In a recent interview with the American Public Power Association, Barry Johnson, Fire Mitigation Specialist at Arizona public power utility Salt River Project, provides details on a project under which SRP is working with Northern Arizona University to install new wireless moisture sensors designed by a company called Growvera.
The effort aims to improve how wildfire risk is monitored in the Tonto National Forest in Arizona and the pilot project is testing new technology from Growvera that enables continuous, real-time tracking of forest fuel and soil moisture conditions.
The project will be funded by SRP's Innovation and Development Program, and SRP noted that this is the first utility installation of this technology in the country.
“Live and dead fuel moisture as well as soil moisture is very important when it comes to wildfire predictive services. We call them indices. And there's a lot of different variables and formulas that go into this, but those are definitely one of the top tier,” Johnson said in a recent episode of the Public Power Now podcast.
“The forest and the federal agencies and state partners all do a great job of sampling a wide variety of vegetation and to get to those indices. But what Growvera wants to provide and SRP is happy to sponsor is just more frequent intervals. So instead of two or four times a month in a 30-day time frame, they can get readings every hour and they're able to change that variable too,” he noted.
“If you want every two hours, every six hours, they can change those settings. So if you can imagine, instead of getting numbers, go into data twice a month versus every hour, it's just that much more fine-tuned.”
Johnson provided additional details on how the wireless moisture sensors work.
When SRP first started talking to Growvera a little bit over a year ago, “they brought the first sensor forward…and they just continued to develop and make the technology better.”
What happens “is we go in and install what's called a gateway and that device sits on a weather station that they also provide and that gateway talks to all these sensors that we pluck onto live branches that are on trees, as well as dead branches and limbs that are on the ground.”
The SRP official noted that Sally Diamond with Northern Arizona University is the lead “that's working very closely with us and their role in the project is to verify that the clamps are accurate in comparison to what the U.S. Forest Service is coming up with numbers wise.”
SRP has a one-year agreement with Growvera and “I can tell you so far working with them officially since we've got everything out and deployed for just a few months, it's very impressive. The website is very impressive. You can export data if you want. You can change how frequently you throw the intervals in, which is very important for fire modeling,” he said.
As a prior operations chief on a type one team here in region three, “you lean on modeling a lot. You have individuals that are in your plan shop that are feeding a database with temperature and all the humidity, live and dead fuel moistures, wind, vegetation types and it's giving you an output of a prediction of what your fire is going to do in the next 24, 36 or 48 hours and it's another tool in the toolbox,” Johnson said.
“It's not like every individual goes out on the ground and says all right this is what the fire is going to do and it does exactly that,” he noted. “But it's nice to know what possibilities you have or what options that you can make based on those because you don't want to invest you know multiple days of hard work and labor from these men and women on crews and engines and different resources out there and then not be able to implement that plan.”
Johnson also detailed the other tools being utilized by SRP as it relates to mitigating wildfire risks.
“We have AI detection cameras that we have posted around some areas of our footprint that are similar to ones that other companies are using to try to detect smoke when it pops up. They're very impressive,” he said.
Johnson noted the “great coordination and cooperation” with local agencies such as the Department of Forestry and Fire Management “and all the forests we work around and tribes -- everybody is very great about communicating to specifically the wildfire mitigation group at SRP and the other utilities in the state. We collaborate with APS very frequently,” he said in reference to investor-owned Arizona Public Service.
APPA Wildfire Resources
The American Public Power Association has curated a collection of resources to assist utilities in crafting their wildfire mitigation plans.
Accessing these tools, expertise, and strategies can help utilities develop a robust wildfire mitigation plan to effectively address wildfire risks and protect their communities from the devastating effects of wildfires.
