HURRICANE, W.Va. — Members of Appalachian Power’s Storm Response Team recently gathered for a twice yearly exercise to prepare for potential storm related outages in the coming months. This week’s training event held at Hurricane’s Valley Park Conference Center was a mock wind storm and how to coordinate response and brought together key personnel across all of Appalachian Power’s areas of service in West Virginia, Virginia, and Tennessee.
“It sets the stage for us on what we’re going to improve this year and how we’re going to get more efficient to keep costs down for our customers. Practice make perfect,” said Jason Baker VP of Distribution and Operations for Appalachian Power
One of those efficiencies is the use of drones to locate downed lines in remote areas. Baker said by flying a right of way they can cover miles of territory in minutes which in the past took hours for individuals to walk and visually inspect lines to locate the source of an outage. APCo deploys the Skydio X10 to quickly assess outages and deliver real-time visual intelligence to field crews and dispatchers. By providing an aerial view of damage and access issues, the X10 helps prioritize repairs and accelerate restoration times for customers.
“It’s safer for our folks. They’re not walking up and down mountains for hours and hours to assess a situation. They’re getting a drone in the air and it’s 30 seconds or a minute to fly that area that once took an hour or two to walk,” he explained. “For our customers, it means we can keep the price down and faster restorations. It’s a game changer for us.”
The company has two exercises a year, one in the spring and one in the fall. Each exercise takes on a different mock scenario to test the response and activity of everybody in the company. This week’s mock scenario was a wind storm. Baker said a lot of times they’ll have new employees and these are vital to showing them how the company system operates during storm response. He said it’s all about speed and getting the lights back on quicker every time.
“You know you’re going to have poles broken and wire on the ground, those procedures are always the same, that’s our table stakes is getting the electricity restored and getting the lights back on. Where it differs is the type of storm. Ice storms we respond differently to and wind storms we respond differently to,” he explained.
Understanding the nuance of each response is what the table top exercise this week was all about.