Safety is one of Kerrville Public Utility Board’s core values. We use extreme caution when working by always being aware of our surroundings and using the highest level of care for any utility workers, equipment and conditions in our service area.
Red flag fire conditions
Kerr County and the KPUB service area is one of the highest wildfire risk areas in the State of Texas. As part of our commitment to safety, KPUB has been preparing for red flag fire conditions with wildfire mitigation plans to maintain and operate our electrical lines and equipment in a manner that will minimize the risk of catastrophic wildfire.
We have enhanced and added new operational practices in response to this risk for red flag condition days. These new practices include enabling more sensitive settings on our substation breakers, allowing us to interrupt faults more quickly and minimize fire risks for our service area.
We are using these more sensitive settings in the more rural parts of our service area that typically have higher fire risk: West of Ingram, North of IH 10 and in the Center Point area.
Hunt transmission project
As many of you are aware, an LCRA transmission project is underway that’s passing through our KPUB service area in Hunt.
For the safety of LCRA’s contractor crews working in that area, we have increased the sensitivity of circuit breakers at the Hunt substation.
With these more sensitive settings on our substation breakers, if any type of fault and/or contact happens on a power line in that proximity, outages will occur and that will require crews to physically inspect the equipment before restoring the outage. These outages are typically short in timeframe and affect a larger number of customers than normal. For example, a blown transformer fuse on a power line that would typically affect one to five customers could cause an outage affecting hundreds of customers with the more sensitive settings.
Customers served by the Hunt substation may have already experienced a few outages as a result of this and are still at a higher outage risk while this project is underway. Transmission work is expected to be completed within the next week in the Hunt area.
Thank you for your understanding and patience with these important and critical safety changes during these weather and construction events.