At a recent meeting of County Emergency Managers a representative from Atlantic City Electric spoke about a change in their approach to major outages since their recent merger with Exelon Corporation which should be of interest to you. Exelon Corporation is the parent company to six of the nations largest electric providers. Exelon’s approach to major outages is “all hands on deck” in that they will send resources from other owned companies to our area in the event of a major outage. So you may see crews from Washington, Baltimore, Philadephia, Delmarva or Chicago working along ACE personnel. In return the ACE crews may be sent to other areas to assist. The change in policy will allow quicker return to service in the event of a major outage. This is good news for us. On the downside it may take longer to get that street light repaired if the crews are out of the area for outages elsewhere. The last major outage was the 2010 Ice storm where portions of North Wildwood was out for almost a week.
(08/27/18) While so far the Atlantic Hurricane season has been on the quiet side, we shouldn’t take it as we are free from any problems. For the most part historically the second half of the Hurricane Season has given us the most problems.
One of the good things about having several full time weather channels on TV is that you get to see what others are doing in real time. Emergency managers use the various after action reports to review the lesson learned – these after action reports often come months after the storm and recovery. We still use these reports but seeing the storm and it’s effects in real time really adds to the words in print and gives us ideas to fine tune our responses. The other good thing is the viewers have a better understanding of the potential of a given storm.
Watching the coverage of Hurricane Lane and Hawaii two things really stick out – first the number of days of food they were requesting people to have on hand – in their case 14 days. It seems that every storm this number goes up. With the change in weather patterns perhaps planning for 30 days will not be out of the question in the near future. The second thing that was noticed was the fact that they talked about not having enough shelter space for their residents and to watch your neighbors. This is the reality of every community that has more residents than can fit in a meeting room / shelter. This is probably the main reason that, as emergency managers, we stress the importance of preparedness and self reliance. Take a few minutes and review the preparedness tips on North Wildwood’s “Ready” page by clicking on the “Be Prepared” link on the lower right hand side of the page.