Wildfire safety practices

The safety of the public and our employees is our top priority. During wildfire season, electricity customers could experience longer than usual power outages. This is because we’re taking extra steps to reduce the potential risk of wildfires to your community and the electricity system.

Reasons for an extended outage 

There are three reasons electricity customers could experience a longer than usual power outage during periods of high wildfire risk:

Power line safety settings 

When wildfire risk is high, customers may experience unplanned outages more frequently, or that last longer, because we’ve turned on enhanced safety settings that increase the sensitivity of our equipment. For example, debris contacting a line during a windstorm could trigger an outage, and the power would remain off until we can manually inspect the line to be sure it’s safe before restoring power.

Emergency wildfire outage 

During active wildfires, FortisBC may shut off power in consultation with local fire authorities, to support firefighting activities. We may also apply fire retardant and fire blankets to protect our equipment. Once the fire has passed, we will inspect our equipment for damage, make repairs and restore your power.

Public Safety Power Shutoff

This is a new, precautionary measure where we proactively shut off power in high-risk fire regions during extreme weather conditions, such as high temperatures, low humidity, strong winds and dry vegetation. When those extreme conditions are present, FortisBC may shut off your power to reduce potential ignition sources.

Once weather conditions improve, and it’s safe to do so, our crews will inspect our equipment and restore your power. We'll continue to monitor the area throughout the wildfire season in the event we need to activate another PSPS.

We’ll only intentionally turn off power as a last resort and we’ll work to limit the scope, duration and frequency of these events. We’ll also attempt to provide as much advance warning as possible and provide updates throughout the outage. It’s important to always be prepared to be without power for at least 72 hours in the event we need to turn off your power during periods of extreme wildfire risk.

Find current and future outages on our outage map.