Water, power, and gas utilities faced with increased regulatory demands for proactive customer critical event notifications also faced a record year of utility-disrupting events in 2020. The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season saw the highest number of named storms on record, as well as a record number of rapidly intensifying storms. The wildfire season in the U.S. broke the 2015 record for acres burned with 10.25 million acres burned as of December 18, 2020.
When critical events keep utilities in a near-constant state of emergency, it can be difficult to take the proactive steps needed to shore up emergency notification systems. Yet, that is exactly what utilities are being asked to do. Taking the time to streamline notification processes and equip emergency managers with technology that enables them to reduce risk, accelerate customer notifications, and comply with regulatory requirements to save critical time.
Sample Scenario: Notifying Customers with Medical Dependencies During a Natural Disaster Threat
Utilities rely on notification systems to inform customers of outages, and for customers with critical care needs and chronic conditions that require electrical-powered medical devices, these notifications can be the difference between life and death. Motorola Solutions’ Mass Notification platform enables utilities to customize integrations with exterior sensors monitoring potential weather events such as high winds, fire, hurricanes, storms, or tornadic activity. When these sensors indicate the threat of an event that could either knock power out or require proactive de-powering of electricity, a custom workflow can be triggered to target a notification to the customers on life support in the impacted geographic areas. Plus, two-way polling capabilities confirm that notifications have been received, providing backup for compliance and reporting.
Streamline and Automate Critical Notifications
With Motorola Solutions Mass Notification solution, utility and emergency operations centers simplify and automate workflows to reduce risk, accelerate customer notifications, and comply with utility regulatory requirements.
Preparedness strategies:
- Reduce time to notification by automating routine and critical notifications. This can be accomplished by maintaining current contact lists to identify priority customers for notifications and creating notification rules based on critical events, alarms, or sensors.
- Streamline notification workflows with custom-built notifications and sensor integrations to efficiently inform populations served during critical and routine events.
- Maintain compliance with notification accuracy and efficiency for critical service impacting events such as fires, floods, outages, boil orders, and drone surveillance alerts.
Utilities have no time to waste when it comes to critical event notifications. Proactive planning pays off by enabling utilities to communicate the right information to the right people at the right time in order to reduce risk, accelerate notifications, and improve compliance and reporting.
