Part one of a three-part blog series on what utilities can learn from emergency rooms when it comes to managing an urgent response.
In both an emergency room and a utility control center, the first challenge is often the same: Make the best possible decision with the information available in that moment.
A patient arrives with clear symptoms but an incomplete medical history; a storm moves through a service territory with outages appearing faster than field crews can assess them. In both situations, there is no time to wait for perfect information. The response has to begin with what is known, while creating a process for learning more and adapting strategy as conditions change.
For utilities, that starts with establishing a reliable operating picture. During the early stages of a storm, utilities may be looking at outage management systems, SCADA, customer calls, GIS and initial field reports. Each provides useful information, but none tells the entire story on its own.
Darrin Reeb, managing director at Arcos, has seen that uncertainty play out throughout his utility career.
“At the onset of a storm, we don’t really know,” he says. “You might have beautiful weather outside the service center, but 30 miles away, you may have 100% of your customers out.”
That makes the quality of the underlying data especially important. The most sophisticated system can’t compensate for an inaccurate view of what’s actually happening in the field. If GIS or as-built information is out of date, the operating picture can start with gaps before damage assessment is even underway.
The goal is not to eliminate uncertainty. It is to establish enough confidence in the information available to act, then continuously improve that picture as new information comes in.The U.S. Department of Energy reinforces this approach in its Energy Emergency Response Playbook for States and Territories, which describes emergency response as an iterative process of gathering information, assessing consequences, sharing critical updates and coordinating restoration.
The same principle applies to utilities during a storm: effective response doesn't require perfect information from the outset, but it does depend on continuously improving the operating picture and getting new information to the people making decisions.
Information needs to move with the work
The next challenge is making sure information flows across the response. For an emergency room team, that means keeping patient records updated so that as a patient moves from triage to treatment, whether in the ER or in later follow-up appointments, the latest diagnoses and prescriptions are always at hand.
For utilities, it’s the damage assessment that starts to inform restoration planning. Like a patient’s medical records, that assessment has to move through the restoration process and absorb additional information as conditions change. Back office teams turn that assessment into a work order; that work goes out to the assigned crew; the crew's findings make their way back into the systems guiding the next decision.
That becomes harder as more crews and organizations enter the response. Mutual aid can rapidly expand the workforce with employees and contractors from other companies. That increases the number of outside resources a utility has to bring into its operating process, while internal teams may already be working across multiple systems.
“The real gap becomes the flow of information,” Reeb says.
That gap matters because storm response is always distributed, sometimes across hundreds of square miles. The more the response depends on manually moving information between systems and people, the more opportunities there are for context to be delayed or lost.
The strongest restoration efforts ensure the people assessing damage, managing crews and coordinating jobs are working from the same evolving picture. This is one reason utilities are moving away from disconnected, paper-heavy workflows toward more integrated field and workforce processes.
ComEd offers one example of why crew visibility matters. Its storm-resource process previously required 11 steps across spreadsheets, whiteboards and email. The utility reported reducing that to four steps with a centralized crew-management process, making it easier to see available crews as an event develops.
“Before we automated the management of crews, it would take us up to 4 hours to even be able to say, ‘This is how many crews we have, and here’s where they are,’" says Kimberly Smith, director for emergency preparedness. "Now we’ve reduced an 11-step process to an easy, four-step process that shows us who we have on site, right away."
For utility leaders, the lesson from emergency medicine is straightforward: You can’t wait for a perfect diagnosis to begin treatment. You need a reliable process for making decisions with the information you have, validating what you learn, and sharing a single operating picture as the situation changes.
The first hour is not about knowing everything. It is about establishing enough clarity to move, and making sure that clarity travels with the work.