Eliminate Hazard Awareness Delay
It’s 2 a.m. on an early fall day in Northern California’s Sierra foothills. The winter rains haven’t arrived yet. A large tree limb in the area snaps and falls on a distribution line, triggering a fault powerful enough to trip circuit breakers at a substation 15 miles away. Alarms sound in the company’s control center. At this time of year, daytime temperatures can still reach into the 90s and fire conditions still exist. The utility knows something has failed, but they don’t know what – or where.
It’s dark outside when dispatch notifies the troubleshooters; the sun won’t be up for another four hours. They head out in their trucks to patrol the lines, searching for the fault. Is a tree down across a line? Did squirrels breach conductor insulation, causing it to arc? Was a crossarm damaged? The control center knows only that a fault occurred somewhere on the circuit, nothing more. Since they can’t test due to potential fire conditions, a full patrol must be completed.
The troubleshooters split up. One heads north in his truck, along the ridge. The other takes the valley road. They are looking for anything out of the ordinary: a broken line, failed equipment, branches tangled in conductors. One troubleshooter stops to investigate a downed oak tree. He flags the issue, but it’s not the one they’re looking for. The other troubleshooter checks an area with historical tree issues, finding nothing.
A Hidden Problem
For lineworkers, these searches are an operational inconvenience, a safety liability and a detriment to customer service. Crews rolling out in the early hours don’t know if the hazard is still active. Not wanting to miss anything, they do what they have always done: drive the line in search of the issue.
The central safety challenge here is the chunk of time between when a hazard manifests and when operations teams understand what happened. Known as “hazard awareness delay,” this fundamental information gap sends troubleshooters into the field with incomplete data.
Consider what happens at a utility’s control center. When a circuit trips, control center employees can typically identify a general location, perhaps several miles of line. But they don’t know if a tree is actively shorting the line, for example, or whether the hazard is stable or still developing.
Multisensor Technology
Hazard awareness delay typically occurs when a utility organization monitors only electrical indicators. Fortunately, it is not inevitable. Recent technological developments are shifting how utilities can detect grid hazards. Multisensor units installed on poles can continuously capture data and share information through cellular and mesh networks. Rather than waiting for electrical signatures to build to a level that triggers alarms, real-time hazard detection technology provides continuous visibility into physical, electrical and environmental conditions across the distribution network. It expands traditional monitoring’s focus on current and voltage to include temperature, physical stress on poles, vibration patterns, vegetation contact, wind speed and humidity.
Continuous monitoring means hazards are detected as they develop. Dispatchers receive the exact fault location to the pole span, fault type and severity level, enabling crews to respond to known conditions with the proper safety precautions in place.
Xcel Energy: Detection Before Disaster
In March 2025, some Xcel Energy sites experienced severe wind gusts that caused adjacent utility poles to fail while the primary line remained structurally energized. Traditional monitoring systems likely would have missed this until an electrical fault occurred, potentially igniting a fire.
However, Xcel had previously installed multisensor devices to provide real-time intelligence. The devices detected structural failure through vibration, acoustic and pole-tilt measurements prior to voltage loss. A crew was dispatched with detailed knowledge of what they would encounter, allowing them to safely de-energize the line and make repairs before a fault could occur.
Conclusion
Real-time detection technology offers utilities the data they need to safely, efficiently identify and troubleshoot unexpected field hazards. Its adoption will likely expand as utility organizations continue seeking enhancements to employee safety and grid reliability.
About the Author: Tim Bedford is the principal customer success manager for Gridware. Reach him at tim.bedford@gridware.io.
Editor’s Note: To learn more about multisensor technology for utilities, check out a recent interview with Tim on the Utility Safety Podcast, available at https://utilitysafety.podbean.com/e/closing-the-hazard-awareness-delay-real-time-grid-visibility-with-active-grid-response/.