As hurricane season officially begins across the Northeast, utilities like New York State Electric & Gas are putting their emergency response plans to the test.
High-stakes decisions — like how many crews to call in, how long repairs will take, when it’s safe to send workers into dangerous conditions — have become increasingly complex as climate change intensifies and changes storm patterns.
Adam Helman, director of emergency operations at Avangrid, says these changes are reshaping how New York State Electric & Gas, one of Avangrid’s subsidiaries, prepares for and responds to severe weather events. “What we are doing is taking a look at how our company’s threat profile may change in future years to bring new hazards…into focus,” said Helman during a recent interview on the With Great Power podcast.
Helman has spent the past few years thinking about how emergency response needs to evolve to meet the reality of today — spurred in part by the COVID pandemic.
“From the public health emergency management perspective, COVID was a tremendous challenge and a lot of very passionate individuals put their bodies on the line to try and do the best they could to protect the residents,” Helman said, reflecting on how the pandemic reshaped his approach to emergency management before joining Avangrid in 2023.
This spring, NYSEG received approval from the New York Public Service Commission for a new emergency response plan that reflects a utility grappling with evolving threats and the need for deeper resource pools. It outlines a comprehensive strategy for managing everything from routine outages to multi-day restoration efforts affecting hundreds of thousands of customers.
The backbone of the plan is a three-tier classification system that determines resource deployment: Class I events, expected to be resolved within 24 hours, rely primarily on local crews. Class II events, lasting up to 72 hours, may require resources from neighboring divisions. Class III events — the most severe category lasting more than 72 hours — trigger activation of mutual aid agreements with other utilities and contractors.
The plan also details specific staffing matrices for different event types. For damage assessment alone, NYSEG maintains at least 175 trained employees and can scale up to deploy between 100-350 line workers depending on incident count and weather conditions.
And the utility prioritizes proximity and availability when deciding which crews deploy. It first calls on contractors already working in the area, then brings in crews who can arrive within a day, followed by those requiring up to two days of travel time, and finally resources from distant locations.
The approach balances the urgency of getting power restored quickly with the practical challenges of mobilizing workers across large distances. And it ties to a key theme throughout NYSEG’s planning that Helman calls “bench depth” — ensuring sufficient trained personnel can sustain operations during extended events.
“The more often we respond, the deeper our bench needs to be to ensure that we’re prepared to respond to it,” he explained. On top of the tiered-workforce deployment strategy, it also means maintaining experienced leadership and training newer employees to eventually take over critical roles. “We have a tremendously experienced team of leaders in this company, and it’s our responsibility to make sure that we’re passing that knowledge base down to the younger generation,” Helman noted.
NYSEG complements its workforce management and response strategy with a heavy emphasis on predictive modeling and advanced weather monitoring. Using AI-driven outage prediction modeling, the utility can analyze weather forecasts against historical data to estimate potential impacts. “What those models do is they tell you… [the weather] is going to cause this many incidents, this many customers to be out, and in these rough areas,” Helman said. The predictive capability allows NYSEG to pre-position resources and make mutual aid requests before storms hit, which can help reduce restoration time.
Helman says an increasing number of unpredictable weather events is fueling NYSEG’s investment in ex predictive modeling: “[We’ve had] different, interesting confluences of events like severe winter storms into the solar eclipse,” explained Helman, “or an earthquake coming off the back end of a winter storm.” Traditional planning approaches weren’t designed to handle such complex, overlapping scenarios.
Perhaps most notably, NYSEG’s plan explicitly addresses mental health considerations for emergency responders — a relatively new focus for utility emergency planning. “I think mental health is not something that we can take for granted,” Helman said.
The new inclusion stems from Helman’s personal experience working back to back storms last fall. “By the eighth or ninth day I realized I’m no longer at the point where I need to be effective in my role. And I told my boss, ‘I need 24 hours to shut down’,” he said.
The willingness to acknowledge these challenges reflects a broader evolution in how utilities think about sustainable emergency response in an era of increasingly frequent and severe weather events.
For the full conversation with Adam Helman, listen to his interview on With Great Power.
This is partner content, brought to you by GridX. It borrows from an interview that appeared on With Great Power, a Latitude Studios partner podcast.
With Great Power is a show about the people building the future grid, today. It’s a co-production of GridX and Latitude Studios. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get your shows.
