Aired Jul 7, 2026 · 33 min

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In January 2025, the LA wildfires became one of the most destructive weather events in American history—and LADWP, the largest municipally-owned utility in the United States, had to respond in real time…while simultaneously planning for the World Cup, the Super Bowl, and the 2028 Olympics.

This is how they did it.

In this episode, host Kinsey Grant Baker sits down with Zoraya Oliver-Griffin, LADWP's Chief Resiliency and Emergency Officer, to talk about what it actually takes to build a utility that can withstand anything.

From standing up a state-of-the-art emergency ops center to stress-testing infrastructure through back-to-back global events, Zoraya breaks down how LADWP is turning hard-won lessons into a long-term resilience strategy—and why she thinks every major utility needs a role like hers.

Zoraya Oliver-Griffin: Fire, it's flood. We have to be prepared for anything and everything. Those are kind of some of the highlights that makes emergency management in LA a little bit more complex than in other areas.

Kinsey Grant Baker: LA is also preparing for some pretty significant global events.

Zoraya Oliver-Griffin: World Cup is happening as we're talking right now.

Kinsey Grant Baker: You've got the Olympics in 2028, the Super Bowl coming up pretty soon as well.

Zoraya Oliver-Griffin: It's an opportunity for us to review and stress test our resilience. And then you start thinking through how do you make infrastructure stronger and more resilient? It's a forward-looking approach.

Kinsey Grant Baker: What capabilities you feel are most important to prioritize investing in right now to prepare you for what the future might look like in, you know, 2028 when the Olympics come, but also beyond that.

Zoraya Oliver-Griffin: Making those investments through the lens of legacy. What is the long-term effect beyond what's occurring today that's going to be a benefit to the customer?

Kinsey Grant Baker: Los Angeles runs on extremes. Four million people, 500 square miles, one of the most seismically active, fire-prone, heat-stressed urban environments there is. And it's served by the largest municipally owned electric utility in the United States. In January 2025, the L.A. wildfires became one of the most destructive urban fire events in American history, burning through communities and putting every assumption about emergency preparedness to the test in real time.

And that's just the baseline. In the next few years, L.A. will host the Super Bowl, the FIFA World Cup and the 2028 Olympics. The demands on the grid and on the people managing that grid will be unlike anything the city has ever seen. So we are about to find out how LADWP is preparing for it all. I'm Kinsey Grant Baker and this is Power Perspectives.

My guest today is Zoraya Oliver-Griffin, LADWP's Chief Resiliency and Emergency Officer, a role that really sits at the intersection, I would argue, of wildfires and extreme heat and outages and multi-agency responses. So translation, one of the most consequential jobs in utility leadership right now. Zoraya, welcome to Power Perspectives. How are you today?

Zoraya Oliver-Griffin: I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me. I was really excited to be here today with you.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Of course, I'm thrilled to have you. As I mentioned in that intro, this is a big job. You have a lot on your plate, I'm sure, so I'm really grateful for you taking the time. I want to start here by understanding a little bit more about that job, about what it means to be Chief Resiliency and Emergency. What does that office entail? It seems like something maybe people haven't really heard of before. Walk me through a little bit what your day-to-day looks like.

Zoraya Oliver-Griffin: So it's a brand new role at the Department of Water and Power. I get the privilege of really working on a blank slate in this role. When I came over from another utility in Southern California, never in a million years did we imagine that six days on the job, we were going to have the 2025 wildfires, right? And so while some may have been like, I did get the question, oh, my gosh, you know, like, was it overwhelming? You would like, you know, and I said, it's what I do, you know, and I actually took it, framed it from the position of, thank goodness I was here. Because I came from a utility that had extensive wildfire experience. And so I was able to bring that knowledge over and be one of the individuals that helped get L.A. through the wildfires, you know.

So what does it mean to be in this role? It's a really unique role. And it's a role that I hope that we start seeing blossom more and more in the utility industry. And I think that we will. The department, LADWP, like you said, Kinsey, is the largest municipal utility in the nation. We're serving 4 million people. So to us, resiliency isn't a buzzword. It really is operational survival for us now. And especially, you know, the transformation that the city went through as a result of the wildfires.

