PG&E Unveils Major Mill Valley Undergrounding Project
Jeff and Brad Lambert-Stone peered at the laptop showing a map of their street in Mill Valley’s highlands and lines tracing PG&E power lines.
“So there’s your house,” said Paul Larson, project manager for Pacific Gas & Electric Co. “All the lines are white. All of our overhead distribution lines are going to be gone.”
“Any idea when?” Jeff Lambert-Stone said.
“You’re kind of at the top,” Larson said. “So it will probably be around June, July, August.”
The utility held an event at the Mill Valley Community Center on Wednesday to outline plans to bury power lines along 16 miles of streets in neighborhoods with the highest wildfire risks. The $45 million fire prevention project, which is centered along West Blithedale Avenue, will begin in 2027 and take most of the year to complete.
“The real driver of this work is wildfire risk reduction,” said Dave Canny, a PG&E vice president. “It is permanent risk reduction. Once the undergrounding is complete, we expect 98% wildfire risk to be eliminated.”
“And typically, we also see significant improvements in reliability,” he said. “Once the primary lines are underground, that reduces outages by about 90%.”
Several dozen residents trickled in and saw an array of posterboards describing the wires and gear that would come down, what the utility poles would look like after the work is complete and what the construction teams look like. Typically, crews cut narrow trenches in the street to bury new wiring and install street-level transformer boxes on cement pads.
“This is what it looks like right now,” said Lauren Urhausen, a program manager, pointing to two levels of cables strung between the tops of poles and nearby can-shaped transformers. “We’re putting the primary electric distribution line underground, and then the telecommunications lines will stay in place, and we will top the pole. And then, often, there is a transformer box.”
“The lines will rise up the pole and then serve the customer,” she said.
New wires and breakaway connectors will be strung from poles to the sides of homes — or connect to conduits where property owners have already undergrounded wiring from the street to their buildings.
At the table staffed by Larson and project manager Megan Kinzer, residents could see close-up maps of their streets and parcel-by-parcel engineering plans.
“We’ve been doing extensive amounts of outreach,” Kinzer said. “If we need to go into people’s property, we’ve been contacting them so they’re aware we’re going to come onto their property. We’ve been trying to answer any questions they might have.”
Some of the outreach has involved sending teams into the field to develop the engineering plans and construction schedule.
“We’ve been walking in the community,” Kinzer said. “There are a lot of dog walkers, a lot of folks exercising. … They’ve been asking, when are you going to do the work? Are you here for undergrounding?”
Several residents came to the event to urge PG&E to do a better job overseeing contractors who have been cutting down trees in their neighborhoods.
But those who saw PG&E’s computerized maps and engineering plans for work on their street were impressed.
“They showed us exactly where it was going to go and they’re very conscientious,” said Brad Lambert-Stone.
“The thing that concerns me is the cable companies are refusing to cooperate with the city of Mill Valley,” Jeff Lambert-Stone said.
City officials have said telecommunications companies have declined to coordinate with PG&E to also bury their cables, which will remain on the poles.
“I’ve been pretty impressed with how proactive they’ve been,” Tim Emanuels said after Larson showed him where a transformer box would be located. “I received a phone call about six months ago from PG&E saying they didn’t have a lot of detail yet but they’re going to be doing this work.”
“They’ve been on it,” he said. “And judging by what’s in here, they’ve done a good job.”
Canny said the Mill Valley project is among the first that the utility would be doing in Marin over the next decade. State emergency management officials rank areas according to fire risk and likelihood of wildfire spread, he said. That assessment determines the sequence of undergrounding projects.