One Voice Under Pressure: Lessons from the Front Lines of Crisis Communication
By Carlos Torres, Resilience Executive Advisor, Chartwell Inc.
Over the years, I’ve seen utilities face many kinds of emergencies — terror attacks, major blackouts, hurricanes, and now an entirely new era of extreme weather and digital risk. Technology has advanced, and our systems have grown more complex, but one truth remains constant: trust is the currency of leadership in any crisis.
Infrastructure can be rebuilt, and service can be restored, but without the confidence of employees, customers, regulators, and other stakeholders, recovery is never complete.
At Chartwell’s 2025 PowerUp Conference in Dallas, I had the honor of moderating a panel with three leaders who’ve faced these same moments head-on: Colonel (Ret.) Michelle Fraley of LUMA Energy, Shaun Vacher of National Grid New England, and Keith Stephens of CenterPoint Energy. Together, we explored what “One Voice” communications really means when the world is watching.
👉 Explore Chartwell’s Organizational Resilience Executive Council
My Mantra
As I progressed in my career, I developed a mantra in building trust with stakeholders, and it hasn’t changed:
Tell customers what you know, tell them what you don’t know, and when you know what you didn’t know, tell them.
Emergencies are chaotic. Information shifts by the minute. That’s where clarity, cadence, and consistency build the credibility that operations alone cannot.
This principle applies to every kind of event. Whether the challenge is a hurricane, a wildfire, or a cyberattack, what matters most is consistent, credible communication. When you speak honestly throughout the event and especially early, even bad news builds trust.
At LUMA Energy, Michelle Fraley and her team faced intense public scrutiny while rebuilding Puerto Rico’s electric grid after Hurricanes Irma and Maria and again during Hurricane Fiona. Their early missteps showed that communication cannot be reactive. Now, every LUMA employee is trained to be a communicator through monthly Siempre en Contacto sessions led by the CEO. They learn are trained to explain what is happening in plain language to their neighbors and customers, creating an informed community long before a storm ever hits.
👉 Read the case study on LUMA’s gold award-winning initiative: Data-Rich Web Platform Modernizes Emergency Response Capabilities at LUMA Energy
Build “One Voice” Communications Before the Storm
“One Voice” can’t just be a slogan; it has to be a state of mind.
At LUMA, that meant structuring communications through the Incident Command System so that public information officers, digital teams, internal communicators, and liaisons to regulators and local leaders are aligned. The same message must reach the press, regulators, and mayors across all 78 municipalities, with updates that are timely, clear, and consistent.
At National Grid New England, Shaun Vacher faces a different scale of challenge: 1.4 million customers across 168 communities, each with its own expectations. After a series of severe Nor’easters and new wildfire risks, National Grid built a “municipal room” where every town manager has a single point of contact during emergencies. Twice-daily reports to regulators and real-time outage information help customers make decisions for their families.
Cadence Wins
Keith Stephens brought it home with lessons from CenterPoint’s experience after Hurricane Beryl, which left more than 2 million Houston-area customers without power. Writing press releases in the middle of an event, he said, “isn’t just painful; it’s fatal.” His team now keeps “ramen content” ready: pre-approved statements that can be updated with facts and released on time. They aim for 80 percent complete and 100 percent on schedule, not 100 percent perfect and too late.
His other rule: “Flood the zone.” Use every channel — email, the web, social media, radio, and crews in the field—to make sure no customer can say they didn’t hear from us.
👉 Read the blog post: From Crisis to Transformation: CenterPoint Energy’s Post-Beryl Blueprint for Resilience
The Final Ten Percent
From my own experience, and echoed by every panelist, the last ten percent of restoration defines how people remember the event. Michelle Fraley described how LUMA keeps Regional Operations Command centers active even after the main Emergency Operations Center stands down. The message to the public remains clear: the work is not over until every customer is restored. Closing communication too soon creates frustration and erodes trust.
Closing Reflections
This conversation reaffirmed what decades in the field have shown me. Communication is not a side task of operations; it is integral to resilience. Preparedness, structure, and honesty determine how a utility is judged long after the storm has passed. It will also impact any future response to events.
In the end, customers do not measure their utility’s performance in a crisis by outage counts or restoration curves. They measure it by how well they were informed, how clearly they were heard, and how much they believed in the people leading the response. That belief — earned word by word, update by update — is what real resilience looks like.
To learn more about the Organizational Resilience Executive Council, please contact Tim Herrick.
You may also like these blog posts:
- Organizational Resilience: Defining, Governing, and Measuring for Strategic Impact
- Operationalizing and Validating Emergency Operations Plans
- From Crisis to Transformation: CenterPoint Energy’s Post-Beryl Blueprint for Resilience
