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Discover how Tri-State and our members are embracing the opportunity to power the West in our new podcast, Western Watts!
We'll dive into the heart of energy issues, from reliability to wildfire mitigation, and share firsthand insights relevant to rural, agricultural and mountain communities across Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico and Wyoming.
[00:00:17] Pete: It's not just a job, it's something more. It's understanding that If you don't do this work properly and efficiently and get power restored, it means a real bad day for the rest of the community. And I think everyone appreciates that community response.
[00:00:34] Elizabeth: Thank you for joining us for the Western Watts Podcast. I'm Elizabeth Shilling. And I am Julia Eshelman. Wait, Julia, what's your name?
[00:00:41] Julia: Julia Eshelman. I got married but like a year ago. I just changed my name like a month ago.
[00:00:47] Elizabeth: I'm sorry. We have to include that 'cause they're gonna wonder where Julia Perry went.
[00:00:50] Elizabeth: And we are today joined by Mr. Pete Slintak. Thanks for being with us, Pete.
[00:00:55] Pete: You're welcome. Pleasure.
[00:00:57] Elizabeth: tell us about your role at Tri-State, what your title is, and explain to us what you do as if we were five year olds.
[00:01:05] Pete: I'm the business resiliency manager at Tri-State and I have two kids and I tell 'em, I help make sure that the lights stay on even when bad things happen, when disaster strikes, whether it's wildfire, blizzards, cyber incidents, or other emergencies, our cooperative is ready to respond, recover, and continue serving our members.
[00:01:27] Pete: My job is to think ahead. Plan for the worst and build partnerships that make our grill grid and people more resilient.
[00:01:35] Julia: So having toddlers probably gave you a lot of experience with that too, huh?
[00:01:39] Pete: Yeah. And fortunately one of them's in college now, so hey,
[00:01:43] Julia: I think that counts as success. I think you successfully business resilience to them.
[00:01:48] Pete: Resilient kids, resilient community.
[00:01:51] Elizabeth: That's true. So what drew you to this role and what keeps you passionate about it?
[00:01:55] Pete: what's weird about growing up? most kids grow up wanting to become policemen, firemen, lawyers, web casters. I had this crazy experience, 10 camping with my parents when I was five years old and the upper peninsula of Michigan, and it was the perfect camp spot right on the lake.
[00:02:14] Pete: just beautiful. We had a sailboat and, overnight, just this crazy wind rushed in and my dad was holding up the tent and everything and turned out. It was a tornado and we survived the tornado. No one was hurt. But this is one of those rare things where the up never gets tornadoes. So this one was after me, it had like my name on it.
[00:02:36] Pete: it was like at a scene out of the Wizard of Oz. Woke up the next morning and there was just devastation all around us and we were just so fortunate to survive this. And ever since I'd had a unhealthy relationship with disasters and emergencies and all that. And, fortunately I was able to turn it into a healthy career.
[00:02:56] Pete: what's amazing is 20 years later, I'm still protecting critical infrastructure and doing crisis management. And it's the whole idea of driven by service, keeping employees safe and helping communities stay strong in the face of adversity.
[00:03:12] Julia: It was either this or storm chaser then, huh?
[00:03:15] Pete: Yeah. I don't have quite the vehicle for that.
[00:03:17] Julia: That's the only barrier. That's the only thing stopping. You'd be like, oh, if I could just get this truck lifted, we'd be in business.
[00:03:23] Pete: I'm more Mad Max, so old school.
[00:03:25] Elizabeth: you're not afraid of disaster, but you know that we're in a better place if we're prepared in general, that we're thinking about the things that can happen before they actually do happen.
[00:03:36] Pete: Yeah. hope for the best plan for the worst. And you'll get through it.
[00:03:40] Elizabeth: Yeah. recently your team had to deal with the Lee Wildfire, which. I had burned over 138,000 acres when we were looking at this last, it may be even higher, making that the fourth biggest wildfire in Colorado. Can you give us a timeline of events from your perspective, how you handled that situation?
[00:03:56] Pete: Yeah. Every. Fire that's this large always starts as a spark and it's hard to imagine, just a spark can devastate these communities.
