Sparking a response: For utilities, wildfire threat prompting action

When Grand Valley Power CEO Tom Walch started working at that utility 14 years ago, “no one cared a whit about wildfire mitigation,” he remembers.

Derek Elder, Grand Valley Power’s chief operating officer, said that when California started experiencing a lot of wildfires, involving a lot of damage to utility infrastructure and concerns that utilities might have been contributing to some of those fires, “that was about the time that we started thinking about what were we doing to help prevent that same situation here in western Colorado.”

These days, he said, “It’s a topic that we all have top of mind.”

Electric utilities in Colorado have begun making investments to address the threat of fire, and these days, says Walch, with the risk of fires only having grown, “we have to pay a lot mor