Hope for the best and plan for the worst: That’s a foundational attitude behind how public power utilities execute well-orchestrated emergency management. Emergency management isn’t just a reaction to an event or moment in time, but encompasses a suite of efforts that support each other in a singular cycle. The emergency management cycle consists of four main parts: mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery.
Both the challenges utilities face and the technology and tools available to utilities has affected each part of the cycle. In addition to individual utility efforts, the American Public Power Association has developed and updated an array of resources supporting public power across the cycle. Here’s a look at how some public power utilities are employing these tools along with rethinking other processes to improve all aspects of emergency management in their organizations.
A New Risk Landscape
Identifying risk is the first step toward mitigating it. In the risk management process, utility workers identify potential hazards and implement measures to avoid or reduce these risks, such as providing cybersecurity training for employees or hardening critical infrastructure that could be vulnerable to storm damage. Kyle Gibbs, corporate risk supervisor for Colorado Springs Utilities, oversees the risk management process for all four services the utility offers the city’s 488,000 residents: water, wastewater, electric, and gas.
Gibbs is also chair of APPA’s Risk Management Working Group, which helped to develop the documents and sample workshops comprising the Public Power Risk Management Toolkit. “The toolkit provides resources to guide organizations in assessing risks and gives people documents to support the process of capturing risks and organizing them in a risk matrix,” he said.
“This matrix allows us to see risks throughout the organization and score them,” he explained. “It helps us quantify risks and determine what we need to do to mitigate them.”
“Utilities have limited resources, and this risk management toolkit helps to really prioritize and allocate scarce resources to where they're needed the most,” said Bryan Willnerd, who manages treasury and risk for Lincoln Electric System, a utility with more than 153,000 retail customers in Lincoln, Nebraska. What risk management does is focus on risk ahead of time and determine what controls can be put in place to prevent events from happening or result in outcomes that aren’t as severe. Because not all risk can be avoided, risk management means utility teams have written strategies to work through when something does happen so they can get back to normal operations more quickly.
Another tool utilities use to reduce risk and prepare for incidents is the APPA eSafety Tracker powered by ESAMS. Ryan Thornberry, training and safety manager at Danville Utilities in Virginia, uses that tool in his city of nearly 42,000 and surrounding areas to pull together job briefs, training modules, utility manuals, and incident reporting into one easy-to-use interface that line workers can use on a tablet and carry into the field.
“We have a significant territory with our electric grid — 500 square miles — and we were doing job briefings on paper,” Thornberry said. Thornberry said the new eSafety Tracker system enables his team to download more detailed, project-specific instructions so that line crews have better, more complete information when out on restoration calls.
For instance, the Danville team has customized the tracker to tell personnel where larger crews would be needed or what hospital is closest to a job if someone gets hurt. It also has better information to share with people outside the utility, like mutual aid workers or first responders. “Ice storms, thunderstorms, car wrecks — all those kinds of things — when they happen, our team works closely with emergency personnel,” Thornberry said. “When power goes down, the team does job briefings and talks about the hazards before anyone goes in to do their jobs.”
Because the tracker also enables incident reporting, Thornberry said he uses it as an analysis tool to help determine areas of training that may help mitigate risks when crews are fixing downed lines or other issues. “If there was an accident or a near-miss, we use the tracker as an in-house tool to help avoid issues in the future,” he said.
Practicing Plans
When it comes to being prepared for emergencies — or any risk — Gibbs said the key is planning. He pointed to risks old and new — everything from the age-old storm damage utilities have grappled with for more than a century to risks of bigger, hotter wildfires in our changing world. He also pointed to newer risks stemming from the unrelenting demand for data centers that many utilities must plan for now.
“Planning is more critical than ever. Utilities will have to scale up with new technologies,” he noted. They also need to look more seriously at potential risks they may not have considered before. “When you're looking at, for example, Los Angeles and the fires that have taken place there, it's hard to see how that could occur maybe 30 years ago, but as we look at the drying conditions, the severity of spiking heat and all other pieces that are coming into play, the probability of a wildfire occurring could be growing for a utility. How would the utility meet that risk? It all comes back to planning.”
Planning is also an important part of the preparedness phase of the emergency management cycle. Practicing the plan is critical, too. As Willnerd said, “Going through an incident for the first time without any documented controls or mitigation strategies is not recommended.”
Both Colorado Springs Utilities and LES use tabletop exercises regularly, which consists of gathering teams to practice how they would respond in a specific scenario. The scenarios usually are designed to test or identify certain stress points utilities might face, so they can then flesh out plans for worst cases.
