Hurricane Preparedness Symposium Highlights Power of Partnerships
In July, representatives from EEI, CenterPoint Energy, Dominion Energy, Duke Energy, Entergy, Florida Power & Light, Southern Company, and TECO Energy traveled to Capitol Hill to meet with federal lawmakers and their staff for the third annual Congressional Hurricane Preparedness and Recovery Symposium.
The symposium showcased the vital role of industry-government partnerships and mutual assistance networks. The event also emphasized the electric power industry's commitment to disaster preparedness and recovery, highlighting how technological advancements enable faster, more efficient responses as lineworkers and first responders restore power and hope to impacted communities.
During the event, electric companies showcased their disaster preparedness and resilience plans and tools, including:
- Dominion Energy’s grid upgrades that are enhancing resilience, including automatic sectionalizers that help restore power more quickly when outages occur.
- Duke Energy’s grid modernization plans, including investments in weather-resilient power poles, smart grid technologies, and unmanned aerial systems and helicopters to monitor the grid.
- Entergy's Damage Assessment Collecting Tool, which streamlines the damage assessment process and allows field assessors to access online maps to relay the exact location of where repairs need to be made.
- TECO Energy’s lineworker equipment, which highlighted the difficult task lineworkers face every day as they maintain, repair, and upgrade critical energy infrastructure and restore power after extreme weather events.
- Florida Power & Light’s drones, which optimize grid assessment efforts and allow crews to gain visibility into hard-to-access sites.
Power of Partnerships
The event's fireside chat, which featured American Red Cross Vice President for Disaster Programs Jennifer Pipa and EEI Senior Vice President for Energy Security and Industry Operations Scott Aaronson showcased the vital role of partnerships and mutual assistance networks across sectors.
“Electric companies are critical to national security and critical to health and safety. We appreciate the support of our government partners, and our mantra is to be better today than we were yesterday—and better tomorrow than we are today,” said Aaronson.
“When things occur, what we do is look to the entire network [of regional American Red Cross organizations] and ask each one of them to put forward their volunteers, so that we can bring them together and then deploy them down to the disaster area. It's the exact same kind of mutual aid assistance model [as the electric power sector],” Pipa said.
U.S. Representatives Troy Carter (D-LA) and Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), co-chairs of the Congressional Disaster Preparedness and Recovery Caucus, emphasized the importance of disaster preparedness and partnerships that support recovery efforts.
“These storms, high winds, and high waters, they don’t know zip codes, socioeconomic status, or political affiliation,” Rep. Carter said. “They are equal opportunity havoc wreakers. We thank you all for your partnership, and we stand ready to support you.”
Disaster preparedness and recovery requires “absolute partnership,” said Rep. Moskowitz, noting that the Caucus supports the electric power industry and emergency management officials.
To learn more about how EEI’s member companies respond to extreme weather events and other disasters, visit EEI’s website.