of Maine’s community has always been a top priority for the project’s engineers, who are deeply committed to the prevention of forest fires. Project planners have made extensive preparations to not only ensure safe construction and operational practices, but to ensure host communities will not bear the burden of emergency response during construction.
ASSESSING RISK OF FOREST FIRES
There is no comparison in risk of forest fires between the Clean Energy Corridor in Maine and the PG&E equipment-failure fire in Paradise, California. According to the Wall Street Journal, “PG&E Corp. equipment started more than one fire a day in California on average in recent years as a historic drought turned the region into a tinderbox.” CMP has no such track record, nor do we share the same climate, vegetation, topography or housing density with California.
LISTENING TO LOCAL FIRST RESPONDERS
To hear the concerns of local first responders, and to gauge the readiness and capacity of local and regional fire response, CMP engineers met with fire and EMS officials in each of the project’s host communities, plus the towns of Eustis and Jackman, as well as the Emergency Management Agency Directors in Somerset and Franklin Counties. We met with five Maine Forest Service representatives including the Director and the Forest Protection Division Director. CMP met with 24 Fire Chiefs serving all the host towns and townships plus 22 additional personnel representing local, regional and state emergency services and two U.S. Border Patrol agents.
The purpose of the meetings was to inventory local fire and safety resources, review town-by-town corridor access, evaluate fire and safety risks relative to the construction process and draft safety specifications. In the course of these conversations, we also reviewed incidents of fire or injury related to transmission line construction, operation and public use of transmission corridors.
None of the nearly 50 Fire and Rescue personnel we met with could recall an incident of fire or injury related to construction, although there have been seven incidents of fire caused by equipment failures. More typical are fires related to lightning, discarded cigarettes, camping or fires that spread from adjacent areas outside transmission corridors. In fact, the Maine Forest Service and others called our attention to the beneficial role of corridors as fire breaks and access routes to unrelated fire and rescue operations.
Fire and emergency response officials in the host communities do not view the construction of the NECEC as a fire or public safety risk based on more than 1,000 years of collective experience with transmission lines in the communities they serve. In their view, the additional line in the existing corridors will add minimal new demand on local fire response resources.
These meetings were extremely helpful to us in developing fire and safety recommendations we incorporated into our operations, construction and bid safety specifications. Among the many protocols we are implementing to ensure close communication and coordination with state and local emergency response agencies:
We will hire a full-time EMT service (for two EMT’s through North East Mobile Health Services) for all of Segment 1 to respond to all emergencies and construction related injuries while construction activities are occurring. This relieves the local first responders from having to support construction related emergencies in Segment 1.
NECEC contractors will be required to conduct pre-construction meetings with local fire and safety personnel to establish communication contacts and protocols.
We will provide plans to local fire and safety identifying all laydown yards, access points, emergency landing zones, and worksites as set out in the contractors’ health and safety plans.
We will notify state and local fire officials of any fire incidents on the corridor regardless of size or duration.
Additional specific fire safety protocols will be in place prior to construction and operation.
Throughout the planning, construction and operation phase of this project, CMP will continue to work with communities and the state to ensure that fire protection and emergency response is resourced appropriately. We are proud of our safety record. CMP operates more than 250 substations and 2,900 miles of transmission lines. The company conducts construction, maintenance, and repair on substations and transmission lines on a routine basis year-round.