So the mandate by which I operate from is prepare the utility for everything, because chances are it will happen at some point. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. So everything from extreme heat to wildfires to major global events to cyber attacks, all while also trying to keep the power and water services reliable, equitable, and safe while we're doing it all. So it is a really big job. I like to think I have one of the best jobs in the world, and I love my job, and I love that I see it growing in the industry.

The four, just to give you some context, the four operational areas of responsibility for me, again, all emerging for the department here, is I oversee the Office of Emergency Management and our Department Emergency Operations Center. And I'm happy to say that we just are, you know, finished the construction, phase one of our state-of-the-art Department Emergency Operations Center. So excited to come back and tell you about all of that. I also oversee our recovery and rebuild of the Palisades and any other additional catastrophic event that may hit the city. It'll be my team that'll be responsible for helping through that.

And then, as you mentioned, high-profile global events like the World Cup, the Super Bowl and the Olympics, just to name a few. In addition, it is L.A., right? So there's no shortage of high-impact events that occur here in the city. And then also what I like to say, I'm helping design and shape the future by building and bringing on a climate resiliency portfolio into the department to help with our, you know, our resilience decision making and forward looking on how we're going to manage and invest in our infrastructure.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Yeah, I mean, this is a lot for one job description. You know, I think that you have a lot of really, really interesting different kind of core tenets of the work that you do. I'm curious, you know, as you think about what it means to serve in that position, what makes emergency management in a city like L.A. different from emergency management in maybe other cities across this country that are less prone to wildfires, are less prone to these global events? What makes that different?

Zoraya Oliver-Griffin: It's a variety of risks, right? I mean, we saw the unprecedented wildfire, so we know that's a given, but it's fire, it's flood. Now we're seeing a lot of seismic activity in Southern California, right? It's the size of the city. It's the global events that LA hosts here. It's the diversity, not only geographically, but ethnically as well. We have so many microclimates here in the city of LA, coupled with just the name recognition of LA that really makes it a target. I wish I could say it's a handful of risks, but it's not. We have to be prepared for anything and everything. But that's what makes, those are kind of some of the highlights that makes emergency management in L.A. a little bit more complex than in other areas.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Yeah. I mean, I imagine it is an incredibly complex job to have at any utility, but certainly a city at the scale of Los Angeles is quite the undertaking. And what I'm curious to learn more about, too, is when an emergency does emerge, right, when we understand that some sort of threat is coming toward the grid, whether that's extreme heat or fire or some sort of water disruption. I would love to understand a little bit better how you're balancing speed of response with the accuracy or the responsibility of responding in the right way to prioritize resiliency. What does that balance look like for you?

Zoraya Oliver-Griffin: It really is an art, you know, leverage technology more, leverage AI, you know, push the boundaries with that. But everything that you said, managing the speed of the response with the massive amount of information that's constantly changing, right? Because there is nothing common about emergencies. Each one takes on its own personality. You're dancing with the risk, a different risk that has chosen to manifest. And each has its own characters and its challenges.

And I think it starts with surrounding yourself at the decision-making table with the best of the best of your subject matter experts that can advise you. And you are processing information by the minute, you know, from probably up to 50 advisors that are technical experts in the various work streams that ultimately affect our operations and affect our customer experience through that response. Relationships internal are critical. There has to be a high degree of trust. Also external. I mean, we cannot manage any emergency in a silo or by ourselves, even if it's a utility-centric emergency. You need first responder partners, you need community partners, you know, you need academia, you need it. There's no, it's a village that has to come together for any type of an emergency.

