OPENING LINES TEAMWORK BETWEEN LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND UTILITIE SPELLS SAFER, SWIFTER POWER RESTORATION Source- https://www.americancityandcounty.com/ , Mike Zappone, First published Aug 02, 2024 An East Coast electric utility manager recently shared that his organization created an online portal for local government leaders across its service territory. The goal of the portal, in part, is to request in advance of a storm (or major event) each locality’s top three priorities for restoring power. Through the portal, there is also two-way communication between the utility’s community liaison and government leaders and police and fire chiefs. The utility can also tap data from its outage management system to tell local officials which circuits, substations, pumping stations and other assets are without power and how many crews are working on restoration. Not every locality has the technological or financial means to communicate about power restoration to the extent mentioned above. But there are a variety of ways to foster closer ties with electric utilities and their trade allies, especially before trouble strikes. The benefit is safely speeding up power restoration and shortening the tail of a storm. For example, to help coordinate the work of damage assessment and restoration during storms, a Northeastern utility established a public safety unit as a branch of its emergency response team and incident command system (ICS).The unit liaises with local fire and police departments to make addressing blocked roads and downed wires a priority even before restoration. Here’s how it works: In the wake of a storm, police can contact their utility liaison about an emergency with a single call, text or email. The emergency might be a driver trapped in a car with a downed wire laying on the vehicle.The utility, in turn, would make this a priority-one response. A utility crew assigned to fire and rescue work would then head for the scene. With that alignment and streamlined communication, government leaders and utilities can safely expedite emergency response and ultimately power restoration. By designating liaisons, pre-staging equipment and rehearsing scenarios and roles, each entity knows the other’s capabilities before a storm or major event. If clearing roads is the priority, the utility will know how many apparatuses the local department of public works has for the job. The electric utility can then earmark resources to accompany each apparatus and manage downed power lines that would complicate debris removal. Joint planning also allows all the entities to speak with one voice in updating the community and other stakeholders about the estimated time of restoration, or ETR.This builds trust with constituents, too, because all parties are working with the same information. ADOPTING JOINT EXERCISES For a municipality, joint planning starts internally by assessing each department to ensure managers have their business continuity and emergency response plans. Once they have their plans, government managers would run drills (drawing on a utility’s past storm data related to numbers of outages, poles down, roads blocked, etc.) with their utility 9 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 05, ISSUE 08
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