[00:04:08] Pete: I think it's still undetermined, but it was probably a lightning strike that caused it. What's important is early detection and one of our tools is just using satellites, thermal imaging, understanding, from local reports what's going on the ground. And that contributed to us getting a heads up about somethings near our lines.
[00:04:31] Pete: with the current weather conditions being red flag, we went through several weeks of 20 mile per hour gusting to 30 mile per hour, 90 degree plus heat, low humidity. if you look early on in the season, even before all these fires started, we had a very wet spring. All that moisture contributed to so much vegetation growth that wouldn't typically be there.
[00:04:56] Pete: then we went through this drought period, I think they call it a flash drought now. Where things get so dry, where it doesn't take much, that spark takes it and add the wind and these conditions and things really explode. so luckily we saw it, it was on our radar and with the weather conditions we saw that it was heading straight for our transmission lines.
[00:05:22] Pete: What's really critical about this fire is it's in rugged territory. there's. No easy access to this fire. And I think the incident commanders at the state level, they saw that they started doing fire drops with tankers, doing slurry drops, water drops, getting things mobilized. We also saw that and we started reaching out saying, Hey, we have this critical infrastructure, not only us, but this is a energy corridor where
[00:05:53] Pete: All this power is going through the state and it leads to, one of our critical generation stations in Craig, Colorado. We have a, coal fired power plant with a total capacity of about 1200 megawatts. Now, it's not just Tri-State, it's co-owned with Pacific Corp Platte River Power Authority, salt River Project, and Xcel Energy.
[00:06:18] Pete: And we were able to remain resilient by communicating, coordinating our actions through the state incident command. Daily briefings, specific ad hoc requests where, if we needed a helicopter, inspections of our transmission lines and it was no fly zone day, we just coordinated, when can we do it and make sure that, we don't get into any trouble and everyone stays safe.
[00:06:41] Julia: So how quickly do you and these other groups connect? Is it as soon as there's a fire, everybody all comes together? Or do people get looped in as it progresses?
[00:06:54] Pete: We have a emergency Rolodex where if we see something and they're not seeing it. We reach out if we're not seeing it and not communicating, they reach out.
[00:07:03] Pete: One thing that always, collapses during any incident is communications. If you can over communicate. And then get things going.
[00:07:13] Pete: Everything else is easy. If we bring the right people to the table, they can work through any disaster.
[00:07:19] Elizabeth: It sounds like during the Lee Fire there were a lot of groups involved, a lot of coordination. Is there any particular group or groups that you would wanna shout out for their work during that time?
[00:07:29] Pete: Beyond Tri-State and just the teams that really came together with transmission maintenance, grid ops, all those critical teams within, Energy management. I want to recognize the State Public Utility Commission that coordinated with the Public Information Officer, they were able to communicate the importance of these transmission lines to the community, really helped with evacuations and understanding. If we lost those lines, what that meant to the first responders.
[00:07:59] Pete: The hospital, the oil and energy sector that's heavily down there. the water, if we lost power, it was be like this horrific domino effect. And one of the things that really brought to light some of these fires in Colorado is disasters aren't bound by state lines or county lines, county maps, city limits.
[00:08:21] Pete: There's these downstream effects of an incident happening in different areas. there's key members of the PUC Larry Duran. He's the risk assessment specialist. He was available 24-7 along with Drew Brolin, he's the PUC section Chief and
[00:08:39] Julia: Strategic Communication Officer. he was available 24-7 to communicate the impacts and support our requests in a fast and efficient manner.
[00:08:50] Elizabeth: Those are the relationships too, where you know these people ahead of time, they're gonna answer your call, you're gonna answer their calls.
[00:08:55] Elizabeth: 'cause it's not a stranger.
[00:08:57] Pete: It's amazing. I've known Larry for 20 years and we've been through a lot of disasters. those relationships really matter.
[00:09:05] Elizabeth: That's huge.
[00:09:05] Julia: So you saw the spark, you're watching it kind of ramp up. When did Tri-State and all these other agencies realize, oh crap, this is a huge fire that we're dealing with?
[00:09:17] Pete: Those wind connections on the first day really exploded.
[00:09:21] Pete: The fire. We had fire runs of up to three miles in one day. That's unreal. It's not a record. But with these conditions, you could see the path of where the fire is going and the future forecast, we were in for a long run just because it was already to a certain size and growing exponentially.
