Tornado Recovery Lessons Learned from Kentucky

Image courtesy of Niccolò Ubalducci under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic License, resized to 700 x 391 pixels.

I stumbled upon a case study describing how Mayfield Electric & Water used lessons learned to facilitate a recent tornado recovery effort.  In December 2021, a massive tornado hammered residents residing in Mayfield, KY.  Approximately 500 homes were destroyed and 22 people lost their lives.  But thanks to the utility’s fast action, things could have been infinitely worse.

The Ins and Outs of Mayfield Electric’s Tornado Recovery Operations

The origin of the story is 2009, when 10,000 people lost power during an ice storm.  Recovery was slow and inefficient because the utility did not have an outage restoration plan in place.  Luckily, utility official were quick to realize the error in their ways and worked rapidly to create an emergency preparedness plan soon after the 2009 event.

Fast forward 12 years, and the company’s plan was put to the ultimate test.  The tornado recovery took on added complexity because the twister ravaged the main office and destroyed computers, servers, and a fleet of bucket and digger trucks.  All told, the City of Mayfield incurred $45 million worth of damage.

Here is a small list of the utility’s response to the 2021 tornado:

• Efforts were initiated to make sure all employees and their families were safe, relocating them to hotels in neighboring communities that did not lose power.
• Damage to the utility’s equipment was assessed, a process made easier due to the fact that the utility received help from volunteers, vendors, and other utility providers including the neighboring utility, West Kentucky Rural Electric Cooperative Corporation.
• The utility’s advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) system was utilized to export visual graphs of electric restoration progress, enabling the precise tracking of work and the ability to provide accurate updates to the community.

All told, the tornado recovery was completed within 4 weeks – the water system was restored within 30 hours, the substation was back online in 7 days, and within 1 month power was restored to all customers.  Tornado recovery is extremely complex, and to recover within 30 days is an impressive achievement, something that would not have happened without the benefit of past lessons learned.