Hurricane Preparedness Week: Tips for Public Power Utilities

During National Hurricane Preparedness week, which runs May 24 through May 30, APPA urges you to get ready for the storm season ahead with these five tips and infographic:

Review your Emergency Response Plans

Review your emergency response plan on an annual basis to ensure that employees understand their roles and responsibilities during a storm, staff contact information is updated, and contact information with local vendors (e.g., hotels, restaurants) is updated, in case their services are needed.

Ensure that your mutual aid agreements are in place

Ensure that you have local, state/regional, and national mutual aid agreements in place. By signing the APPA national mutual aid agreement, you will link your utility to approximately 2,000 municipal and cooperative utilities. This can be helpful when seeking reimbursement from FEMA – mutual aid agreements are required to be eligible to receive federal aid.

To ensure that your utility has signed the APPA national mutual aid agreement, please visit publicpower.org/mutualaid or click here to sign one now. (Please note that both links are only available to APPA utility members.)

Review the Public Power MAP

The Public Power Mutual Aid Playbook (MAP) can help you identify your regional mutual aid coordinators, should you need support outside of your existing mutual aid agreements. For large-scale storms affecting multiple states, network coordinators will provide situation awareness from you to APPA, who can then help coordinate federal resources (e.g. FEMA housing, fuel for bucket trucks). This can be found at publicpower.org/MutualAid.

Conduct a Drill

Test your emergency response procedures during “blue-sky days,” so that you can tweak and make improvements to your plan before a storm.

Develop a Communications/Media Plan

In the world of tweets and posts, the public expects to be kept abreast of restoration efforts. Therefore, it’s important to review your process for disseminating information to them via social media, press releases, etc. APPA has developed a sample communications plan that can used as a guide. The guide can be found at publicpower.org/MutualAid

Of course, please feel free to contact Mike Hyland (mhyland@publicpower.org / 202-467-2986) or myself (pkumar@publicpower.org / 202-467-2985) should you need any help before, during, or after a storm.