Emergency Planning for Utilities
Emergency Planning:
The Foundation for Successful Restoration
Emergency planning is complex. There are hundreds of variables to consider, and many internal and external stakeholders to satisfy. It’s a daunting process, especially with the constantly-evolving nature of the external environment. Luckily, your partner in emergency planning is only a phone call away.
EPP specializes in developing and optimizing emergency plans for energy and other utility companies. Our associates have extensive emergency planning and incident response backgrounds spanning decades, and our team has helped dozens of energy and other utilities maximize the effectiveness of their emergency plans and processes.
From emergency plan auditing, to debriefing, to outage restoration plan and standard operating procedure development, we can help your organization be ready for any critical situation that threatens your service delivery.
Key Benefits
- Flexible emergency plan assessment and development solutions can be as simple or as comprehensive as required by your organization’s needs.
- Highly experienced utility veterans bring decades of real world emergency planning experience to ensure your plan is cost- effective, regulator-friendly, and inclusive of all best practices.
- Efficient and effective, best-in-class process ensures that the maximum number of planning assumptions are validated, and the maximum number of vulnerabilities and improvement opportunities are identified.
Key Areas Of Focus
Emergency Response Plan Review and Development
Auditing your existing emergency response plan is one of our core specialties. Our expert team will assess your existing plan, identify the opportunities for improvement, and develop a new and improved plan designed to minimize the most important threats to your organization. Need to create a plan from scratch? Our consultants will work closely with your staff to develop a tailor-fit plan which supports your business goals and objectives.
Our consultants bring an average of 38 years of hands-on experience from the utility and emergency management industries, and approach every project based on what will work in real-life situations, rather than theoretical scenarios. Every plan we assess or develop is reviewed and practiced with our clients to ensure there are no obstacles or challenges to implementation. At the end of each project, our clients have detailed working plans to help them minimize service disruptions during emergencies.
Outage Restoration Plan Development
EPP can develop your Storm Restoration Plan with an eye on helping your company quickly reestablish infrastructure in the aftermath of a storm or other emergency. This service includes estimating the resources needed to restore services; determining the time and schedule needed for restoration; and establishing procedures for damage assessment. It also addresses internal communications to employees and other crew members as well as external communications to the media, customers and local authorities.
Standard Operating Procedure Development
EPP can assist you in creating and fully documenting standard operating procedures (SOPs) to ensure your emergency management activities become second nature to your employees. If your company does not have an emergency response plan, this documentation could be a starting point for your disaster planning efforts. SOPs can also help clearly define the roles and responsibilities of all employees during a crisis situation.
Security and Vulnerability Assessments
A secure and safe facility is paramount to preventing unnecessary emergencies. EPP’s consultants will perform a comprehensive site evaluation — including assessment of property ingress/egress; employee, client, and vendor access areas; remote site security; site surveillance; guard service; and ancillary services to ensure your environment is safe and secure for visitors and personnel. We can also conduct “Red Team” simulated facility invasions to specifically test security systems and evaluate your facility for potential internal and external threats to your operation. The end result will provide recommendations for remediation and redundancy for your critical services.
Incident Debriefing and Follow-Up Process
We’re available on an on-call basis to assist your organization to debrief your exercise, your storm post- mortem, or your incident after-review processes. We will compile your teams’ input, analyze it, and present it to your leadership with recommendations for continuous improvement. Our trained facilitators will ensure that your debriefing meetings run smoothly and are effective, that productive action items are generated, and that measurable improvements are made to the process. We can also train you or your designees to execute this process, to make it an essential part of your continuous improvement plan.
Our intensive debriefing process has been perfected based on the many client exercises and actual incidents in which we have participated. Our process assures that all internal stakeholders fully share their input and priorities, and that subsequent plan improvements receive complete approval and buy- in. From the moment the debriefing meeting begins, everyone’s rank is left at the door – feedback is gathered and shared, actions are noted, all information is documented, all inputs are analyzed, process improvements are identified, and updates are provided to all involved.