[00:09:42] Julia: how much of Tri-State's infrastructure was. Either near the fire or was damaged by it.
[00:09:51] Pete: Yeah, we had several large lines going through that corridor. And also what's interesting about this area is it's heavy it oil and gas and energy industry.
[00:10:02] Pete: So there's a lot of critical, infrastructure gas pipelines that complicate what's going on and being able to provide energy to the rest of the state. that really made things hard because you also have people working in remote areas. We don't wanna send people into a dangerous situation. Let the fire burn and live to fight the fire another day.
[00:10:29] Pete: These were very extreme conditions. We saw what was going on. We reached out to our state partners, and what was really cool about that is they activated the National Guard resources that they can tap into to help with some of these situations. It's better to communicate, what that potential impact is to community resources like hospitals, police.
[00:10:55] Pete: If there's gonna be evacuation, the last thing you need is the stop lights not working. stop signs, water pumps, medical devices that rely on power. So a lot of issues there.
[00:11:08] Pete: And we wanted to communicate, this is the status of the lines and if there's any outages, we wanted to report that as it was happening, so they got that information real time.
[00:11:19] Julia: could you go a little deeper and explain to me what you mean by corridor?
[00:11:24] Pete: This is a canyon area where there's not really a nice place to build your power lines.
[00:11:31] Pete: These are very big lines that just go North and Aouth. it's not just Tri-State lines, it's everyone, transmission lines, distribution lines, all pretty much follow one path. Fortunately it's near, one of the major highways, so it's easy to get access to, but it's also hard to defend just because the rugged nature of it.
[00:11:54] Pete: The best way to fight that fire was with airdrops and air resources.
[00:11:59] Julia: It sounds like where this infrastructure is being built is dependent upon geography. So at the bottom along the canyon? Yeah,
[00:12:08] Pete: It's along the road.
[00:12:09] Pete: It's very parallel to how it runs, but again. It's one way out, one way in. Mm.
[00:12:16] Pete: Because if you've got a satellite community with that one way in, one way out, are you guys building redundancies into the system when you're planning?
[00:12:25] Pete: We actually saw that in the Lee Fire where that was the end of the line for a lot of those communities, those ranchers that are out there. They need the power. But it's hard to justify having another way into that remote area.
[00:12:42] Pete: It's one of those things where they have to also be resilient.
[00:12:46] Julia: Can you speak to how the leaf fire passed through the system, The timeline for that?
[00:12:52] Pete: That one went really fast because our lines tripped because of the smoke and the particles in that smoke causes those, high energy lines to, trip on us. And then we can't restart them until we do an inspection. we don't understand if it's from the fire actually burning those lines or if it was just smoke.
[00:13:17] Pete: So that was part of the challenge where once it went through the highway that ran parallel to those lines, we had a lot of power outages, but we also had a lot of redundancy. So it wasn't that bad. the real issue came where we were trying to do inspections and it did take a couple days before we got the helicopters to inspect the lines, to get the crews back into areas they were ready to go day one.
[00:13:47] Pete: But again, it wasn't safe and there were other priorities. they were evacuating the community. They didn't wanna. confuse that evacuation with, power suddenly being restored. Also, it's a motivation. If the local community understands that there's these localized power outages, the less likely they are to ride out the situation.
[00:14:10] Pete: The situation gets much worse if they're trying to defend their property, their land, whatever, and they have no power. What's also tough is those communities that are out there, those ranchers with all the cattle, with all the sheep.
[00:14:26] Pete: It's hard to evacuate all those sheep without, having resources from outside help out. So we saw some amazing things where, the community really came together to help one another and, make a bad situation a little better.
[00:14:42] Julia: That's awesome. With as bad as the fire was and with as much burned, I felt like Tri-State got everything up and replaced pretty quickly, like in a, like a week or two weeks or so.
[00:14:54] Pete: Yeah, just hats off to the transmission maintenance crew that was able to go and they knew the mission, they understand what they needed to do and they restored a lot of the lines really fast. we were very fortunate there. No one was hurt. That was key. They did it safely. They knew their limitations, they got their resources that they needed.
