FortisBC

• 500 Million - Spent on firefighting efforts in BC in 2021
• 864,473 - Hectares burned in BC in 2021
• 1,000,000 - Gas customers with Fortis BC

Fortis BC automates the assessment of current wildfire threats to its buildings, customers, and gas and electric assets.

The frequency and severity of wildfires in the province of British Columbia have been steadily increasing. For FortisBC, the largest natural gas utility and second-largest electrical utility in the region, this means that wildfire management is becoming a year-round effort.

To help prevent catastrophic damage, Fortis BC needed a more efficient way to determine the current wildfire threat to its assets and customers so that its Operations Managers could take immediate action.

How they made it possible – no code required.

The GIS team created an FME workflow that integrates active wildfire data (obtained from the provincial government BC Wildfire Branch via DataBC) into their GE Smallworld environment. They can view all assets within a 10km buffer of the wildfire and analyze every asset interacting with that buffer. The system also provides insight into threats to critical infrastructure, including schools, hospitals and care homes.

FME Server runs automatically every two hours to match the frequency that the source dataset is updated to keep the information up to date. The output is made available on the server for Operations Managers and Emergency Responders to access via VPN as drawings, reports, plots, Excel files, and KMZ files.

The final integrated view of wildfires and assets makes for better decision-making for the first responders and the GIS team.

FME Products Used:

• FME Desktop
• FME Server

Whether your data challenges have to do with emergency management, spatial data, or data sharing, FME is here to help you solve them. Spend more time using data and less time fighting it. Try FME for free.