Beyond the Storm: How Co-ops Are Preparing for and Responding to Emergencies
Hurricanes on the coast. Ice storms in the Midwest. Wildfires racing across the West. Rural electric cooperatives don't get to choose whether an emergency hits their system, only how ready they are when it does.
That was the focus of CIN's latest Ideas for Innovation webinar, “Beyond the Storm: How Co-ops Are Preparing for and Responding to Emergencies.” Four presenters joined us to share the tools, playbooks, and hard-won lessons they use to prepare for and recover from the emergencies that hit their systems hardest.
If you missed it, you can watch the full replay here. And if you're looking for a practical look at what emergency preparedness actually looks like inside a co-op, keep reading.
New tools for predicting and planning around damage
Mary Klett and Steve Hall, Idaho National Laboratory
Idaho National Laboratory (INL) is the nation's nuclear energy laboratory, providing the facilities, expertise, and research capabilities that help move advanced reactors from concept to deployment. Mary Klett and Steve Hall opened the webinar with a look at Resilience Guard, a damage-prediction and resilience platform INL is developing under funding from the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Electricity.
Resilience Guard is designed to be a single pane of glass for utilities trying to grow capacity, mitigate hazards, and stay affordable while weather extremes increase in frequency and severity. At a high level, it brings together a few complementary capabilities co-ops of any size should know about:
Near-term damage prediction, which lets a utility run an incoming storm against current weather data and get back a realistic picture of expected damage and the crews, materials, and time needed to restore power.
Long-term risk modeling, which looks further out, years to decades, to show how a changing climate and a growing service territory could affect grid reliability, helping utilities plan capital investment before problems emerge rather than after.
An AI-assisted knowledge tool, which helps utilities quickly find vetted, expert-backed guidance on resilience investments instead of sorting through unreliable information online.
A shared reference library, compiling how different types of infrastructure typically perform under hazards like wind, earthquake, flooding, and landslides.
For co-op leaders, the bigger takeaway is that this kind of modeling and planning capability is no longer limited to the largest utilities. The Department of Energy's Office of Electricity offers free technical assistance to help any co-op get set up with these tools, an easy entry point for building capacity without a big up-front investment.
Inside a hurricane response: DEMCO's preparedness playbook
Eric Ouber, Manager of System Operations, DEMCO
DEMCO is an electric distribution cooperative established in 1938 to serve members across seven Louisiana parishes. For DEMCO, the primary threat is tropical storms and hurricanes, and Eric Ouber walked through the emergency response plan the co-op has built and refined over years of real storm seasons, one approved by both the Louisiana Public Service Commission and DEMCO's board.
The plan scales with the storm: any time restoration is expected to take longer than 72 hours, DEMCO activates a tiered response, escalating from in-house crews to hundreds of outside contractors and mutual aid workers, with staging, lodging, and logistics scaled to match, all decided in advance so nobody is figuring out staffing levels mid-storm.
Preparation starts well before landfall, tracking the storm, taking inventory, and locking in contractor, hotel, and fuel rates ahead of time, which keeps the co-op compliant with FEMA reimbursement rules and protects funds that would otherwise come out of members' pockets. Crews restore power until sustained winds hit 35 miles per hour, then stand down and rest until conditions are safe again.
A few operational details stood out:
A mobile command center, based at DEMCO's training center, serves as the single hub everything filters through, so leadership isn't playing phone tag if communications go down.
Every mutual aid crew is paired with a DEMCO employee, called a “bird dog,” who is responsible for that crew's safety and full headcount before any line is energized. Every crew signs in and out, with time sheets documented for both safety and FEMA purposes.
Crews work 16 hours on, 8 hours off, with the goal of getting people home before their 16 hours are up. Near the 72-hour mark, the schedule shifts to rotating shifts worked straight through.
Restoration follows a strict priority order: transmission lines and generation metering points first, then substations and main three-phase feeders, then taps serving critical infrastructure like hospitals and nursing homes, then large taps and subdivisions, and finally individual transformers and services. DEMCO has learned the hard way that restoring out of order, no matter how tempting, just means redoing work.
Communication runs through every channel DEMCO has, social media, text alerts, and daily local news updates, powered by a real-time, AI-assisted outage management system that locates outages, recommends a restoration plan, and even flags outages members haven't reported yet. It's a big part of why Louisiana's utility commission has recognized DEMCO as the state's most informative storm communicator. Read the full case study, DEMCO's Digital Transformation for Outage Management, on Co-op Compass.
Wildfire risk: La Plata Electric's public safety power management toolbox
Jerry Sutherlin, VP of Operations, La Plata Electric Association
La Plata Electric Association (LPEA) serves southwest Colorado, where wildfire is the defining threat: the co-op maintains more than 2,000 miles of overhead line, roughly 1,000 of which run through heavily forested terrain.
Jerry Sutherlin walked through LPEA's public safety power management toolbox, layered from least to most disruptive.
