One wildfire.
Every decision
that matters.
A day in the life of an electric utility using AWRAM + SWIM, from a capital decision made a year ago to the critical minutes of an active wildfire, and the decisions that follow.
A wildfire does not begin when the smoke appears.
For a utility, the consequences of a wildfire are shaped by decisions made long before ignition: which assets were inspected, where mitigation money was spent, how circuits were configured, and whether operators can act on a rapidly changing forecast.
An effective wildfire program must connect investment strategy, asset intelligence, weather readiness, emergency operations, and lessons learned. These are often handled by different people using different tools. AWRAM and SWIM are designed to make the underlying risk more consistent and actionable across those boundaries.
Risk originating from the grid
Electrical equipment can initiate a wildfire. AWRAM evaluates where asset-driven ignition risk is concentrated, while SWIM helps characterize the potential consequences should an ignition occur at a given location.
Risk threatening the grid
A wildfire can also damage equipment regardless of its cause. SWIM identifies plausible spread and exposure, and AWRAM connects those hazards to electrical assets, customers, switching options, and restoration priorities.
One connected story.
Five operational tempos.
The active fire may unfold in hours. The decisions influencing its consequences extend across an entire year and continue long after containment.
12 months before
Capital allocation and asset mitigation
7 days before
Weather outlook and preparedness
24 hours before
Risk thresholds and preventive operations
Minutes to hours
Ignition, forecasts, switching and response
30 days after
Validation, learning, reinvestment
Simplified conceptual formulation. Practical models account for initiating conditions, scenarios, consequence distributions, dependencies and uncertainty. Once an unrelated fire has ignited, the operational focus shifts to conditional spread, exposure and response.
The most important wildfire decision might have been made a year earlier.
Three decisions establish the utility's posture long before anyone calls 911.
How should we spend the next mitigation dollar?
Cedar Ridge's asset managers face a familiar problem: the list of potential wildfire mitigation projects is larger than the available budget. The utility has $25 million to allocate, but dollars spent on one corridor cannot be spent elsewhere.
AWRAM brings together electrical asset information, ignition risk, and mitigation effectiveness. SWIM contributes the distribution of potential consequences from hypothetical ignitions along the network. Rather than ranking investments by asset age alone, planners compare expected risk reduction, cost, and the residual risk after mitigation.
The analysis identifies a 10-mile corridor where risk is concentrated around a limited set of assets. A targeted program combines vegetation work, selected equipment replacement and remotely operated sectionalizing switches.
Compare three investment alternatives
A dangerous weather pattern emerges.
Weather forecasters identify a prolonged period of strong winds, unusually low relative humidity and dry fuels. Not every circuit faces the same risk. Exposure varies with geography, weather, vegetation, ignition likelihood and potential consequences.
AWRAM's weather-informed risk analysis and dynamic risk tiers identify which feeders deserve closer attention. SWIM evaluates hypothetical ignitions at sensitive locations, including plausible spread toward communities and critical infrastructure under forecast conditions.
Wildfire operations staff translate this intelligence into a preparedness plan: closer monitoring, coordination with dispatch, field crew posture, preliminary contingency switching studies, and awareness of facilities that may need backup service.
Will tomorrow require preventive de-energization?
Updated forecasts narrow the most concerning weather conditions to a few feeder segments. The utility must weigh the risk of leaving lines energized against the operational, public safety and financial consequences of interrupting service.
AWRAM supports comparison of ignition risk and candidate operating measures. Its PSPS analysis and switching intelligence help the utility examine which configurations could isolate higher-risk sections while preserving service elsewhere. SWIM informs the severity of possible consequences should an ignition occur.
The control center prepares the relevant operating plans and customer communications, while authorized personnel apply established thresholds, engineering checks, notification requirements, and utility procedures.
Define the exposed portions of the network
Risk is evaluated at an actionable geographic and electrical resolution, not only at the broad service territory level.
Identify critical customer dependencies
Water, communications and community facilities are flagged for coordination under possible interruptions.
Pre-plan feasible switching configurations
Operations teams prepare contingencies subject to normal equipment loading, voltage, protection, and safety reviews.
09:00. Severe weather has arrived. Every customer matters.
With dangerous conditions now observed, operational choices move from theoretical to immediate. The investment in new sectionalizing capability becomes valuable in a way that is easy to understand.
Shut down an entire feeder or isolate a dangerous segment?
AWRAM indicates that the greatest modeled ignition risk is concentrated on one part of the feeder. The utility's switching team evaluates two illustrative, electrically feasible options:
Option A: de-energize the entire feeder and interrupt service to 5,800 customers. Option B: use the switches installed after last year's mitigation analysis to isolate the high-risk section while continuing service to 4,850 customers.
In this illustrative case, the targeted configuration leaves 950 customers interrupted instead of 5,800. Operators still verify protection coordination, transfer capacity, conditions, and required approvals.
It is a direct payoff from the capital planning decision made 12 months earlier: an investment that reduces ignition risk also creates operational flexibility when the stakes become immediate.
Illustrative 84% reduction in affected customers versus a full-feeder shutoff. The real system configuration must be operationally verified.
A fire ignites. The utility's central question changes.
Before ignition, the focus was lowering the probability and consequences of a grid-caused fire. Once any wildfire is burning nearby, the immediate concern becomes the fire's conditional spread and its threat to the electrical system.
A wildfire has been reported approximately two miles upwind of a 115-kV transmission corridor. Its ignition cause is unknown; no connection to the utility is assumed.
What is in the fire's path?
Dispatch receives an approximate incident location. AWRAM helps operators identify the nearby transmission and distribution assets, feeder connectivity, and the customers or critical facilities that could be affected if the fire approaches.
