“I was on one of the LA County Sheriff’s department search and rescue teams,” Ulrich tells Utility Week. “That night we were doing searches and rescues and evacuating elderly and infirm individuals. My house is a quarter mile from the origin of the fire and the houses of my neighbours on the left burnt down. My neighbours on the right, their houses are still there. My house survived. It was tough.”

The wildfires were exacerbated by drought, low humidity, buildup of vegetation, and hurricane-force winds. They killed 31 people, forced more than 200,000 to evacuate, destroyed more than 18,000 homes and structures, and burned more than 57,000 acres of land. Two of the largest fires, the Eaton and Palisades fires, took until the end of January to contain.

For teams of engineers at Southern California Edison (SCE), which has been working with operational safety specialist DEKRA for many years, damage to electricity infrastructure meant a huge “wrecking out” operation. “As soon as we could safely get into the area, we were doing demolition or removing downed wires, burnt poles, or carrying out damage assessment,” Ulrich says.

The devastation meant debris had to be removed, and restoration planned and then executed. To assist, the parking lot at the Santa Anita horseracing track in Arcadia was transformed into a laydown yard (“like a small city”, recalls Ulrich) with new poles, conductors, wires and transformers staged in the area. From this impromptu set-up, crews worked tirelessly to remove damaged equipment and restore the grid.

It was difficult and high-risk work. “The volume is high, the complexity is high, the hazards are high, and there’s a multiplying factor: we were changing a pole here, they are changing a pole there, this truck’s in front of that truck,” explains Ulrich. “Normally when we do one pole, it’s not a big deal. But now when we've got 50 crews doing 50 poles, everything is interacting, magnifying the complexity and risk.”

As a safety expert, once normalcy returned, he was keen to share best practices and experiences with other utilities in the region. At an Edison Electric Institute conference, a major irony of the response to the wildfires became apparent. “I asked the other safety leaders, ‘how many times do your guys get hurt in those situations?’, and almost everyone said, ‘never’. It’s the same for us. During those high restoration periods our safety performance is really good. That’s not just at Southern California Edison, it’s across the board.”

This counter-intuitive finding is arguably a product of attentiveness, says Ulrich. “It [the response to the wildfires] takes a lot of energy, because people are working for 12 hours or more. But their focus is really good. They are concentrated on the job, the safety of the job, and they take their time to do things safely. It is the blue-sky days when crews are doing a normal pole replacement that they might become complacent.

“We have had serious injuries and fatalities because of complacency, but during a storm restoration, for example, everyone's safety performance is remarkably good, given the complexity of the environment.

“It helps that they are mission driven. When people feel like they are doing valued work, they do better work."