The students of the Power Grid Resiliency for Adverse Conditions Course would like to cordially invite you to a seminar by San Diego Gas and Electric (SDG&E). The 2018 wildfire season was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire season on record in California, with a total of about one thousand fires burning an area of about two million acres, the largest amount of burned acreage recorded in a fire season. The fires have caused more than $3.5 billion in damages and destructed homes, businesses and infrastructures, including power transmission and distribution lines. The seminar will be conducted by two experts from SDG&E, who will explain to us what SDG&E, one the world's smartest utilities, is doing to increase the resiliency of their system against this extreme weather condition.
Steven Vanderburg has 18 years of operational weather forecasting experience in California, including 10 years with the National Weather Service and 8 years with SDG&E. While at the National Weather Service in San Diego, Vanderburg served as the local Fire Weather Program Manager and amended the Red Flag Warning criteria for portions of Southern California. He is the SDG&E's Principal Meteorologist SDG&E's and serves as the utility's lead forecaster during periods of critical fire weather events.