An increase in major natural disasters—and the growing number of damaging events involving gas, electric, water, and other utilities—has led to heightened concerns about utility operations and public safety. Due to today's complex, compliance-based environment, utility managers and planners often find it difficult to plan for the action needed to help ensure organization-wide resilience and meet consumer expectations during these incidents. Emergency Planning Guide for Utilities, Second Edition offers a working guide that presents new and field-tested approaches to plan development, training, exercising, and emergency program management.

The book will help utility planners, trainers, and responders—as well as their vendors and suppliers—to more effectively prepare for damaging events and improve the level of the utility’s resilience. It also focuses on planning needed in the National Incident Management System and ICS environment that many utilities are embracing going forward. In doing so, utilities will be able to improve the customer experience while reducing the impact that damaging events have on the utility’s infrastructure, people, and resources.

Sam Mullen has more than 30 years experience in utility operations, planning, and management. He is the author of three books on contingency and emergency planning and technical communications, including Emergency Planning Guide for Utilities 1st and 2nd Editions, and Critical Communications: An Operations Guide for Business. After a long career in power system operations and system control, Mullen founded MPS in 1994, a practice working primarily with utilities. Sam consults on a full range of projects involving power system emergencies, EMS and SCADA operating procedures, information technology, business process design, computer applications and controls, communications, and regulatory compliance.