What would you do if Clinton County was without power for up to 30 days?  Once you get past the notion if it was really possible and focus on the question, you may find yourself with a lot of questions…namely where to start!?!  

EMA will be leading a workshop to explore prepatory actions, decision points, and actions necessary to enable the continuity of critical government services during a prolonged outage.  The workshop will be the first step toward a larger multi-jurisdictional exercise to help validate its suitability for major disasters involving long-term power outages.   The recommendations that flow from this workshop will serve as the basis of a Playbook to be included in the county Emergency Operations Plan (EOP) under the ESF-12 Energy Annex.

While it can be challenging to envision a Playbook for situations like this, it is not difficult to find historical examples of events resulting in LTPOs:

• Solar Storm of 1859 (Carrington Event)
• New York Railroad Storm of 1921 (CME)
• Northeast Blackout of 2003 (software)
• Solar Storm of 2012 (CME) <--- very close call!
• Pick a major power outage (1999-2021)
• Pick a hurricane (disaster)
• Pick a Derecho (disaster)

I hope you will help EMA in this extroidinary planning effort for a situation I hope we'll never need to respond locally to...