Industry Highlights

I spend a lot of time blogging about emergency preparedness in the electric utility industry, but water system operators face their own set of unique challenges.  One of which is the fact that [...]

Laser defense systems are all the rage these days, because they can be utilized in multiple situations to prevent manmade disasters – whether it’s shooting down drones or blasting North Korean [...]

I typically think about emergency preparedness in the context of electric, gas and water utilities, but I recently took a peek behind the curtain at how hospitals prepare for disasters.  And it [...]

I just read a great article describing how the US Forest Service developed the organizational model used by all utilities during emergency response – the Incident Command Structure, or ICS.  [...]

The notion of unmanned power plants seems like something you might find in some futuristic society, but the truth is that it’s not all that far-fetched. The constant evolution of technology is [...]

The 3 natural gas utilities that deliver approximately 90% of Kansas’ natural gas have been ordered to develop a plan to replace obsolete distribution lines in the state.  The reason is that [...]

Nursing homes and other places where elderly people reside must be accounted for in emergency planning.  Sadly, the main reason this is top-of-mind is because eight Florida nursing home residents [...]

One of my favorite topics in the world of emergency preparedness is training, exercises and drills.  Most drills in the utility industry revolve around nasty weather, but I always encourage [...]

Between Hurricane Irma and Harvey, September 2017 has not been kind in terms of the weather here in the U.S.  But it could always be worse.  At the time of this writing, reports are starting to [...]

Electric utilities are becoming increasingly adept at developing and communicating outage data / outage statistics to employees and customers. Unfortunately, this same level of sharing has so far [...]