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At Modern Electric Water Company, your safety is our top priority, especially during wildfire season.
When the National Weather Service issues a Red Flag Warning for our area, we take extra precautions to help reduce wildfire risk and ensure the reliability of our electric system.
What Is 'Fire Safety Mode,' and What Does It Mean for You?
During a Red Flag Warning, Modern may enter "Fire Safety Mode," which is a specialized operational protocol designed to minimize fire ignition risks caused by electrical faults. This includes:
- Changing protection relay settings at our substations so they act faster to shut off power during a fault.
- Limiting reclose attempts to just one. After that, power remains off until our crews can safely inspect the line and restore service manually.
- Deploying line crews to investigate all outages, before restoring power to ensure the system is safe and undamaged.
Why Does This Matter?
Most utilities that enter fire mitigation mode do not attempt to reclose power lines at all after a fault. At Modern, we balance this industry's best practices with the need to maintain reliability for our customers, especially when conditions are borderline. Our approach reduces fire risk while helping to avoid unnecessary prolonged outages.
We also:
- Track National Weather Service alerts.
- Monitor system conditions in real time.
- Maintain 24/7 Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) access and response capability during high-risk periods.
What You Can Do
- Stay informed about local fire weather alerts at Weather.gov.
- Report any smoke, sparks or downed lines to us immediately.
- Follow us on social media (Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn), or return to our website for outage updates and safety information.
We appreciate your support as we work to protect our community, our infrastructure and our natural surroundings during this fire season.
If you have questions about these procedures, please call us at (509) 928-4540.