Why utilities lose time before storm crews start work

Major storms now account for most of the time US customers spend without power. On those days, a power cut can leave families without heating or air conditioning, force hospitals onto backup power, and slow emergency teams on blocked roads.

Utility leaders usually call for help. Line workers, tree crews, damage assessors, and support staff travel from across the country through mutual aid, the industry process for sharing people and equipment after an emergency. Local teams need that capacity because they cannot rebuild a badly damaged network alone.

Yet visiting crews cannot start useful work until dispatchers know which equipment has failed, where crews can reach it, and what each repair requires. Dispatchers struggle to establish those facts during severe weather because cell service fails, roads close, and early reports conflict. Utilities restore power fastest when they can turn those reports into a current, field-verified plan for every crew.

Major storms and outage time

Customers can experience steady service for years and still spend days without power after one severe event. The US Energy Information Administration reports that ordinary faults have left the average customer without power for about two hours a year since 2013. In 2024, the average rose to about eleven hours, including roughly nine hours during major events.

Hurricanes Beryl, Helene, and Milton accounted for about 80% of US outage-hours that year. Customers and regulators increasingly judge a utility by those few terrible days, even when its teams handle routine faults well.

Utilities call for help on this scale because a few storms cause so much of the year's outage time. Regional mutual assistance groups coordinate crews and equipment from companies outside the affected area. About 70,000 workers supported recovery after Superstorm Sandy in 2012, and more than 28,000 arrived from over 40 states after Hurricane Ida in 2021.

The host utility still has to turn those unfamiliar workers into productive local crews. Until it can give each team a safe route, switching instructions, the right materials, and a clear work package, those crews add capacity without restoring another customer.

Mutual aid and idle crews

Every idle team costs money while customers wait longer for service. A utility pays to move, house, stage, and support visiting crews, but dispatchers cannot send them toward a general area and hope they find the right work.

After Hurricane Beryl left about 2.26 million CenterPoint customers without power in July 2024, some visiting crews waited for work. During the Texas Public Utility Commission's investigation, company leaders acknowledged that the utility did not know where to send them. CenterPoint had people available, but dispatchers lacked an accurate view of the repairs.

A wide regional storm can also leave utilities with far fewer workers than they requested. After Tropical Storm Isaias in 2020, Central Hudson asked for 200 line workers and received 16. The New York Department of Public Service later found that utilities had depended too heavily on mutual-aid workers who could not arrive soon enough.

Leaders cannot create more line workers during an emergency. Getting more from each available crew depends on how storm-room staff establish confirmed facts from incomplete and conflicting reports.

Building a current damage picture

Crews lose repair time when they arrive with an incomplete work package. Dispatchers need the location, damage, access conditions, and required materials or safety instructions. Otherwise, the crew must investigate before it can repair, and storm-room leaders learn the full scope later.

Teams also restore the network in a deliberate order. They make dangerous sites safe, then repair high-voltage lines and substations that serve the widest area. Next come circuits for hospitals and other critical services, followed by neighborhoods and individual homes. Assessors must confirm what has failed before dispatchers can apply those priorities accurately.

Dispatchers must reconcile several systems to assemble a complete work package. Staff use an outage management system, or OMS, to combine customer calls, smart-meter alarms, and network status into an estimate of who has lost service. From that estimate alone, they cannot tell whether a fallen tree brought down three spans or a transformer failed. Planners then check mapping records for the locations and connections of poles, wires, and other equipment; if the map is outdated, they may infer the wrong fault or plan an unsafe switch. Control-room operators use supervisory control and data acquisition, or SCADA, to see which devices have operated. Field assessors still have to find the physical damage and establish what the repair needs.

The people inspecting that damage face blocked roads and failed cell service. Smart meters also send fewer automated power-loss messages during the largest events. Reports arrive late, conflict with earlier estimates, or reveal damage that the first survey missed.

Storm-room staff must therefore keep reconciling field observations with outage and mapping records. Dispatchers, local crews, and visiting teams all need the latest confirmed repair. Flight teams have used helicopters and drones at major utilities since around 2016 to inspect inaccessible areas faster, but engineers and field staff must still interpret the images and update the work packages.

Customers receive a credible restoration estimate only after teams understand enough of the damage and repair scope, and crews will revise it when they uncover more damage. Dispatchers reduce the average time to restore each interruption when they use the same confirmed facts to send crews prepared for the repair. Customers and regulators can also use the resulting record to judge whether leaders directed the response competently.

Regulatory scrutiny after a storm

Regulators accept that severe weather will damage electrical equipment. They still expect utility leaders to direct crews competently, clear hazards, and tell customers when service is likely to return. A utility can face costs long after crews repair the last line if its leaders run the response poorly.

After Tropical Storm Isaias, the Connecticut Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA) penalized Eversource about $28.5 million for imprudent communication and make-safe or road-clearing work. Customers received most of that amount as bill credits. In 2026, PURA disallowed more than $500 million of Eversource's costs from several storms after finding that spending imprudent. The utility had already paid the bills, but PURA barred it from recovering that portion from customers.

Utilities may leave the same storm days that draw the most regulatory attention out of their published reliability figures. They classify statistically extreme storm days as Major Event Days under the IEEE 1366 industry standard and report reliability without major events. Analysts can then compare ordinary performance across years even if customers spent a week without power during an excluded storm.

Regulators therefore examine how leaders prepared, what dispatchers knew, where crews went, and how accurately the utility communicated. Leaders can account for those decisions only when storm-room staff maintain a current damage picture and use it to turn incomplete reports into safe, prioritized work for each crew.

Directing crews to confirmed work

Assessors build that picture by inspecting damage early on the ground and from the air. Storm-room staff then compare each observation with outage and mapping records, resolve conflicts, and give crews the latest confirmed work.

Several neighborhoods may depend on one damaged circuit. Once an assessor confirms three downed spans and a blocked access road, dispatchers can choose a workable route and send a line crew with the right materials and switching instructions. The crew can begin the repair on arrival. If dispatchers lack those facts, the same team may reach an inaccessible site, discover missing equipment, and return to staging while planners rebuild the job.

Mutual aid remains essential, and crews will still work with uncertainty while communications are down and assessors are reaching damaged areas. The host utility must keep one current damage picture and update it whenever a crew reports a different condition, clears a hazard, or completes a repair.

After the next major storm, the utilities that restore power fastest will know where to send every available crew.