[00:15:17] Pete: I think we replaced 18 structures. That's a lot of work. And again, in tough terrain, tough conditions. It was still hot weather. very extreme working conditions and they really made Tri-State resilient.
[00:15:32] Julia: Since Wildfire is unfortunately common in our service territory. How do you prepare linemen to just be ready for this circumstance?
[00:15:43] Pete: Yeah. One, one of the most important things is common sense. If they see something, if they have eyes on the situation, if there's fire going in a certain direction and that's where they're heading towards, turn around, play safe.
[00:15:57] Pete: They're not the firefighters. We wanna make sure that they stay safe, that they can come see their families at the end of the day, They have a lot of gear, a lot of training that they go through to understand, how to do a damage assessment, to inspect those lines, inspect those poles, see if they're, structurally, sufficient, if they need to be replaced.
[00:16:20] Pete: And that's one of the key things where we can then deploy those resources that's needed to the site and help rebuild.
[00:16:28] Julia: That's just a lot to prepare for,
[00:16:30] Pete: Part of it is you don't know what's burning.
[00:16:32] Pete: And you need more than just a face mask. Like I said, if there's a fire going through, let it burn through. We'll come in afterwards, rebuild it better, stronger. And make things just more resilient
[00:16:45] Julia: when you say building it better, Is that potentially moving it somewhere else?
[00:16:50] Julia: Is that building it out of a different material? What are the techniques for that?
[00:16:54] Pete: a lot of times we treat this as a opportunity, you know, never let a disaster go to waste. If we have older infrastructure that just happened to go up in the fire or whatever incident, now we can think about like, how do we make this stronger?
[00:17:09] Pete: We have better material, we can build it higher, we can just re-engineer things so it's more resilient and put in. Things sooner than we were planning to. so if we had a fire go through now, maybe in 10 years, we'll have another fire. If we can dodge a disaster, bullet by building it stronger, better, I think that's a lot of value.
[00:17:32] Elizabeth: One of the factors that it sounds like played into fires specifically was looking at the wind. but is there other data or predictive modeling that you use to anticipate and prepare for future threats?
[00:17:44] Pete: We analyze weather patterns, fuel loads.
[00:17:48] Pete: Historical fire behavior to forecast those risk zones. This helps us prioritize mitigation efforts and allocate resources more effectively.
[00:17:58] Pete: two years ago, Colorado had a horrific tornado season where week after week we lost all these lines. one of the great things was that we were able to build it stronger. And better to withstand those winds in future disasters.
[00:18:15] Julia: I remember that it was in eastern Colorado, which just seems bizarre to me.
[00:18:19] Pete: One of those crazy things is tornadoes where we haven't seen them in Highlands Ranch or in high altitude mountain communities, where they've never seen these tornadoes. they were strong and did a lot of damage. things are changing. We just need to be ready to, take a punch and get back up.
[00:18:39] Pete: Reliability and resiliency are key member needs, which are detailed in our strategic plan by detailing adequate resources to meet demand in normal conditions and anticipating withstanding and recovering from disruptions.
[00:18:54] Pete: So we're dealing with everything from wildfires to winter storms to tornadoes, variety of different kinds of potential disasters. What is the role of utilities like Tri-State during disasters like these either to respond or to be coordinating with other agencies that help us, have a more complete response?
[00:19:14] Pete: part of the key in the response is how we interact with all the different agencies and unfortunately there's been a lot of changes at the federal level, putting pressure on the state level, and. those relationships are really key for the state, where those FEMA fundings that used to exist no longer exist.
[00:19:35] Pete: For Colorado, what that means is working closer with the state, PUC to communicate impacts a request for resources and coordinate with the state's response in ESF 12, which is the energy sector.
[00:19:49] Pete: In New Mexico, we work with offices of the secretary, the Energy minerals and natural resources, a department.
[00:19:56] Julia: It's really important to bring all those groups together. the state police, the Department of Transportation, for locals face-to-face is really important.
[00:20:06] Pete: All disasters are local and it's good to know your local sheriff, fire marshal. those incidents are led by those first responders. and the relationships are forged by doing outreach, participating in exercises, and becoming trusted partners in the community. for example, this month, Colorado is hosting Interlock 2025.
