Disaster Talks: Going from hurricane to power on, faster

What are three things you can always count on?

Death, taxes, and natural disasters.

No matter how much you prepare, there’s not much you can do to stop a hurricane or ice storm from coming in and causing damage to your network.

Storm mitigation and restoration is a tall order, but if you understand what moving parts are under your control and what data you need to look for to make better decisions, you can save precious hours and get your community back up on its feet quicker.

That’s what Gary Huntley, Retired VP of Distribution Services and Bradley Smith, VP of Sales Operations and Demand Generation at AiDash sit down to discuss.

You can catch the full episode to get Gary’s personal breakdown of storm mitigation and restoration or keep reading for the top three takeaways from their discussion.

Watch the full storm interview

Top three takeaways

1. Every hour you can speed up storm restoration is an hour your community has power.

In disaster response speed is everything. Your community is without power and it’s your job to fix that.

Families are in the dark, small businesses can’t serve their customers – a day without power affects peoples’ livelihoods.

The quest really becomes “what can I do to start shaving hours or days off of the storm restoration timeline?”

2. Fast data is the key to faster, successful storm restoration.

Gary mentioned it a few times. Getting data quickly, that you can trust, can have the biggest impact on your storm response time.

Knowing the best places for staging sites, where outages are likely to occur, where you have grid hardening opportunities – all of that can greatly reduce the time it takes you to respond to a storm.

Not to mention being able to get an accurate snapshot of your system after a storm so you know exactly where damages occurred and what roadways may be flooded or blocked so you don’t have to waste time sending a crew to a site that’s underwater.

Insights like that will help you get the power on fast for the communities you serve.

3. There’s a lot more to storm restoration than people realize.

There’s no doubt, disaster response is a complex business.

Grid hardening to prepare for a storm. Assembling all storm prediction data and network design to figure out damage estimates. Lining up mutual assistance, finding staging sites, creating work packets, running safety and training orientations.

And that’s not even half of it. There are tons of moving pieces, and everything has to go perfectly for a quick restoration.

It’s your job to play the part of conductor, controlling the chaos to get to the right end result.

The good news? You don’t have to go at it alone with a spreadsheet anymore. There are technologies that exist to give you the data you need and people like Gary who love to talk through best practices.

Don’t forget to catch the full interview with Gary to get his storm response breakdown, or if you want to talk about how satellites and AI can streamline your storm response – get in touch with a specialist today!