The Impending Snowstorm: A Live Stress Test for Utility Alignment
As Winter Storm Fern approaches, with impacts expected across dozens of states and more than 180 million people, utilities are doing what they do best – staging crews, activating communications plans, and preparing systems for a prolonged response.
Yet storms of this scale reveal far more than physical vulnerabilities. For the most resilient organizations, they serve as stress tests of alignment across operations, emergency management, communications, and leadership.
Over the past year, utilities participating in Chartwell’s Emergency Management and Outage Communications Leadership Councils, as well as the Organizational Resilience Executive Council, have shared lessons from hurricanes, wildfires, extreme heat, and other non-traditional events. A clear theme has emerged: the greatest failures in a crisis are rarely about technical response capability. They are about how an organization holds together under pressure.
📖 Emergency Management Leadership Council Guideline No. 8 – Operationalizing and Validating Emergency Operations Plans (EOPs)
Familiar Events, Real Strain
Winter storms are often dismissed as “known hazards.” However, as this system moves in, it brings the potential for the same organizational stress points seen in larger disasters.
Recent OREC discussions on all-hazards planning have reinforced a critical insight – risk is not defined by event type, but by whether roles, authorities, and decision frameworks hold when conditions deviate from the norm. When response structures are tuned too narrowly, even familiar hazards can create unfamiliar strain.
When restoration stretches, multiple regions are hit simultaneously, or safety constraints limit movement, well-rehearsed structures begin to fray. Decision authority blurs. Executive involvement increases. Communications move faster than operations. Coordination becomes harder precisely when it should become tighter.
These are not weather-specific failures. They are organizational vulnerabilities that winter storms often expose first.
A Live Rehearsal
Utilities that navigate this week best will treat the storm as a diagnostic event, not just an operational task. They will apply all-hazards thinking in practice – aligning emergency management, operations, and communications around roles and objectives, not the weather – and preparing customers for how long-duration events differ from routine outages.
📖 CURI Resilience Research Center Report: Leadership and Staffing in Emergency Management
This storm may not carry the visibility of a Category 5 hurricane, but it offers a rare opportunity to surface misalignment before the next truly catastrophic event arrives.
The question is not whether crews can restore power, but whether the organization can stay aligned as complexity increases.
To learn more about the Emergency Management Leadership Council, please reach out to Tim Herrick.
You may also like these blog posts:
- From Crisis to Transformation: CenterPoint Energy’s Post-Beryl Blueprint for Resilience
- A New Standard for Crisis Communications
- Resilience in the Heat of Crisis: LADWP’s Lessons from the Pacific Palisades Fire
