Far away but still closely in touch with home

There are probably not too many people in San Francisco who use Skype to find out how their family is getting on back home during lambing season. But while Máire Sogabe may live in a place where the biggest things being born are successful start-ups, she still likes to keep in touch with how things are going on at the farm in Co Kerry.

“My mother keeps me up-to-date on all that’s happening so, while I’m far away, it feels like I’m close to home. We’d be in touch regularly so I know as much about what’s going on as I would if I were living there,” she said.

“I know what’s going on in my village through Facebook and I usually Skype my mother once or twice a week. She’ll often be out in the yard and be showing me the lambs and all,” she added.

Sogabe, who is originally from the Dingle Peninsula, first moved over to the US in 1996. After a few years travelling around, she settled there permanently in the early 2000s. As IT portfolio operations principal with Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), one of the country's biggest utilities, she is in charge of some of the company's biggest projects – the last one of which had a budget totalling more than $100 million.

According to Sogabe, while she loved living in Co Kerry, it was always on the cards that she’d leave Ireland once she’d finished college.

“My family were sheep farmers in west Kerry and the nearest village was three kilometres away so I was born in a place that was very beautiful, but didn’t have much going on in terms of excitement. I was keen to experience the urban life so it was inevitable I’d leave at some point,” she said.

Emigration

“I come from a family in which generations upon generations have emigrated so I think that going abroad wasn’t something that seemed foreign to me. I’d always had the experience of relatives coming home from cities such as New York and Los Angeles and they’d be looking very glamorous and be talking about all these places I could only imagine. I guess I was always curious about what life was like elsewhere because of it.”

“I didn’t really leave out of necessity – I left to explore,” she added.

While she has only recently moved into her new role, Sogabe has been working with Pacific Gas and Electric for more than 15 years.

“The projects I’ve worked on have gotten progressively bigger over the years and, in the new role I’ve just started, I’m not working so much at the project level any more but am now in charge of planning and monitoring the company’s entire book of works.

“This means I don’t get so caught up in the details as much and it’s not as technical as it was, but the new role is really interesting because it’s great to get an early glance of how we are going to use technology on projects before we start,” she said.

Projects

Former projects she has been involved in include deploying large scale geographic information systems (GIS) to manage all of PG&E’s electric assets by centralising distribution, construction and maintenance records.

Another project was centred on improving safety and reducing methane emissions from the company’s gas system. In 2012, PG&E became the first utility in the world to employ the car-mounted Picarro Surveyor solution, a sophisticated sensing technology capable of detecting and pinpointing the source of even minor natural gas leaks from far away.

The solution is about 1,000 times more sensitive than traditional leak detection equipment and PG&E said that using the survey has led to a 99 per cent reduction of minor, non-hazardous leaks on its system.

Being in San Francisco means that Sogabe might be far away from home, but she still finds herself surrounded by Irish people.

“There’s a big Irish community here and plenty of people from Ireland are working for Pacific Gas and Electric too,” she said..

“In fact the company was started by the O’Donoghue brothers who began installing gas lamps in the early 1900s and over the years merged with other companies to become what it is now.”

Sogabe has been active in community organisations throughout her career and is currently a board member of the Irish Network Bay Area, a not-for-profit for professionals living in the region.

“San Francisco has been a destination for emigrants for a long time and there are so many Irish people here that they don’t necessarily need our support in the way they might have done before.

“One of the things I’ve noticed is that Irish emigrants these days tend to be more educated and more confident than those that came over in the past and this has made it easier for them to get established here. But our network has helped a lot of people over the years and I’m proud to have played my part in that,” Sogabe said.