Temperatures are beginning to plummet across the nation, causing us to zip up our coats and grab a warm hat and gloves. There is no doubt about it; the season of ice and snow is here.
History has shown that the Northeast, Midwest, and even the South have been hit with outages that can last for days – and that doesn’t necessarily come from a blizzard’s blanketing of an area’s landscape. Ice can be an even bigger culprit as it leaves its frozen footprint before melting away into a considerable amount of trouble for a utility and its customers.
Downed power lines and water main breaks can affect thousands of customers and make a cold and dire situation even more difficult for health compromised consumers. A moment’s lapse in services isn’t an option. And with COVID-19 still hanging around until a vaccine is in place, crew safety and contact tracing are paramount.
Is your plan to attack winter weather developed? Now’s the time to assess and reassess the measures an organization has in place before the season gets ahead of us – and it all begins with emergency and incident command software.
The Power of an Incident Command System
Organizing a response before something happens is in everyone’s best interests. Heightened emotions and knee-jerk reactions should not be the forces used for making the decisions during an emergency winter event. ARCOS Incident Manager can help you develop a well-thought-out, agile, and pivoting restoration plan in step with available resources and personnel.
Incident Manager allows you to activate your emergency response plan or use FEMA’s Incident Command Structure (ICS). It automates an organization’s emergency hierarchy activation and calls up teams without the delays manual activation can take. There’s no searching for binders or spending hours looking for the right spreadsheet – it’s all done ahead of time and instigated with one click of a mouse. It saves precious time so crews can be sent out immediately to get customers back on-line to life-sustaining services like water, heat, and electricity.
ARCOS Incident Manager is one step of an organized and level-headed solution to assist business, operations, and incident response. ARCOS Callout and Crew Manager are an additional constructive tier of incident resource management, allowing crews to be assigned and dispatched at a moment’s notice. Crew Manager can also help keep crews safe through the creation of a pod work structure. This makes COVID-19 contact tracing a reality while never letting a slowdown occur in restoration activity.
Unfreezing Your Incident Command Software Potential
Winter weather shouldn’t freeze you or operations in its tracks. Planning and having solutions in place for any turn a storm may take is necessary and beneficial not only for customer restoration times but also for crew safety. Find out more about the whole ARCOS suite and how it’s helped many utilities mitigate the results of whatever Mother Nature has decided to dish out. Warm-up your response and contact us here.