Vegetation management is the foundation and the co-op's single largest contributor to fire mitigation. LPEA targets specific circuits for aggressive rights-of-way clearing, using data on fire risk, outage history, access routes, and population density to decide where to focus. Community buy-in matters as much as the equipment: partnering with a local wildfire ambassador program to build member support for cutting down trees people love has made these projects go far more smoothly. One recently completed clearing project took a formerly outage-prone subdivision down to zero tree-caused outages.
Capital improvement and system hardening means replacing aging, brittle materials, undergrounding where terrain allows, protecting against wildlife contact, and using drone inspections to catch deterioration that's invisible from the ground before it causes an outage or a fire.
Enhanced Power Safety Settings (EPSS) adjust protective relay settings so a line de-energizes quickly, with minimal or no automatic attempts to restore power, when a fault like a falling branch could otherwise spark a fire under high-risk conditions.
Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS) are the last resort: pre-planned, proactive shutoffs when conditions make any energized line too dangerous.
Behind these decisions is Firescape, a third-party AI wildfire risk model tailored to LPEA's own equipment and the multiple microclimates across its territory. It gives the co-op daily forecasts it uses to decide when to shift into higher-alert settings.
The results so far: since LPEA's first EPSS enactment this spring, protective settings have caught five separate incidents where a tree contacted a line before it could spark a fire, restoring every affected member within 24 hours each time. LPEA has not yet had to enact a full PSPS.
Sutherlin was direct about the tradeoff at the center of this work: “I will take safety over reliability every day of the week. It's never convenient to be without power, but we have to ensure that we're protecting our communities and our environments. We will always get your lights back on, but we can't rebuild homes, can't rebuild lives, can't replant forests.”
What this means for co-ops
A few themes carried across all three presentations, worth bringing into your own co-op's emergency planning conversations.
Sophisticated preparedness tools are becoming accessible, not just to the largest utilities. Resilience Guard's tools are already free for co-ops to explore through DOE's technical assistance program, and Firescape-style AI risk modeling is built to scale down to a co-op's specific territory and microclimates. Budget is less of a barrier to entry than it used to be.
Preparation is a documentation exercise as much as an operational one. DEMCO's emphasis on locking in contractor rates and documenting every hour, part, and meal wasn't a side detail, it's what determines whether FEMA reimbursement dollars come through.
A tiered, pre-decided plan eliminates the need for key decisions at high-stress times. Whether it's DEMCO's tier system or LPEA's EPSS thresholds, both co-ops have already made their hardest calls in advance, so that when the storm or fire risk actually arrives, crews are executing a plan rather than debating one.
Communication is treated as core infrastructure, not an afterthought. Every presenter described pushing information out across every available channel, before, during, and after an event, as central to keeping members safe and informed. This enabled members to adhere to safety guidelines immediately, rather than looking for answers or staff in unsafe conditions.
Big fixes like undergrounding and battery storage remain appealing but costly. Both DEMCO and LPEA are already undergrounding where terrain allows and studying battery projects, but both were candid that the economics don't yet support wholesale conversion. Targeted, data-driven investment is currently winning out over blanket solutions.
Preparedness looks different in coastal Louisiana than it does in the Colorado high desert, but the underlying discipline is the same: the work that happens before the emergency is what determines the outcome during it.
Ready to go deeper? Explore emergency preparedness resources on Co-op Compass, including this framework for winter storm resilience planning, browse past sessions through the Ideas for Innovation webinar series, or connect with the CIN team to learn more about how the network supports co-op leaders navigating this work.
Frequently asked questions
Where should a co-op start when building an emergency preparedness plan?
Start with the hazard most likely to affect your service territory, hurricanes, ice storms, wildfire, and work backward from there: what would trigger a response, who needs to be looped in, and which decisions can be made in advance rather than in the moment. Every co-op in this webinar built their plan around the specific risk their territory actually faces.
Do we need expensive technology to improve our storm or wildfire readiness?
Not necessarily. Programs like DOE's free technical assistance and third-party risk modeling services are increasingly built to scale down to co-ops of any size and budget. The bigger lift is usually organizational: building the plan, the vendor relationships, and the documentation habits before you need them.
How much of this is about technology versus planning and communication?
Less than you'd think. Every presenter emphasized that pre-negotiated contracts, clear restoration priorities, and proactive member communication mattered as much as any tool. Technology helps a co-op make better decisions faster, it doesn't replace the planning.
How do we build member trust around difficult decisions, like a planned power shutoff or a lengthy restoration?
Communicate early, often, and honestly, before, during, and after an event. Co-ops that are transparent about what to expect and why, even when the honest answer is “we don't know yet,” tend to keep member trust even through hard outages.
We're a small co-op with a limited budget. Can we realistically apply any of this?
Yes. Most of what these co-ops described, pre-negotiated vendor rates, a documented restoration priority list, a proactive communication plan, doesn't require a large budget or dedicated staff. Start with the highest-leverage, lowest-cost pieces and build from there.
Co-op Innovation Network connects electric cooperative leaders to proven ideas, trusted peers, and practical resources. Learn more and register for upcoming webinars at coopinnovation.org.
