Wildfire safety practices

Wildfires are an unfortunate reality in B.C., which is why we take extra precautions to help reduce the potential risks to the communities we serve. With hundreds of employees across B.C., including in the Southern Interior, we’re not just serving these communities—we are part of them. We live, work and raise our families here, and we care deeply about the safety and well-being of our neighbours.

Proactive measures

We act throughout the year to help keep the communities we serve safe and reduce the risk of wildfire. This includes:

  • Design and construction: We regularly upgrade equipment and structures to strengthen our system and reduce wildfire risk.
  • Inspection and maintenance: Vegetation management and inspections help maintain safe operations and reduce contact between infrastructure and vegetation.
  • Wildfire preparedness training: Our field employees receive specialized training to ensure they can safely respond to wildfire threats near our infrastructure.
  • Wildfire risk monitoring: Our teams use interactive tools to help assess wildfire risks around our electricity infrastructure, improving decision-making and response readiness.
  • Power line safety settings: When wildfire risk is high, we turn on enhanced safety settings to help reduce the risk of wildfires. For example, we adjust the sensitivity of our equipment so when a problem is detected on a power line, the system will turn off power faster than our standard setting. Rather than our system trying to restart the power line automatically, we will instead send out a technician to manually inspect the line to make sure it is safe to restore power.
  • Active wildfire preparedness and response: During active wildfires, FortisBC may shut off power in consultation with local fire authorities, to support firefighting efforts. We work with local fire authorities to maintain power to critical infrastructure such as water delivery systems where possible. We may also apply fire suppressant and fire blankets to protect our equipment.
  • Public Safety Power Shutoff: The Public Safety Power Shutoff is a new initiative that would see us shutoff power to limited sections of our system during periods of extreme wildfire risk to reduce potential ignition sources. A PSPS event is tool of last resort that we anticipate would be used rarely.

Possible outages during wildfire season

Our priority is always to keep the power on for our customers, but outages can happen as we take steps to protect you and your community from wildfires. Similar to outages that you could face from incidents such as storms, maintenance, or car accidents, it is important to be prepared. That means having a plan, supplies and a way to stay informed.

Join us for an open house

We’ve received important feedback and questions from communities, local governments and customers about our PSPS policy. As a result, we’ve made the decision to postpone our upcoming open houses to early June. Read our media bulletin.