And you can't build that communication and trust and shake hands for the first time during an emergency. That is all fermented and solidified way before through training together, exercising together, communicating together, using smaller, what may seem like inconsequential blue sky day emergencies to stress test your policies and your procedures and your protocols and understand each other's roles during an emergency. All of that has to come together to balance the demands. And then also, we really stand firmly in, we have to communicate often the information that is validated and we have to communicate from a position of transparency. Right. If we don't know something, be honest about it and say, but this is, you know, as soon as we have validated information, you know, we'll come back out and communicate more, and then do it.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Communicating across all of those different departments and agencies and first responders and even teams internally to LADWP, I imagine takes a lot of coordination. It's also, I imagine, a job that requires a lot of decisiveness. So when you're in that sort of situation room situation and you're trying to decide if you need to mobilize a crew, set up incident command, get some sort of messaging out to customers, and do that aggressively and do it quickly. What are some of the key sort of flags or metrics or data points that you look for to know that it's time to make that call? Can you walk me through what that looks like?

Zoraya Oliver-Griffin: Yeah. So first and foremost here at the department, the safety of our employees and the public drives every decision that we make. That is the lens by which we make every decision. Once we've ensured that, what are the customer impacts, right? If it's a commodity that's been disrupted, whether power or water, quickly assess how long is the power going to be out? What are the impacts going to be to those customers? What do we need to mobilize to support those customers to mitigate? And then how frequently do we need to be communicating based on what, you know, the character of and what's needed by the community? You're never going to have all the data that you need. So you have to be very comfortable with making the best decision, the best data-informed decision based on the information that you have on hand. And if you need to pivot as new information comes in, then you pivot.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Yeah. And I think that's a great lesson across any department at a utility, is understanding that not every decision is going to look the same. In fact, rarely will they ever look the same. I think it's a good segue here to talk a little bit about some of the learnings from a specific incident, the January 2025 wildfires, which, you know, across the country, I think people really hopefully understood the depth of and the breadth of and the impact and how significant it was for the city of Los Angeles. I would love to just hear a little bit more about, you know, where you are post those wildfires in terms of goals for recovery, lessons learned, you know, what's kind of your thinking now a year and a half out?

Zoraya Oliver-Griffin: Well, we can do an entire podcast just on where we are with our recovery, right? I'm really proud of where the department is with the recovery. I mean, three days into the wildfires, we were given clearance by the incident commander out in the field to go into Palisades and start assessing and rebuilding the infrastructure where we could with temporary infrastructure, right, to start providing power as quickly as possible.

I will tell you that some of the things that I'm especially proud of from that response, and that is we had the appropriate personnel at the subject matter, at the technical subject matter expertise level, and they were all actively engaged. I mean, everybody was fully committed 24 hours a day for 21 days, you know, missed birthdays, missed, you know, you name it, because they were so committed and they were so impassioned to do whatever was necessary to help that community not only get through the fire, but then recover.

Also, our common operating picture was really effective. We were getting information. I mentioned those 50 advisors to me and the other incident commander for DWP. We were getting information all the time. We were getting feeds from our partners all the time. So we had a really strong common operating picture across the entire department. Everybody had the same information that everybody else had.

And then rapid development and deployments of tools to communicate with customers. If we didn't have a communication tool, we developed it really quickly. It may not have been perfect, but it got us through. And then we were constantly refining the tools based on feedback that we were getting from our customers, right? I always tell our teams, you're not always going to have perfect information and that's okay, but you've got to have information and you have to be able to effectively communicate during a time when our customers are feeling the most vulnerable, which is during an emergency. And then the other piece that I remind our teams is, we have to meet customers where they are, not where we expect them to be. And we have to adapt to them and what the situation calls for. So it's being fluid and being comfortable in that all the time.

Kinsey Grant Baker: And having gone through something like that, it seems like the lessons have been really significant for you and for your team. What would you tell other utilities? You know, what would be your advice having worked through all of that?

Zoraya Oliver-Griffin: Yeah, I would say, especially if you know that it's going to be a significant, or certainly if it's going to be a catastrophic event. And, you know, I mean, those of us that have experience in emergency management, we know when something is going to, you know, roll beyond 24 or 48 hours and we can start pre-positioning to support our customers. I would say to other utilities, as soon as you know that you're going to have an extended outage or impactful disruption to whatever commodity you provide, start positioning to call in mutual assistance. These things are not something that you could or should be doing alone. And we are all trained in the utility industry across the country to be supportive of each other. And we may have some variety in our processes and protocols, but the core are all pretty much the same with all the utilities.

