Emergency Planning Guide for Utilities, 2nd Edition

An increase in major natural disasters—and the growing number of damaging events involving gas, electric, water, and other utilities—has led to heightened concerns about utility operations and public safety. Due to today’s complex, compliance-based environment, utility managers and planners often find it difficult to plan for the action needed to help ensure organization-wide resilience and meet consumer expectations during these incidents. Emergency Planning Guide for Utilities, Second Edition offers a working guide that presents new and field-tested approaches to plan development, training, exercising, and emergency program management.

The book will help utility planners, trainers, and responders—as well as their vendors and suppliers—to more effectively prepare for damaging events and improve the level of the utility’s resilience. It also focuses on planning needed in the National Incident Management System and ICS environment that many utilities are embracing going forward. In doing so, utilities will be able to improve the customer experience while reducing the impact that damaging events have on the utility’s infrastructure, people, and resources.

Features

• Provides a comprehensive risk assessment for utilities seeking to improve their plans
• Identifies local, state, and federal emergency management organizations and examines how utilities should interface with them for large-scale emergencies and disasters
• Offers a view of computer and web-based outage and control systems before, during, and after major storms and how those systems affect restoration
• Presents tactics for auditing emergency plans and programs and applying metrics so plans can be significantly improved
• Includes Internet resources to further improve utility emergency plans, training, and exercises while maintaining regulatory compliance