NV Energy is bolstering its wildfire detection capabilities by installing 53 new cameras as part of its “Power Safe NV” Program.
Jesse Murray, senior vice president of energy delivery at NV Energy, highlighted the vast service territory, noting, “We want to be able to see fires as soon as they start. We have a service territory of over 45,000 square miles at NV Energy. The state of Nevada is over 110,000 squared miles. And so as we all know, there are parts of the state that there aren’t a lot of people at, not a lot eyeballs on.”
The Public Utilities Commission of Nevada has approved the installation, with 35 cameras in northern Nevada and 15 in southern Nevada.
When it comes to the placement of the cameras, Murray notes “we’re always looking for peaks of mountains or tops of buildings that allow us a 360-degree uninterrupted view with very long-range visibility.”
In addition to the new stationary cameras, the utility company is dawning three mobile cameras for increased coverage during areas that can be challenging for fire crews to access. “If you felt that you needed visibility in an area that you didn’t have visibility on, or you needed higher resolution visibility that was closer to that fire, we would have the capability of deploying that camera right where that action was happening so that we had that real time visibility where it was needed, said Murray.
The cameras are run on the University of Nevada Reno’s “ALERT Wildfire” network, which has 85 active cameras across the Silver State, as well as cameras near Lake Tahoe and in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
William Savran, network manager at the Nevada Seismological Laboratory, noted, “our lab has 120 cameras that we’re maintaining right now. And the new investment from NV Energy is really going to fill in a lot of critical coverage gaps we have, especially in high-risk fire areas across the state.” Savran said the network will continue looking for opportunities to expand its coverage.
Adam Mayberry with Truckee Meadows Fire and Rescue emphasized the importance of these investments, stating, “Those wildfire cameras are critically important, not only to us as a fire agency, but for the public as well. It allows us to really assess and in some cases size up the potential threat of a fire, [and] deploy our resources quicker so we better understand the location, better understand what we will be arriving to as opposed to chasing down the smoke sighting that we can’t see.”
The cameras are funded through customer bills under the Power Safe NV Program.
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