[00:20:31] Pete: It's a whole state infrastructure and public safety summit, where we. Participate and just exchange ideas. Understand everyone's roles and responsibilities ahead of a disaster. that means you don't have to be introduced at time of disaster. That's the worst time to exchange business cards. we participate in secret briefings with Colorado Information Analysis Center.
[00:20:54] Pete: We collaborate with the Energy Threat Analysis Center. We hold industry meetings with the Electricity Information Sharing Analysis Center and the Electric Sub Sector coordinating Council,every year I attend the Colorado Emergency Managers Conference to better understand what's happening in that world and how they're responding differently, the tools that they use so we can better integrate.
[00:21:20] Pete: And respond to, a disaster in a coordinated way.
[00:21:24] Julia: That sounds like a really stressful conference,
[00:21:26] Pete: Allegedly there's a lot of drinking, but, in a good way it's a healthy way to bond ahead of a disaster and understand everyone and their, communication styles.
[00:21:38] Julia: What's an example of a disaster scenario that you guys would role play out?
[00:21:43] Pete: What was amazing is we're trying to understand how disasters are evolving. We talked about like the crazy tornadoes going on in Colorado. We're seeing that people have to be prepared longer before the government shows up to give assistance. The state of Wyoming took a amazing. A plan where they exercised a month long disaster where 75% of their population was without power and they were stuck in a massive snowstorm.
[00:22:18] Pete: That really stressed the system and asked a lot of uncomfortable questions.
[00:22:23] Pete: When there's no communication, there's no power, there's no heat, what do you do? bringing together public and private sectors that was also big so we understood their pain points and how we could help out.
[00:22:36] Pete: Just a better understanding of what we would need to supply power transmission. To that community we also do other exercises, not just state level. every two years we participate in Grid X. It's coordinated by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation and the Electric Information Sharing and analysis Center.
[00:22:58] Pete: It's designed to give. Electric utilities an opportunity to test and refine their emergency response plans in a learning safe environment. participants remain in their regular locations. It's just a simulation. but what's really great at really stresses real world situations and our next grid X is coming up in November, so we get an opportunity to really put our plans through the ringer and stress some of the things that we're seeing in the world today and how that's affecting us.
[00:23:31] Julia: Is that something that you look forward to or something that makes you nervous?
[00:23:35] Pete: Qhat's cool about it, it's like a game playing thing where we're giving certain scenarios to play out over the course of Grid X and we can customize it to tri-state's world. To really make it specific to our threats, our realities, and also play with the rest of the entire North American grid.
[00:23:56] Pete: what's also exciting our CEO, Dwayne highly, he participates in grid X at executive level and goes to Washington DC and talks to the big picture issues with grid X. And since he's on the electric sub sector.
[00:24:12] Pete: Coordinating counsel, he can coordinate with those government officials at a top secret level and share information that a lot of, CEOs can't.
[00:24:23] Julia: What were the results of the Wyoming no power test? How long before everybody turned into zombies or cannibals and ate everybody else?
[00:24:32] Pete: What was amazing about this was it was a series of three exercises where the first eyeopener was how bad it was,
[00:24:41] Pete: Even though, there was a lot of failure that first day of the exercise, they had two months, they came back and they were better prepared.
[00:24:49] Pete: They updated their plans, which for a lot of agencies they didn't exist. And that was a eye-opener for me, where either they were outdated or they just didn't think about some of these issues and they came back stronger.
[00:25:02] Pete: It was a room with over a hundred people and you had people interacting, going to different tables, sharing information. You need to do that before a disaster. You saw that coordination, communication, those efforts really clicking during the second exercise.understanding that, you know, you can rely on outside sources. Public private partnerships Understand, that MacGyver mentality where you can go in out of the box thinking and make things happen by bringing the right people together with the right resources.
[00:25:38] Julia: as we're talking about, drills and exercises and the things that prepare us for these scenarios, I feel like we've seen it play out that every relationship gets strengthened when we do these drills, even just different departments within Tri-State that need to know.
[00:25:52] Elizabeth: Who to coordinate, who to call. and seeing as your team conducts these, it's building those relationships at every level. and one of the things that I feel like you do so well is taking that time afterwards to do that, look back, to do the lessons learned, recognize where we can keep improving, but also where have we succeeded?