So start thinking and don't be shy about calling in mutual assistance early. You know, for the Palisades wildfire, at any point in time during the 21-day event, we had over 150 crews out in the field, including our mutual assistance from utility up to the north, Pacific Gas and Electric, and then the Navajo Nation that also sent personnel. So they landed the first week, you know, and they were ready to roll with our crews.

Also start thinking about recovery, right? We started thinking about recovery on day two and positioning for that. So we were managing the emergency while also thinking through, okay, as soon as this emergency is over, and we had no idea it was gonna be 21 days, but it was, we started thinking, how are we gonna position to get power up, get water through the pipeline and in a safe manner? And then what is the long-term customer support plan looking like? And so we started thinking about that.

I would also say strengthen your integrated planning across your entire organization. You know, you're planning your response and your recovery between gas or electric or gas and water or, you know, whatever your commodities are. But everybody needs to be dancing in concert during an emergency. It's not the time to learn each other's processes and procedures. That's the time that if it's an electric-centric, you know, emergency, then, like for us, our water personnel, it's like, what, can we drive the personnel as they're doing assessments? I mean, can we distribute water? Can we make phone calls? Like, what can we do if it's not impacting our commodity? How can we help with the response, and vice versa, right? So everybody needs to be operating in concert.

The other thing is have a robust and agile employee notification and accountability system. It's imperative to keep your employees informed, even the ones that are not involved in the response. Because guess what? They are advocates and communicators and ambassadors of the work that you're doing, right? We all have neighbors. We all have friends and family that know that we work for a utility and they're going to come to us. So it's important to put all of our employees in a position of being able to give accurate, validated information. And then accountability systems. You do not want to be in a position where you don't know where any one of your employees is, right, at any point in time.

Also, in today's environment, where the supply chain is in such a delicate state, have supply chain contingency plans in place, right? Have them two or three layers deep, because in today's environment, any one of those layers can be compromised and you need to have redundancy in our supply chain. And that's something that we've not been very good at in the utility industry as a whole, and we're getting better. Share resources with each other. Have things that you know are in high demand. Have them ready to go somewhere in your service territory.

I would also, you know, this may not apply to investor-owned utilities, but certainly to public utilities where we have access to FEMA monies for reimbursement. Start thinking and collecting your documentation for cost recovery on day one so that you're not behind the eight ball when the funds are available to you. So those are just a few highlights that I think, like, key lessons learned that I would recommend to, you know, our sister utilities to just kind of be thinking through.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Yeah, I love how you say just a few highlights. It's a temporary blueprint, a playbook for how to respond in an emergency. Such insightful information, too. And I think the real premise of all of this and what really stands out to me is that you mentioned you started thinking about recovery on day two. You know, all of this is so impressive. And to manage a response process and a recovery process at the same time, I imagine, is pretty difficult. And now we're going to stack one more layer of complexity onto all of this, which is beyond the storms and the fires. L.A. is also preparing for some pretty significant global events in the coming weeks and months and years.

Zoraya Oliver-Griffin: Yes. Yes. World Cup is happening as we're talking right now.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Yes. You've got the Olympics in 2028, the Super Bowl coming up pretty soon as well.

Zoraya Oliver-Griffin: Yes.

Kinsey Grant Baker: With big events like this, how does that influence, if at all, your resiliency planning strategy right now?

Zoraya Oliver-Griffin: Oh, it influences it in, you know, insurmountable ways. The way that I choose to look at these type of global, high-profile special events is, you know, it's an opportunity for us to really stress, review and stress test our resilience. Right. And work with our partners on technology upgrades that we may need, on legacy improvements or enhancements to venues that can serve the community well after these events take place, right? And we need to start, like, planning as soon as the event is announced. The planning starts, like, right away. You know, we don't have the luxury, we don't have the luxury of time.

