Industry Highlights

In March 2018, Virginia held a statewide tornado drill as part of its overall emergency preparedness efforts.  This is refreshing, as I don’t hear about tornado drills very often, [...]

For utility companies, incident management software can dramatically improve the efficiency of emergency response.  Many utility companies rely heavily on various manual mechanisms to orchestrate [...]

Every four years, the Federal Emergency Management Agency publishes an updated FEMA strategic plan designed to enhance the country’s disaster preparedness and reduce the perceived complexity of [...]

Utilities – especially electric utilities – are facing increased pressure from all angles to improve outage response times.  And this is a trend that is only expected to increase over time, [...]

It is hard to believe that it’s been 7 years since Tokyo Electric Power experienced the worst nuclear incident in its history – an earthquake and subsequent tsunami that essentially destroyed the [...]

It’s no secret that the utility workforce is currently in a state of flux.  Baby Boomers are retiring in droves, leaving the remaining employee base with a knowledge gap.  An estimated 50% of [...]

Now that 2017 is waaaaay back in the rear-view mirror, and the 1Q of 2018 is well underway, I thought it would be fun to find out what industry experts consider to be some of the top electric [...]

As an emergency preparedness professional, it’s always something.  Hurricanes, earthquake activity, forest fires, terrorism, cybersecurity, derechos, microbursts, you name it.  And now we have [...]

The recent California forest fires illustrate the importance of proper dispatcher training.  On October 8, 2017, a handful of fires exploded onto the scene in Sonoma County.  Panicked residents [...]

The FEMA Urban Search and Rescue or USAR teams are made up of individuals that specialize in search and rescue, disaster recovery and emergency triage and medicine.  They are typically deployed [...]