[00:26:13] Elizabeth: What are things that we need to take into the future and keep doing? for the Lee Fire, for example, were there particular lessons learned that you would wanna speak to?
[00:26:21] Pete: Those after actions, things that you can do to improve, after a disaster are big. And the Lee Fire really opened our eyes on how fast a fire can spread and how overwhelmed resources can be within not just the state, but.
[00:26:37] Pete: At the Tri-State level too, because at that time we were coordinating three different incidents that were burning either our lines or some of our generation. we had one situation in the Dolores Canyon, fire where a fire broke out while we were doing constructions on one of our solar projects. And one of the cool lessons learned in a MacGyver moment was the construction crew had some heavy equipment They saw the fire was maybe a mile away, but they saw the smoke and they saw it coming towards them. They were safely able to use this equipment to create a fire line where they dug through to the soil level. That was one of those great lessons learned They were able to do something fast and put in place this barrier that now the firefighters said, Hey, this is defensible and we're gonna have some airdrops come by because it's defensible.
[00:27:35] Pete: We also had to do a damage assessment to understand what that impact is. And now the opportunity is we have other solar farms out there. How can we better mitigate against what happened how do we prevent these other farms the same type of damage that was caused at Dolores.
[00:27:56] Julia: How do you empower people to make those. Quick decisions like plowing a fire break while coordinating and keeping everybody safe and keeping everybody informed because that was an awesome thing they did. But then how do you move up the chain for approval, especially when you're not on site and figure all that out?
[00:28:18] Pete: sometimes the planning that we do gets a little too complicated. You have this, phone book that you reach for, but maybe you don't reach for it at a time to disaster. What I like to do is keep a simple philosophy.
[00:28:31] Pete: be flexible. Be that MacGyver out there understand what you can do, bring in the right people, the right resources to respond effectively. And again, stay safe out there. everyone wants to be a hero. but again, if it's a big fire, you need to know when to say, hey, it's no longer safe and retreat.
[00:28:51] Julia: It sounds like a big part of your job is probably balancing speed of reaction and also following a proven process.
[00:29:03] Pete: It's all about simple. Procedures and training. If you have that muscle memory, if you've been through disasters, if you've gone through these exercises, you just rely on that and you'll understand when things get a little too much.
[00:29:18] Pete: It's all right. Back off.
[00:29:19] Julia: We've talked a lot about relationships and a big part of the cooperative business model is, cooperation among cooperatives. if there's an emergency, tri-states whole membership or even co-ops from neighboring states will offer assistance in these kind of emergency situations.
[00:29:40] Julia: Did that happen at all? Fire.
[00:29:43] Pete: Yeah, those mutual aid agreements, that's all about the cooperative principles and it's built into our DNAs and they're ready to go It's part of what they do and how they grew up in that co-op system to, help out in any way.
[00:29:59] Pete: We didn't have to do mutual aid assistance, but when I mentioned we were fighting a lot of fronts here, those fires really took up a lot of resources where our transmission maintenance, east, west, south, all. helped out shared resources, inventories. they were going back and forth to see how they could help out in any way they could.
[00:30:22] Pete: During the Lee Fire, we also had another fire, called the Windy Gap Fire near Granby. That fire started again, a suspected, lightning strike, but that was a quarter mile from one of our substations and within. A hour. It overran our, substation and all the power lines were tripped, going in and out.
[00:30:44] Pete: there was a WPA dam nearby that also lost power. The bigger issue was the community of maybe 4,400.
[00:30:54] Pete: We were able to coordinate access to the site through the state, PUC, the Colorado Department of Transportation, the local police department to safely allow our crews, our trucks. Into that area to help restore those people that were without power.
[00:31:14] Pete: That was key because they were fighting a fire at the time, and they wanted to make sure that our crews could get in to safely restore that power to help with some of the evacuations that were taking place for that community.
[00:31:27] Julia: How come utilities, like Tri-State get wrapped up in all of this emergency prep,
[00:31:34] Pete: Part of the challenge is at the state level, they make a lot of assumptions and guesses of what a disaster has to the community. We just try to better communicate where that power is going to, and if that power would be lost at a highest level. How that impacts their critical infrastructure, like hospitals, fire departments, police departments, and then they can make decisions based on what that Community impact looks like.
