The Public Utility Commission Thursday finalized a proposed policy statement on service outage response recovery and public notification guidelines and established a Critical Infrastructure Interdependency Working Group.

“Today’s action represents further progress in assuring that significant measures are in place to expedite the restoration of electric service for all customers,” said Commissioner Pamela A. Witmer in a statement.  Regardless of whether the outage is the result of a storm, or physical or cyber attack, I am very pleased that the Commission is establishing a Critical Infrastructure working group that will bring all utilities and other partners into one room to discuss best practices that will benefit residential and business customers in this Commonwealth.”

The Commission voted 5-0 to finalize the policy statement and create the working group. The policy statement proposes additional preparation and response measures as guidance for EDCs after review of the utilities’ storm response for Hurricanes Irene and Sandy.

The Commission also addressed the cost/benefit analysis regarding implementation of the policy statement by the EDCs, and potentially other industries, especially in regards to the proposed storm damage and outage prediction models.

The working group will be made up of jurisdictional electric distribution companies (EDCs), incumbent telephone, facilities-based competitive telephone, water, wastewater, and natural gas distribution utilities with 5,000 or more customers as well as non-jurisdictional stakeholders such as cable providers and wireless carriers.

One of the goals is for parties to come to an understanding of their critical interdependencies and how to coordinate restoration of services where more than one party is affected in a geographic area.

3/10/2014