LiDAR for wildfire mitigation, Hawaiian Electric

The challenge

Wildfire risk along utility corridors is a life-safety issue in Hawaiʻi, and Hawaiʻi Island's corridors are long, remote, and rugged. Vegetation crowds fire-prone lines across terrain that's slow and expensive to walk. The need was on-demand risk analysis at a rate that lets the work actually get done — so mitigation crews spend their time trimming, not searching.

What we did

We flew the corridors with drone LiDAR — a RESEPI-integrated Hesai XT-32 sensor — and built a point cloud dense enough to read individual tree structure and species. From that cloud we classified the conductors and the surrounding vegetation as separate layers, then generated 3D clearance buffers 12 ft out from every line. Anything growing inside a buffer gets flagged automatically, so encroachment shows up as data instead of a hunch.

Those flags publish to an interactive web map. Crews open it on a tablet, pan the corridor, and see every encroachment pinpointed in 3D against the real terrain — a direct work list for the field rather than a stack of drawings.

What we delivered

• A dense, classified Hesai XT-32 point cloud across 60+ corridor miles
• Separate line and vegetation classification
• 3D clearance buffers 12 ft from each line, with encroachment flagged inside
• An interactive web map of every encroachment for the trim crews

The result

Hawaiian Electric gets an objective, repeatable record of corridor risk, and crews work from a map that pinpoints exactly what to trim — affordable, on-demand analysis for wildland-fire mitigation across the Big Island. It's one half of a broader vegetation program we run on the island. See the field-data side of the program →