[00:32:06] Julia: we can define what assets to prioritize based on the effect it'll have on the community, like phone lines going down or powers to the hospital and stuff like that.
[00:32:17] Pete: Yeah, a lot of times it's just overwhelming and a disaster where there's so much confusion. during the marshal fire we ran into a lot of that where, firefighters
[00:32:28] Pete: didn't understand what to protect If they understand those impacts in a exercise, or they better understand what that infrastructure looks like, they can faster respond to an incident and better protect those lines.
[00:32:42] Julia: On the paranoid, scary side, what are some emerging threats or challenges you're preparing for in the next few years?
[00:32:50] Pete: The dead pine trees from the decades of beetle kill, it's a big concern for Colorado. You just drive up I-70 You see the sides of these mountains just dead. flash droughts. Flash flooding after you have a wildfire, all those burn scars, Ruidoso, New Mexico is seeing that where last year they had a series of wildfires now they have these horrific monsoon reigns.
[00:33:19] Pete: That bring down the sides of mountains and homes being swept away. It's a tough thing for the resiliency of a community where they experience those fires. They think they're building back and they're hit again with those floods. it's a multi-year commitment before vegetation comes back
[00:33:39] Pete: There's a multi-year threat. If you don't perform proper vegetation rehabilitation. the community will have continued risks from flash, floods, debris flows, landslides, contaminated water. Their drinking water can be at risk, and we saw that in other New Mexico fires. One of the other threats that we're preparing for is cyber threats, international threats supply chain disruptions from tariffs.
[00:34:08] Pete: That complicate the disaster response. These are all things that happened within the last few months. We're just adapting and being resilient.
[00:34:17] Julia: Do you thrive on the chaos or do you just take it in stride?
[00:34:23] Pete: You know what's amazing, after all these disasters, it doesn't seem like chaos. It's controlled madness where we get it, if we can take these big problems and chomp 'em down to smaller.
[00:34:36] Pete: Issues. We'll get through it. It's like project management. We understand what needs to get done. We know the people that can do it. We just need to put them together and get things done.
[00:34:47] Julia: It's like extreme project management.
[00:34:50] Elizabeth: To wrap it up on a positive note, what is one win that you can speak to from the Lee Fire
[00:34:55] Pete: Their incident response was very local. The people inspecting those power lines.
[00:35:02] Pete: They were Tri-State members of that community. They had skin in the game. And it's great when you know you have that mission. It's not just a job, it's something more. It's understanding that If you don't do this work properly and efficiently and get power restored, it means a real bad day and I think everyone appreciates that community response. It's like building a barn. Everyone's coming together, going in the same direction that was inspirational to see.
[00:35:34] Pete: A lot of times these disasters can be so overwhelming It's great to see this resiliency within the community where they can build back. And build that community stronger.
[00:35:45] Julia: Yeah. I think the way you spoke to resilience at a large level, but then all the way down to every individual has a part in being resilient, whether it's for your own property or your neighbors or your community. That's a lot. That's a whole huge, and that's just one event.
[00:36:02] Julia: That's just one Yeah Emergency Yeah And meanwhile, I know it's gonna be variable. How many emergencies are you dealing with in the course of a year?
[00:36:10] Pete: It is those shots across our bow where, there's a lot of things you don't see. In the last two months we had about 10 near misses with wildfires, not just the few that we mentioned here.
[00:36:23] Pete: We got lucky and I'd always rather be lucky than good. but sometimes luck runs out and we have plans for when luck runs out. We have people that are trained and understand what to do to help us back from that real bad day.
[00:36:38] Elizabeth: Thank you Pete, for all of the work of you and your team to keep us in this place where we can be resilient, we can be prepared.
[00:36:45] Elizabeth: We know who to call, in these worst case scenarios. Thanks for taking the time to talk with us.
[00:36:50] Elizabeth: Thank you. It was a pleasure. Thanks for tuning into Western Watts. You can find us on Spotify, apple Podcast, YouTube, or on our website at tristate dot co-op slash ww pod. We'll catch you next time.