Ask the experts: How do you deal with fall-in risks?

What risks do fall-ins pose?

Fall-ins can be particularly dangerous to most utility systems, compared to the other failures that we’ll see caused by trees and vegetation.

Also, fall-ins will typically cause the most amount of damage to the facilities themselves. They’ll take out poles and power lines — things like that. That can cause outages, spark wildfires, ignitions, and overall can reduce the reliability and safety of the system.

What are the best ways to reduce fall-in risks?

Utilities will typically begin to mitigate fall-in risks by having a complete inventory of their system — so, understanding how their network looks, where the trees are, and where the potential risks are, and taking a look at the health of those trees, as well.

And any of those trees that are being marked and flagged as higher risk due to their health, location (potentially), or growth patterns? We can then assign a higher priority to them so utilities can mitigate the total fall-in risk.

What challenges arise in mitigating fall-in risk?

So even if you have a complete inventory of your system, and you understand where every tree is, completely green trees can obviously still fall — especially in heavy storms or heavy fire activities. They do every day! So there is a challenge in being able to counteract the idea that no matter how proactive you’re being, green trees are still able to fall.

What factors should utilities consider when they’re mitigating fall-in risk?

Utilities should consider how they’re affecting the environment around those trees. Often, several trees might be protected species. They could expose the rest of the stand behind the tree where they’re currently located, and they could disturb local environments and animal communities.

How does AiDash help utilities address fall-in risks?

The product we’ve built to help identify fall-in risks, and much more, is AiDash Intelligent Vegetation Management System™ (IVMS).

Customers can use our risk modules to analyze the fall-in risk of where hazard trees lie along their network. With this, combined with the option of analyzing tree health for them, we can help identify these fall-in risks that would otherwise go unnoticed in hard to reach or hard to inspect areas.