If you live in the gulf south region of the United States, chances are you have a hurricane story.
DataCapable’s Director of Success, Katy Desjardins, made that clear with her own personal story when answering the first question at our recent webinar with BetterGrids and our Partners at Kissimmee Utility Authority (KUA), Eye of the Storm: Outage Data During a Superstorm.
When the power goes out, a utility’s outage map is the go-to public-facing resource for storm response efforts. But unfortunately, many utility systems lack the real-time information customers need to keep themselves and community stakeholders in the loop on power restoration efforts.
Instead of leveraging outage data with a real-time map, some utilities still rely on traditional storm response and service restoration efforts like call centers. During our webinar, KUA’s Vice President of Information Technology, Jef Gray, highlighted the challenges of those processes.
“When you called a power company in the old world, you wanted to know three things: ‘Do you know our power is out?’, ‘Are you on your way’ and ‘How long is this going to take?’,” said Gray. “All of those things can now be answered via text, [or with a map].”
With extreme weather events increasing in severity and frequency worldwide, utilities are more at risk of experiencing outage events today than at any other point in history. Given limited staff and budgets, this often presents a challenge for utilities diligently working to maintain or restore service.
That’s why many utilities are turning to vendors for cloud software to implement into their existing workflows.
“Utilities have historically taken on outage maps internally, but I’ve seen a lot of change in the industry with building relationships and trust with vendors,” said Desjardins. “We all know [issues will] inevitably come up, so it’s crucial utilities know ‘Who is going to fix this if I run into something?’ before the go-live date.”
In a recent case study, KUA’s team goes beyond our webinar discussion to offer further insight into how we deployed an upgraded outage map ahead of Hurricane Ian and how that map – powered by the DataCapable Platform – helped them respond to the third-costliest weather disaster on record in the United States.