Power to the People - Pre Bushfire Inspections in NSW, Australia

We believe that the B3 is a stable platform, powerful and leading in the class for the aerial work that we do. Yeah, it's very fulfilling. A lot of it has to do with bushfire or bushfire season at the end, just making sure that a lot of these power networks don't get affected by bushfire. We use helicopters to conduct the pre-summer bushfire inspection areas in rural and remote parts of New South Wales where there are large spans and large distances to cover. We also use helicopters to patrol power lines and conduct stringing activities throughout New South Wales after storm events. Hi, my name's Mick Foley. I'm the CEO and Director of Executive Helicopters. We're based in Archerfield and Roma. We operate across southeast Queensland and New South Wales for the energy sector, for Essential Energy and EQL. The PBSI contract in New South Wales for Essential Energy is Basically a contract designed to inspect all of the power line network around New South Wales to maintain the integrity of the power line network prior to the bushfire season and this is a proactive approach from Essential Energy to ensure that there is no encroaching vegetation on the lines prior to the bushfires and to ensure that they deliver safe effective power. And behind me we have the camera machine that we utilise for the aerial photography PBSI contracts in New South Wales for essential. The aircraft further behind me is also a B3 that we utilise across power line patrols and emergency response. One thing at Executive that we pride ourselves in is the quality of machine and the upkeep that we have. The machines behind me are all fitted out with Garmin glass cockpits. We have hook and swing, wire strike and air conditioner in each machine. Usually in the utility world you do not find the machines presented the way we have ours and we're very proud of the fact that our machines stand out in the utility world. My name is Lyndal and I'm the Senior Aviation Specialist at Essential Energy. We run a pre-summer bushfire inspection program. We've run that for the last 15 years. We conduct power line patrols using helicopters of our entire transmission network. This year is our first year conducting the pre-summer bushfire inspection program with executive helicopters and our focus this year was on high risk areas in the southern part of New South Wales, western and mid-north coast regions. We identified them as high risk areas using research conducted by the University of Melbourne and in conjunction with other network providers in New South Wales. On each patrol flight, two essential energy workers act as task specialists. One conducts the powerline patrol, the other acts as a second set of eyes for the pilot. All our powerline workers that fly in helicopters are trained in crew resource management and soon to be Hewitt training. Executive Helicopters Fleet has been an upgrade to our available resources. We have some B3 squirrels and not only that, we have air conditioning for one of the first times which has really helped the guys during the summer heat. My name is Joey Reid, I work for Executive Helicopters and I'm a power line patrol pilot for the Fugro program or the essential energy program and also do a little bit of emergency response as well. We only fly between sort of 20 and 45 knots. It's the speed in conjunction with the low level that's our main sort of operating requirement which requires to be fairly careful. It can be fairly Demanding flying, especially when you're flying for eight hours a day for five days a week. So essentially the camera operator in the back, he's looking for faults, looking for anything that needs maintenance. He has the power there to initiate sort of an emergency response if he needs to, if there's something that looks like it really needs fixing quickly, he can initiate that to be done straight away. But for the most part, it's just taking a Taking a broad shot of depth. 40% of it throughout the area and just make sure that it's not affected by growth or tree growth or forage so it's forward looking so we're trying to we're trying to see if anything's going to become a problem within the next 12 months as well. Yeah look down south southern New South Wales beautiful area we've been around the high country very beautiful beautiful sort of terrain down Creates a little bit of a higher workload for us just especially if there's a little bit of wind around just being just with hills around and whatnot but yeah they're definitely down the high country has definitely been a hot one for us. So my name's Kevin Clark I'm Head of Flying Operations for Executive Helicopters so the old essentially the old chief pilot role Um... yeah overseeing all these pilots and aircraft. Yeah the B3 is just a beast it's It's such a versatile machine, lots of power, very stable platform for any sort of long lining, anything like that. Great lifting utility, it doesn't struggle in the heat, even out in western Queensland where it's sort of 45 degree heat, doesn't seem to struggle. You've still got to use power management, but very good machine. When you're flying in that In the wire environment you're down sort of that 80 to 100 feet just off the line. There's a lot of scans going on so it's very mentally demanding just keeping your wits about you like livestock, birds, wedge-tailed eagles or brolgas because you do disturb a bit of wildlife as you're going along because you're so low. So in this scenario we have a very in-depth SMS system and risk assessment so you do a lot of pre-planning before you actually fly. An area on our contract is the size of the United Kingdom. So just to give you an idea, that's how big one area of southwestern Queensland is. There's five depots in that, so we look after all five depots at any one time. There'd probably be close to 200,000 poles. Not that we look at them all the time, but there's those lines right out through western Queensland, so it's a huge area to look after. So you've got to know that area, know where your fuel dumps are. You know the depots and you get to know all the guys, like that's one of the best parts of the job is the people you work with. I enjoy this sort of work because you're providing a service that keeps the power on. To me that's always, even in the pre-bushfire stuff or the emergency stuff, it's nothing more satisfactory than getting a line on, turning the power on. My name is Dominic. I work with Fugro Australia as a camera operator and I've been deployed for the first time this year with Essential Energy, working closely with Executive Helicopters in order to acquire data of the power line network across New South Wales. We have been a part of the bushfire pre-summer inspection program in order to identify hazards that exist within the network. Providing high priority defect notification back to Essential Energy so that they can mitigate the likelihood of any bushfires starting as a result of issues within their network. This includes encroachment of foliage of trees. It also involves hardware issues that they might experience on the poles, on the conductors etc. Fugro has an ongoing relationship with Essential Energy where we capture LiDAR data for Essential Energy of the network and we use that data to prepare for the pre-summer bushfire inspection program. The data that we use from the LiDAR is then used to identify where their network is and that allows our new camera system to track along while we're flying. We've been using the new The new Shotover M2 system which we purchased recently This system allows us to capture high-resolution imagery, it's state-of-the-art technology and has been perfectly suited to what we are trying to achieve. Once the data is ingested and QAQCed, we then prep for data delivery. There's a lot that goes into that process, we've got geodata specialists and our innovation team who develop all of the systems that we use to process the data. The data is then delivered to Essential Energy as a digital twin with their network so that they can identify assets within their network. It allows them to manage the individual assets and assets as a whole. Being a part of the pre-summer bushfire inspection program has been a really exciting project this first year working with great teams with Executive Helicopters and Essential Energy. It's great working as part of a team who everyone's here for the right reasons, where we're all motivated to provide a high quality product and maintain high safety standards. One thing that's been evident to me throughout this process is the standards which everyone has set for us and which we continue to set for each other.