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<br />Joe - And that's one line. The second line goes, and Leadville could have some injuries. And this <br />is not an unusual thing in any environment, if two things go wrong it's many times worse than one <br />thing going wrong. In any event, the concern with transmission lines is whether the proper <br />mitigation steps have been taken allowed them.. . some ofthem for historical reasons are much <br />worse off than others. We're going to have to be looking at those as we get closer to the fall and <br />winter because they're two-tier when the National Forest have some cutting restrictions, no chain <br />saws operated after noon and this sort of things to prevent fires. We did urge the increase of civil <br />and criminal penalties for the creation of fires during declared drought emergencies and the bill <br />dealing with civil penalties got killed, as you all heard a bit earlier. One thing that came out of our <br />group meeting were some horror stories regarding last year's fire at Los Alamos, where confusion <br />between the folks fighting the fire and the utilities personnel kept the utility people from getting in <br />to restart the pumps to provide the water to give the folks to defeat the fire. So we urge, even <br />though it doesn't fall directly under the Office of Emergency Management, we urge DOLA and <br />Public Safety to work with the Forest Service and the utilities, so make sure everybody knows <br />who everybody else is, and we don't have a recurring or a problem here in Colorado, such as the <br />one they had at Los Alamos last year. <br /> <br />- There's a proclivity sometimes to close the area and not let anybody in. You got to let <br />the folks in to take care of the utilities, and you've got to let the insurance folks in so they can start <br />to do their assessment and start providing assisted living expenses to the folks impacted. Those <br />two groups have got to be allowed in. <br /> <br />Joe - And it's good when you know in advance sort of who they are. That the guy in the Excel <br />truck really sort of belongs there.. . and so this is something that was emphasized by the folks from <br />Western Area, from W AP A, Western Area Power Administration, they'd been through this. So <br />right now there's not a first order of risk, there's not a risk that we're not going to have power, but <br />there are these second-order concerns like transmission line safety and so forth that need to be <br />addressed over the long-term. <br /> <br />Ron Cattany - And with that we will fmd in this particular case the critical asset in terms of <br />building the inventory of critical assets and will need to be maintained during a fire or drought <br />response. <br /> <br />Joe - Well, you have not just transmission lines, there's gas and electric, but also the distribution <br />substations. And protecting a gas substation is a really, really good idea. Because.. .those are <br />really important. The distribution of these things tends to be radial, so when one of these puppies <br />goes, it affects folks all around it, as opposed to being sort ofthe line, as in the case of Leadville <br />now, it's being fed from Denver and probably fed from Craig as well. Gas tends to be radial, so <br />that becomes viable as a critical asset. <br /> <br />- In the '77 drought, we did have an impact on the hydroelectric power, which I would <br />call, looking backward, a first order risk of vulnerability. And it looks to me, from what the <br />discussion has been, that we're a little worse off than the '77 situation in that they had some spring <br />rain. Are you sure that we don't have a more significant risk? The point would be how many <br />power stations are there around the state? I'm not sure. . . <br /> <br />31 <br />