2024 Jasper Wildfire Rebuild - When a Marmot becomes a Mammoth
This is a joint meeting of Canadian Society of Senior Engineers and IEEE Life Members Affinity Groups.
This series of presentations has been occurring for more than 20 years and is now being also advertised to the IEEE Northern Canada Section (NCS) Life Members Affinity Group (LMAG) through vTools and other IEEE LMAG's and IEEE members depending upon the topic. At the same time the Canadian Society of Senior Engineers (CSSE) is using their national organization to provide information, the subject and speaker to members across Canada.
The next meeting will be held on Thursday, March 19, 2026. The meeting will open at 12:30 pm MDT (2:30pm Eastern), with the presentation starting at 12:45 (2:45 pm EDT).
Please note the meeting originates in Alberta which is in the Mountain Time Zone, so if you are in another province you must account any necessary time shift.
In the summer of 2024,the Jasper National Park, in Alberta, experienced the largest & and most expensive wildfire in Canadian Parks history. The fire ravaged 32,000+ hectares, destroyed 1/3 of the Town including 358 homes and businesses and resulted in damage estimates of $1.23B.
ATCO Electric being the distribution facility owner faced numerous challenges, how do we rebuild our system as quickly as possible while also improving system reliability and resilience.
This presentation will show some of the innovative solutions that we applied , including plowing over 22km of underground distribution 3-phase mainline in the mountains, installing tree wire with composite poles, installing almost 4km of cable up the side of a mountain to serve critical communication loads and converting the town from 4160V to 25kV after our lines and stepdown substations in Town were significantly damaged.
The presentation will highlight how ATCO created best practices, tools, and technologies to overcome the challenges and improve grid resiliency and reliability in the face of a large-scale wildfire event.
Bio: Trevor Tkach P.Eng.
Trevor Tkach has been with ATCO Electric for over 37 years. He has extensive design and construction experience including managing multi-million dollar distribution portfolios such as underground subdivisions, high-capacity underground duct banks, urban overhead to underground conversion projects as well as double circuit mitigation projects to name just a few. He is ATCO’s principal engineer for distribution engineering and, for more than 15 years has been overseeing our Jasper area service point. Trevor has been leading the engineering associated with the restoration and rebuild of the Jasper power grid after the 2024 wildfires.
Topic: CSSE Edmonton March 19, 2026 Meeting
Time: Mar 19, 2026 12:30 PM Mountain Time (US and Canada)
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Meeting ID: 898 4614 9957
Passcode: 656771
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Mark your Calendar - The IEEE IAS Electrical Safety, Technical, Maintenance and Projects Workshop www.ieee.org/estmp will be in Edmonton, March 23-25, 2026.