So, and then you start thinking through how do you make your infrastructure stronger and more resilient. So you start, it's a forward, it's a forward-looking approach, right? What are those investments that we need to start making today that we're going to be leveraging? You know, in our case, we started thinking about this, you know, five years ago, right? When there was talks about the Olympics. And then as soon as we heard that the World Cup was going to be here, it was like, that was our opportunity to try to break everything, all of our plans for the Olympics. Why? So then we can get better and stronger when the Olympics are here, right?

It was a tremendous opportunity of timing to have the World Cup and then have the Super Bowl next year. And then we move into the Olympics. So we're stress testing our personnel. We're stress testing our infrastructure. We're stress testing our processes. We're stress testing our partnerships so that it'll be as smooth of a transition into the Olympics as we can possibly have as a department and as a city.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Yeah, I mean, by the time 2028 rolls around, this is going to be just another Tuesday for you and your team, right?

Zoraya Oliver-Griffin: There's always the outliers, right? There's always the unexpected, and that's what makes this job a tremendous amount of fun. You have your core procedures and processes that you follow. But again, like I said earlier, every situation, every emergency, every special event has its own character that you have to support.

Kinsey Grant Baker: It makes a lot of sense. And all of these big events are obviously going to bring a lot of people into the city. They're going to bring a lot of power needs into the city, of course, as well. What other considerations are you really prioritizing from the utility perspective when planning for a major event like this? And I ask primarily to understand some of the risk profile a little bit more. What are some of the kind of red flags you're looking out for right now as you're planning for all of these to happen over the next couple of years?

Zoraya Oliver-Griffin: Yeah. Our biggest consideration always, whether it's an emergency, blue sky day operations, or a global special event, is we must ensure that we're delivering clean and safe water and power to all of our communities equitably. And if there's a disruption, that we do everything that we need to do to restore that service as safely and as quickly as possible and communicate effectively in the process.

From a risk profile, it's a very different environment today. The risks are very different than they were when I started in this industry over almost 25 years now. What I lose sleep at night about now is cyber attacks, right? And that's something that is gaining appreciation. It's the ability to leverage technology to cause a significant disruption. So it's not something that you can touch per se, right? It's happening in the background and it can happen at any point in time. But I will tell you, there are entities that are constantly attacking, are attacking us on a daily basis, right? So we're very, very well prepared for a cyber attack, but it's working in unison with our state partners, our federal partners, you know, other agencies that are providing critical services, and understanding how we're all gonna come together and keep those lines of communication and support each other through something, in case, God forbid, we have a cyber attack.

But it's all of those, you know. So, yeah, you've got your climate-driven threats for sure. But then you've got seismic activity, right? I mean, those are all the things that I have to worry about during the Olympics, is, you know, God forbid that we have the trifecta, right, where, it's going to happen in the summer, wildfire season, right? So we could have a wildfire. We could have seismic activity all happening at once with millions of people in a city that may not be familiar with the evacuation route or may not know, you know, what are the means of communication that they should be plugged into well in advance, right?

Managing all of that and working with our city partners and city agencies to navigate that and stress test scenarios well in advance. You would be shocked, hopefully not shocked, but at the level of preparation. And, you know, at what level we are engaging and, you know, the conversations that we have and the exercises and the plannings that we're doing almost on a daily basis as a concerted, you know, city and state and at the federal level as well. So it's all happening in the background. And it's building insurance, right? You hope you never have to use it. But if and when the day comes when you do, you want it to be as seamless and as smooth and as comprehensive as possible. Because that's what our customers deserve. That's what the city deserves. That's what the guests that we're going to be hosting deserve.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, right?

Zoraya Oliver-Griffin: Absolutely. 100%. 100%, yes.

Kinsey Grant Baker: I'm curious to know what the overlap might be between the kind of two elements of this conversation that we've covered today. When you're looking at what it takes to build out an emergency preparedness, emergency readiness, and a plan for these global events that are coming to Los Angeles, what is the kind of crossover there? What's the middle of the Venn diagram for how you prepare for both of these things at the same time?

