New Chartwell Report: Storm Ready Is Not All-Hazards Ready
By Russ Henderson, Director of Research
Every utility employee knows their storm role. But according to a new report from Chartwell, Training and Exercises in Utility Emergency Management1, knowing how to respond to a familiar storm is not the same thing as being prepared for a genuine all-hazards emergency.
The report, based on Chartwell’s Emergency Management Benchmark Survey1 of 40 power utilities across North America, makes the case that the real measure of readiness isn’t the plans sitting on a shelf, it’s whether people can execute them under pressure.
The Formalization Gap
The report shows a gap between onboarding and ongoing readiness. Sixty percent of utilities require formal training for new Incident Management Team (IMT) members, but that commitment fades over time: just over half maintain a defined exercise schedule, and just under half require ongoing formal training. In other words, most utilities do a good job getting new IMT members up to speed, but far fewer keep them sharp as roles, plans, and technologies evolve.
That matters because IMT members are activated rarely but decide big things fast. Without recurring practice, institutional knowledge fades and personnel turnover quietly erodes readiness.
Who’s in the Room – and Who Isn’t
Exercises are most effective when they stretch beyond the IMT to test how the whole response ecosystem communicates and hands off responsibility. Utilities do this reasonably well internally: Corporate Communications tops the list of functions regularly included in training, drills, or exercises, followed closely by Distribution and Transmission Operations.
External participation tells a different story. Local and state emergency management agencies and Customer Service are included by roughly three-quarters of utilities, but local first responders show up less often, and regulators and mutual assistance partners are included by only about a third. Given how often utilities must coordinate with police and fire around downed lines, evacuations, and site safety, that’s a real gap.
Storms Get Exercised. Pandemics Don’t.
Plan coverage also skews heavily toward the hazards utilities already know well. Powerful storms and winter storms are exercised most frequently, and cybersecurity plans get regular attention too. But lower-probability, high-consequence hazards – pandemics, civil unrest, hazardous materials, physical security incidents – are rarely tested, even when formal plans exist for them. The report’s recommendation isn’t to exercise everything equally, but to periodically check whether an organization’s highest-consequence risks, including the rare ones, are being validated.
The report also addresses all-hazards exercise design. Rather than running a separate drill for every plan, utilities can layer multiple injects – a cyber disruption, a hazmat release, a communications outage – into a single severe-weather scenario. This tests plan interfaces and cross-functional coordination without multiplying the resource burden.
Technology Investment Needs a Training Partner
More than half of utilities have increased spending on emergency management-specific technology over the past three years, and about a fifth have grown that investment by 25% or more. But new tools only pay off if people know how to use them under real conditions – which means every technology investment quietly creates a parallel training obligation.
The Feedback Loop Question
On a more encouraging note, most respondents agree they use data from training and actual incidents to update their Emergency Operations Plan. The harder part, the report notes, is turning those lessons into tracked, assigned corrective actions rather than good intentions that fade after the after-action report is filed.
The Takeaway
Chartwell’s conclusion is straightforward: a mature emergency management program entails a structured, recurring, risk-informed training program, one that keeps pace with turnover, technology, and the full range of hazards a utility might actually face, is what separates an organization that looks prepared from one that performs when it matters.
1Requires CURI Research Center membership
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Russ Henderson is a utility industry research leader, writer and facilitator with 15 years of experience identifying emerging trends and helping utilities learn from one another. He serves as director of research at Chartwell and leads the Chartwell Utility Resilience Institute, where he develops research, industry councils and executive forums focused on outage communications, emergency management and organizational resilience. He also shapes the content for Chartwell’s EMACS and PowerUp conferences and serves as emcee for both events.
Since joining Chartwell in 2011, Russ has researched topics ranging from smart grid deployment and customer engagement to outage response and enterprise resilience. He is known for bringing utility leaders together, asking the questions that uncover meaningful insights, and translating complex industry challenges into practical guidance utilities can use.