SWIM is initialized with the incident location, available weather, fuels, topography and other relevant conditions. At this point, the system is not claiming to know exactly where the fire will go. It is preparing to characterize a distribution of possible outcomes as information becomes available.
The median forecast misses the power line. The tail-risk forecast does not.
SWIM evaluates a range of plausible fire-spread trajectories. The first illustrative run indicates a smaller P50 footprint south of the corridor, while the broader P90 outcome envelope approaches or intersects important portions of the electrical network.
A single deterministic fire path might leave operators falsely confident or excessively alarmed. A probabilistic view instead shows the range of plausible outcomes and allows the utility to evaluate the consequences of uncertainty.
The critical information is not simply acreage. It is whether potentially affected assets include a major transmission circuit, a substation, the access route used by inspection crews or infrastructure essential to community services.
“If the most likely trajectory is less severe, are we still prepared for a consequential but less likely outcome?”
SWIM · EVOLVING FIRE EXPOSURE
Illustrative, not model outputWhich protective actions matter most now?
The electric utility and incident response organizations have distinct responsibilities. Fire officials manage suppression and public safety decisions. Utility operators manage the electrical system, its workers, and its customers. Both benefit from timely, shared situational awareness.
Combining SWIM's possible impact areas with AWRAM's network intelligence, grid operations can evaluate whether an exposed line should be isolated, which circuits may require reconfiguration, where field crews could face danger, and how critical loads may be affected.
These analyses support, but do not automate, the utility's authorized operational decisions. No predicted polygon can substitute for real-time observations, engineering constraints, safety protocols or incident command.
The wind turns. The forecast must change with it.
Fire authorities report a new perimeter and changes in the direction of active spread. SWIM updates its analysis to reflect the observed perimeter, active fire front and revised environmental conditions.
The new probabilistic forecast shifts part of the potential impact area toward the transmission corridor. The utility revisits its operating options, the number of potentially exposed customers, and the relative urgency of protecting assets and personnel.
Notice what makes this valuable: the system does not simply repeat an earlier forecast. The analysis is revised as evidence changes. The utility's plan can therefore be updated rather than treated as a static document.
What can be restored, and what must wait?
As the incident evolves, the utility begins planning inspection and restoration activities. AWRAM helps organize which assets and customers were affected and which alternative service configurations might be available. SWIM provides evolving context on where continued fire exposure may be relevant to patrols and equipment.
Predicted reduction in fire exposure is not permission to energize equipment. Field conditions, inspections, clearance, and approved restoration procedures govern all actual decisions.
The incident ends. The risk-management cycle does not.
The utility has more information than it did a month earlier. That information should improve the next generation of investment and operating decisions.
After the event, analysts compare observed fire behavior, actual equipment exposure, field records and customer interruptions against the assumptions used in planning and response.
How well did modeled consequences align with observations? Which of the mitigation projects influenced available operating choices? Did targeted sectionalizing reduce the number of customers affected? Which assets should be inspected, hardened, moved, or considered for other risk controls?
SWIM can support retrospective analysis of fire growth and, when pertinent to a formal investigation, candidate origin areas. It is not a substitute for physical evidence, utility records, or investigators. AWRAM can use validated findings to revisit risk models, evaluate revised mitigation portfolios and support the next budget cycle.
More defensible investment
Capital decisions can be compared by modeled risk reduction, total cost, uncertainty, and potential system benefits beyond a single mitigation objective.
More adaptive operations
Risk monitoring, switching evaluation and evolving fire projections inform decisions as conditions change, instead of leaving operators with static seasonal maps.
More informative learning
Observed events can be used to examine assumptions, identify model gaps, and support continuous improvement in asset management and wildfire preparedness.
Which platform answers which question?
AWRAM is the utility's risk-management and decision-support framework. SWIM contributes stochastic wildfire spread and consequence intelligence. Their value is amplified when these analyses are connected to the same assets and decisions.
Wildfire resilience is not a single decision. It is a connected system of decisions.
Utilities must make economic choices in the boardroom, precautionary choices before severe weather, rapid choices during an emergency and corrective choices afterward. AWRAM and SWIM can connect those choices through a quantitative understanding of risk, consequence and uncertainty.
Scenario transparency & technical notes
This is a simulated case study, not a customer deployment report.
Cedar Ridge, its geography, electric network, incident timeline, dollar amounts, mitigation results, customer impacts, switching alternatives, maps and projections are fictional and are intended to demonstrate potential workflows. The 45% modeled risk reduction for a $2.8M portfolio, the 58% modeled reduction for a $14M rebuild, and the reduction from 5,800 to 950 interrupted customers are illustrative arithmetic examples, not ATS performance claims.
The inline maps and dashboard illustrations were created specifically for this story. They are not screenshots or outputs from a production AWRAM or SWIM deployment.
Operational and modeling boundaries
SWIM produces conditional probabilistic wildfire projections under defined inputs and assumptions. P50 and P90 on this page indicate illustrative modeled outcome envelopes; they are not guarantees of where a particular fire will or will not travel. For an actual incident, forecasts require current and sufficiently reliable data and should be evaluated against field observations.
AWRAM is decision-support technology. Real PSPS, switching, field deployment and re-energization decisions require authorized utility personnel, validated electrical studies and applicable safety procedures. Fire suppression and public evacuation decisions remain with responsible authorities.
Explore the actual ATS platforms
How to adapt this to a real utility
With actual asset inventories, circuit connectivity, weather and fuel information, ignition models, cost assumptions and utility-specific operating constraints, ATS can scope an engagement to analyze the organization's real service territory and decisions. Any results intended for planning or operations should be validated for their intended use.
What would this look like in your service territory?
Explore how ATS can combine asset-level wildfire risk, stochastic consequence modeling, dynamic risk analysis, switching intelligence and mitigation economics to support your utility's decisions.