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Negative Thinking for Emergency Planning

Could negative thinking actually be useful?  Well, in the context of emergency preparedness, the answer is a resounding yes! Consider this example.  Years ago, before word processing or desktop [...]

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Seeing is Believing When It Comes to Emergency Exercises

For utilities, emergency exercises are necessary, but without proper visual tools, can sometimes be deceiving. When I went to work for an electric utility, one of the first stops on the [...]

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What Utility Damage Assessors Can Learn from Super Bowl LI

To a utility’s damage assessors and restoration teams, the season’s Super Bowl comes in many forms: lightning, snow, ice storms, wind, forest fires, floods, dust, spills, twisters or [...]

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Emergency Outage Restoration and the Call for All Hands on Deck

Sometimes, when we’re researching ways to get a point across about outage restoration and emergency preparedness, we run across an article from an outside source that really hits home.  [...]

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The Role of Utility Senior Leaders During Outage Restorations

When emergencies strike, utility senior leaders must demonstrate solid management practices to efficiently and effectively guide the restoration process. Unfortunately, this reality sometimes [...]

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Storm Activation Without the Aggravation

It boggles the mind how subjective many utilities’ storm activation decisions can be.  I simply do not agree with companies that leave these decisions open to widespread interpretation or [...]

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Utility Training Exercise Injects

For utility companies, training exercise injects are sort of like virtual reality – like, say, The Matrix.  You know, the movie where humankind is enslaved in an interactive virtual reality [...]

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Emergency Preparedness HR Policies for Utilities

When you think about emergency planning, the role of human resources (HR) may not be the first thing that comes to mind.  After all, why think about emergency preparedness HR policies when there [...]

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Optimizing Lineman Scheduling for Faster Outage Restoration

One of the most important things – if not the most important thing – electric utilities can do to minimize restoration times is to find ways to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their [...]

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Outage Management Systems: What Makes a Good OMS?

Outage management systems (OMS) have become standard for U.S. electric utilities.  These systems have historically been built either in-house or by deploying a third party solution. At its core, [...]