“Exercises are a great way for departments to practice what response plans they would have if various incidents were to occur. We do tabletop exercises frequently in different areas of our organization, cyber being one of them,” Willnerd said. “If we get a ransomware event and our system is shut down, how do we pay our employees and vendors? What do we need to do to make sure that there's as little disruption as possible?”
Such community-level exercises can help hone more internal response processes and complement broader state, regional, and national exercises that test response and coordination across multiple utilities.
Utilities from Oklahoma and Kansas participated in an emergency response exercise and workshop last summer to test the response to a major winter storm using the Public Power Mutual Aid Playbook. The playbook, which APPA updated in 2024, outlines the process for process for utilities to support each other when a major event affects the electric grid. Through the Mutual Aid Network, utilities can volunteer crews and equipment to temporarily increase an impacted utility's power restoration capacity following a major event.
In the APPA-facilitated exercise, attendees worked through responding to an ice storm that knocked out power in Oklahoma, necessitating assistance from Kansas line workers. The scenario then tested how the crew roles would flip as the fictional storm moved north into Kansas.
“We have people who are retiring and mid-level supervisors moving up, and there are always new people to train,” said Cheryl Adams, general manager at Municipal Electric Systems of Oklahoma, a co-host for the training.
Another co-host was Grand River Dam Authority, an agency supplying power and services to communities across Oklahoma. David Hefner is GRDA’s superintendent of distribution power line maintenance, and he said the value of exercises as a preparedness tool is that they bring out the ‘what-if’ questions. “What do we do if we are hit with a major storm? Do we have enough material on hand? If we have to call in extra help, how will we house them? How will we feed them? Do we have enough people on staff who can lead them around our service area?” he asked, demonstrating some of the questions that come up throughout the exercise.
Some of the utilities that participated in this exercise said they didn't have a formal written storm preparedness plan in place. “They went back and started implementing one,” Hefner added. “You need to have a plan. That way, you don't have total chaos.”
Improved Response and Recovery
Another thing Hefner and Adams said utilities need for full emergency management recovery is a deeper understanding of FEMA requirements for reimbursement when mutual aid crews must be called in for incidents that receive a disaster declaration from the President. In those situations, public power utilities qualify for FEMA assistance to cover most of the response and recovery costs.
“There's a lot of record keeping when working with the federal government,” Adams said. “They want receipts. They want documentation.”
Receipts cover more than many workshop attendees realized. “Receipts you’ll need include the housing visiting crews use, and their food and fuel expenses,” Hefner explained. He added that utilities should also document how many hours the crews work and the mileage traveled, as FEMA may want to know these details.
Hefner also noted that before and after photos of damaged equipment for FEMA are helpful. “If you don’t have pictures of equipment from before the storm, take pictures of the wreckage before you start to work on it and then take pictures after you reassembled because FEMA wants to see this documentation,” he said.
As for the mutual aid process itself, getting signed up to be part of the network should be attended to before aid is needed or offered. “When you start responding out of state, you've got to have that mutual aid agreement in place, Hefner said. “It takes some time for this to happen, so get it done on a blue sky day. Don’t wait for the sky to fall.”
Adams said the exercise and workshop were so impactful that one of her organization’s member utilities used their learnings from the workshop and the Mutual Aid Playbook to perform their own exercise for utility staff and others engaged in emergency situations.
“They brought in all of their emergency management partners — street crews, community services, cemetery, library, police, fire, and their electric utility workers — then they did an exercise based on the one they did with us,” she said. “They learned a lot, which was good, and they shared it with their community.”
That’s even better because utilities aren’t the only ones who need to hope for the best and plan for the worst.
APPA’s Recent Emergency Management Efforts
The American Public Power Association has developed numerous resources and offered various supports in recent years that aim to help public power utilities improve efforts around the emergency management cycle. Groups including the Mutual Aid Committee, Risk Management Committee, and Safety Committee
provide valuable member input into these efforts.
| Mitigation |
Public Power Risk Management Toolkit: A three-part toolkit with supporting materials to help you identify, assess, and mitigate risks Case study on grid hardening: A look at various coastal community resilience efforts eSafety Tracker: Tool for identifying safety trends and utility training needs |
|---|---|
| Preparedness |
2024 regional mutual aid workshop: to test the updated Public Power Mutual Aid Playbook eSafety Tracker: Assign and track training programs, conduct crew inspections Hurricane season hotwash: To identify lessons from recent mutual aid deployments |
| Response |
Mutual Aid Playbook: 2024 update includes new tools, including a crew coordination |
| Recovery | Statement of Principles: A guide clarifying the mutual aid reimbursement and documentation process |
