As you ride along dusty dirt roads, going over the broken and beat-up pathways, you might not realize how important they are to Southern California Edison’s operations. They’re the rights of way that lead to critical infrastructure, transmission towers and electrical lines that serve some 15 million people. That equipment can often be difficult to reach.

The Transmission Road and Right of Way team maintains critical access roads for SCE crews and emergency responders to perform their jobs. The unit is made up of seven heavy machinery operators and is responsible for upkeep of the more than 7,000 miles of SCE-owned roads and easements.

It’s their job to rip up, clear out and regrade the areas where brush has left paths unrecognizable through rugged, sometimes mountainous terrain.

For SCE, the roads — shared with fire crews and local agencies during emergency events — are crucial for reducing customer outage times.

“If the roads are not in a safe condition, crews may not be able to drive their vehicles. They may have to hike in, or if it’s in a remote location, they may even need to get flown in,” said Jason Carson, an SCE senior supervisor for Transmission Road and Right of Way.

Carson has been with Transmission Operations for 10 years and Transmission Road and Right of Way for three. His colleague Jackie Frith-Smith has more than a decade of heavy equipment operations experience.

“We are oftentimes building, repairing and maintaining these access roads that are in rural areas and hard to get to,” said Frith-Smith, also an SCE senior supervisor. “This kind of dirt work is especially challenging because we deal with many environmental restraints and requirements to stay compliant.”

A prime example is the Psaltriparus minimus, otherwise known as the American bushtit. One of the tiny birds made its home in a Ventura County orange grove and recently delayed an SCE crew for an hour when attempting to make repairs on a project in Santa Paula. The team needed to consult environmental experts on how to finish the job without disturbing the little resident.

A more formidable challenge occurred this past winter near the Sierra National Forest. An avalanche took out two electrical circuits in Mono County, leaving almost 1,000 residents in a frozen city disconnected from power. Driving nearly blind in blizzard-like conditions with icy roads, Transmission Road and Right of Way carved a course of their own, plowing through hundreds of miles of solid snow to deliver generators and restore power to Mono City.

The project was so demanding it took a month to complete.

The beating the roads took during the unusually wet and snowy winter left those and many more SCE rights of way in disarray.

“What we’re seeing is significant portions of our roads are inundated with slides, rutting in the roads, potholes and blowouts,” Carson said. “All of which makes it unsafe for our vehicles to get in and access our infrastructure.”

Government funding is helping to repair the battered pathways through the Catastrophic Events Memorandum Account, which allows utilities to recover the costs of repairing facilities damaged during a disaster. There are currently seven projects under construction, with 87 still in the queue and more being identified. The repairs are expected to cost between $18 million and $20 million over two years.

“This is a significant lift that TROW has never faced before,” said Jason Jimenez, SCE senior manager for Transmission Technical Support. “Regardless of the challenges presented to us, I am confident that our team can fulfill our goal of recovering our road systems and continue to assist with grid reliability, wildfire risk mitigation and emergency response.”