About three to fours days before a storm ever gets here there are calls being made with contractors and other utilities across the nation, depending on how bad the storm is supposed to be. If its forecast to hit us, we secure every hotel room we can get in town. We have rented an entire holiday inn express before. We also hit up a bunch of restaurants to cater breakfast, lunch and dinner. Lunch is generally a bag lunch, or eat off the truck.
Two days before the storm we check the track, and if its close enough we make the call to roll the help. We have the crews in the motel rooms waiting on the storm.
Once the storm subsides enough to permit safe work, we send out crews. Generally speaking, maps aren't shared with contractors. They MUST have what is known as a “bird dog” that is an actual employee of the affected utility. Communication and knowledge of the area is a must. Contractors from different states have no idea of feeds. Even neighboring utilities have very little knowledge of our system.
generally speaking, everything must be cleared with dispatchers. This is where the bottleneck generally happens, and you see crews sitting around doing nothing while the power is out right around the corner. They are waiting on dispatcher approval to go to an area or to energize anything.
Another big problem is too much help. There are only so many utility employees to lead the crews around so this results again, in crews sitting around, pissing off those without power.
I personally like the idea of giving the foremen three to six crews and letting the foreman have all the outages fed from a
particular substation. I’ve had 6 crews before. Its a lot of work coordinating all the crews. Find a broke pole, put a crew on it and move on. Three phase tore down, same thing. Put a crew on it and move on. Everything has to be grounded and nothing is energized without the bird dog and dispatch saying ok.
Always work from the substation out naturally. Get the three phase up and going to the first set of breakers, work on the taps after the three phase is hot.
the last customers on the end of the line are the maddest. They sit for two to four days with no power seeing anyone working and they think they have been forgot about.
Also, those on a medical list are SOL in a hurricane. If your life depends on electricity you better have a generator.
this is a concise list. There is also LOTS if behind the scenes stuff going on with paperwork. Especially if its a FEMA event. FEMA wants outages and work divided by county, so timekeeping and record keeping by the bird dog and/or dispatchers is crucial.
