16 Sep
Wildlife – typically birds or rodents – occasionally stray onto or into CORE’s equipment and damage it, and account for between 5% and 10% of outages on our system each year.
CORE has invested heavily to protect our equipment and our communities from wildlife damage. We cover most energized equipment and continuously inspect and harden our system to help prevent birds and other animals from making contact and causing outages or sparking.
Through CORE Protect, our wildfire mitigation program, we work to reduce the risk of wildfires and protect our members, employees and distribution system. We follow a comprehensive Avian Protection Plan (APP) to protect avian species even as we mitigate wildfire risk and maintain reliability. Our APP includes the latest recommendations, guidelines, and laws from conservation organizations and regulatory agencies. It helps us implement avian-aware engineering and construction standards and practices, equipment and structures less likely to attract or threaten birds, and personnel training in mitigation against avian harm.
While we go to great lengths to prevent wildlife from causing damage, these animals are persistent and continue to find new ways around even the best defense tactics. We can’t cover every piece of equipment, especially on a substation. But we have designed our system to facilitate switching the load to other areas, allowing us to restore power quickly to impacted members while we make repairs.