Zoraya Oliver-Griffin: Without issue, you have to have an effective emergency management organization. Why? Because they are, I like to think of them as the connecting agency across all of the rest of the organization. Right? Right. And that starts with building the appropriate capacity of a team of very experienced emergency managers. You don't get that foresight during an emergency, but for having experience to lean into. Right. So that starts at the core.

Also, coupled with those seasoned emergency managers, is you have to have subject matter experts, in our case, for water and power, that are surrounding you and advising you on the risks, the operational risks. You know, how do we need to support our customers? What do we need to be communicating? And that is all fluid. And you have to plan and train and exercise together continuously. It's never a one and done. I like to compare an emergency response to a dance so that you're all dancing together in concert.

And then, you know, you add a team of seasoned climate resiliency experts like meteorologists and fire coordinators and climate scientists to help you navigate through climate-driven risks. And then you layer in partnerships with academia, community-based organizations, other utilities, local, state and federal agencies and other city departments. And that is your village that all comes together to help navigate, whether it be an emergency or whether it be a special event. That's your core. That's your core. And whatever the trigger is that brings you all together almost becomes irrelevant, because your core, you know, you just adapt that core depending on what the characteristic of what's driving you coming together.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Yeah. And I imagine it's great to have a bench that deep to pull from, you know, when you need to. My last question for you here, as you look ahead into what comes next, obviously a busy few years in Los Angeles, I would love to know what technology, what capabilities you feel are most important to prioritize investing in right now to prepare you for what the future might look like in 2028 when the Olympics come, but also beyond that, years, decades even from now. What matters most?

Zoraya Oliver-Griffin: First and foremost, investing in the hardening and upgrading of our infrastructure so that it can withstand the demand, not just withstand, but deliver excellence with the high demand, you know, when we're going to have all of these visitors here and the demand on both our water and power system. Building a world-class emergency management operation. So, God forbid, if we're in a position where we have to respond, we are capable and confident in our response.

And also increasing the use of our technology. It's a fine balance, right? And especially in today's environment where we're seeing technology advance so quickly, leveraging the technology as a tool, the same with AI, and so that we can get real-time situational awareness tools to help us make data-driven, informed decisions. Data-driven, informed decisions are non-negotiable in the world of emergency management. And then updated communication systems that allow us to communicate, to be nimble in our communications, communicate as much information as we need to as quickly as we need to in a dynamic environment. And that's at the core, is being able to effectively communicate.

Capabilities that help us enhance our collaborative planning. I can't say enough about collaborative planning. You know, and the investments that we make today, you know, are here to benefit our customers in the future. And you'll never go wrong. You'll never have a regret by making those investments today. You know, but making sure that you are, again, making those investments, you know, through the lens of legacy. What is the long-term effect beyond, you know, what's occurring today that's going to be a benefit to the customer?

Kinsey Grant Baker: This has been so wonderful. I mean, I feel like ending on this idea of how you plan for the future is a fitting way to finish this conversation. Zoraya, it has been so wonderful to hear your playbook. I used the word before. I'll use it again. I know to you it's just another day at the office, but to a lot of people listening to this, it is a really, really useful resource for understanding what emergency planning looks like at one of the most, I would say, stress-tested utilities in the nation and the biggest municipally owned in the nation as well. It's been an honor to hear how you go about all of this work. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Zoraya Oliver-Griffin: Yes, and thank you for giving me and the department the opportunity to share a glimpse of a day in the life of, or in our case, a couple of years in the life of. It really is a privilege to serve the public and serve our customers, and it's one that we take with tremendous responsibility and seriousness and discipline. It's also really exciting, though, to be in the utility industry, in the power sector right now, because change is happening so quickly. And we are at the precipice of being able to reimagine what the future is going to look like for the utility industry. And if that's not exciting and a once-in-a-career-lifetime opportunity, then I don't know what is. So thank you, Kinsey, for allowing us to share that with the audience today.

Kinsey Grant Baker: Of course, it was wonderful, and I think that is a really fitting note to end on here. So thank you so much, Zoraya, and to the team at LADWP for helping to make this happen, and thank you to all of our listeners for tuning into this episode of Power Perspectives. I'm Kinsey Grant Baker and I will see you next time.