TOLEDO, Ohio (WTVG) – FirstEnergy crews are at the ready with a wintry weather mix expected Wednesday night into Thursday. And they already have a head start with deploying new tools that help them predict and reduce tree-related outages before they occur.
When trees accumulate heavy snow or ice the added weight can cause tree branches to break posing a significant danger to people and property. Which is why FirstEnergy wants to get ahead of any potential mishaps that may happen with severe weather
“Our preparations in general are taking place all year round,” FirstEnergy Corp. spokesperson Hannah Catlett said.
From equipment and site inspections to tree trimming, FirstEnergy said the work is being done so crews are ready to respond if needed.
“Trees are one of the leading causes of power outages,” Catlett said.
A new technology developed by FirstEnergy with the help of AI aims to calculate where trees pose the most risk to electric systems.
“This is allowing us to be best informed as to how to tackle that problem,” Jacob Wolfgang, a forester with FirstEnergy said.
Known as the Advanced Vegetation Analytics Tool (AVAT), the prediction model pulls data – including soil, weather, roadway, historical outage data, geographical typography and high-resolution aerial patrol photos – from several internal and external databases.
“Our vegetation staff are experts at what they do,” Wolfgang said. “This combines their knowledge at the local level with kind of a global picture of what our conditions are in terms of where we may be more likely to experience outages, and if we do experience outages how significant the impacts of that given outage may be.”
The hope is the data sets will work together to identify patterns and calculate the likelihood of a tree coming down to ensure problematic trees are swiftly addressed.
“It shows us where there’s the highest potential for tree-related outages and also if there is an outage how many people it could affect,” Catlett said.
FirstEnergy focuses on trees in the right of way, but does add if you have a tree you think may be an issue reach out to them and report it.
As always if you see a downed power line get back, do not touch and call 9-1-1.
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