On 17 January 2013, the Portuguese National Civil Protection Authority issued a statement regarding the impending adverse weather conditions, drawing attention to the yellow alert issued by the Portuguese Institute for the Sea and Atmosphere. The forecast?
Deteriorating weather conditions over the next 48 hours. In less than 24 hours, the alert status had been elevated to orange. And on the afternoon of 18 January, mainland Portugal was placed on red alert, the highest possible alert level. Storm Gong was coming.
The storm posed a major threat to EDP Distribuição, the power network operator in mainland Portugal. The company had to ensure service continuity and quality for more than six million customers. EDP Distribuição didn’t wait for incidents to begin occurring.
The Operational Crisis Action Plan (OCAP) was put into action and the alert status was activated internally. Ricardo Messias, who was responsible for the EDP Distribuição Business Continuity Department, recalls that this is the moment when the organisation prepares for a “restructuring of all activities involved in the response to an anomalous situation.” The goal is clear: to prevent unresolved situations from building up, by ensuring better organisation.
In the early hours of 19 January, the number of incidents began to reach alarming levels, but the company was already prepared. During a state of alert, vehicles and communications are checked, the availability of generators and warehouses is guaranteed, and internal and external teams are placed on standby to ensure that the emergency response, trained through regular drills, is activated whenever a provenly anomalous situation is detected.
The Operational Crisis Action Plan (OCAP) is EDP Distribuição’s response to anomalies. It is a plan whereby the organisation is restructured, tested for the first time in 2009.
Telmo Santiago, operations manager during this event, affirms that “the storm hit Leiria and Pombal the hardest. At the time the storm hit, I was in the crisis room in Leiria, managing the issues that came my way and ensuring that sufficient human resources were available, by mobilising employees and assigning service providers.”
More than 3,000 people were mobilised to respond to Storm Gong, with reinforcements coming from all over the country.
All in all, EDP Distribuição mobilised over three thousand people in the field and maintained several local Crisis Management Centres, particularly in Leiria and Pombal. Reinforcements from the Algarve, Santarém, Portalegre and other areas of the country, both from EDP Distribuição and service providers, were needed for these two locations.
And the conditions, which were already very adverse, only got worse. “On Saturday (the 19th), mobile communications went down; we could only communicate by radio. And our operatives were tired and losing heart, facing the rain, the cold and unable to talk to us. There were several stress factors here: fatigue, hardship at all levels. Situations like this make us stronger, but mark us forever,” affirms Telmo Santiago.
For about nine days, the field team worked continuously, in the forest, facing the wind and the rain. Lack of communications was also a problem: people would spend an hour or two in a place, waiting for someone to call them back when they had signal, or through the radio.
The manager reveals the factors that influence an emergency: “Procedures and manoeuvres must be conducted under the supervision of the individuals responsible for managing the network, who are aware of its status, the extent to which it is live and the areas where they can intervene. Simultaneously, work on a network section can only start once its availability for repair has been confirmed.”
Sense of mission and responsibility
Despite all the difficulties, field operators were reluctant to abandon the mission. “We are driven by an adrenaline rush, a sense of mission and a sense of responsibility to solve the problem, to restore the network. It happens in every emergency,” affirms Telmo Santiago.
That’s why it’s crucial to have a system that issues an alert when an individual has been working consecutively for more than a specified number of hours. “It’s important to manage this aspect. We often have to almost force people to leave. They don’t want to. Some are more resilient than others. But it’s a fact that everyone embraces the cause, even those who come from other places. Even our EDP Distribuição colleagues who come from other parts of the country end up wearing the jersey. That feeling of wanting to solve a problem is contagious,” affirms the operations manager.
The Board of Directors of EDP Distribuição also made a point of supporting the mission, by showing up in the field to ensure external stakeholders that every effort was being made. And, in some way, to encourage the work of our operatives and offer moral support, which is extremely important in these situations,” underlines Ricardo Messias.
More than a million people were left without electricity due to the storm; however, EDP Distribuição managed to resolve the issue swiftly: within three days, 90% of customers already had electricity and no personal accidents occurred during the repair works.
Within 3 days, 90% of the people affected already had electricity and no personal accidents occurred during the repair works.
Although the mission was successful, Telmo Santiago acknowledges that significant investments had been made in the Western region up to the end of 2012, in order to ensure uniform service quality across the country. However, this effort went downhill in 2013. “It was a huge setback. We felt an enormous sense of loss, because we had prepared the network for the next few years and a very large part of it was suddenly brought down by the storm.”
The reward of international recognition
As Ricardo Messias explains, the Operational Crisis Action Plan was tested for the first time in 2009, during the “infamous Western storm”. The improvements made “allowed the company to respond successfully in 2013, during the storm that affected the entire national territory. Although the number of customers with no electricity peaked at one million, we were able to restore power quickly.”
We need to have a vision of the future and be prepared for all sorts of situations. The thing about storms is that we know they’re going to happen in the future, but a storm is always an unknown: we don’t know where it’s going to hit, what its impact will be and how long it will last.
Ricardo Messias explains that “the Plan provides for an alert system, which foresees the need to perform tasks as basic as refuelling vehicles, ensuring that the necessary equipment is available in the warehouses and alerting people to be on standby. This is the first step. Then we monitor the situation, and when a predefined threshold is reached – such as a certain number of lines being out of service or a specified number of customers without electricity – we determine which areas are most severely affected. We then allocate sufficient tactical and operational capacity to these areas, such as to ensure that the necessary decisions can be made and adequate actions taken.”
This occurrence allowed EDP Distribuição to prove it is “well versed in emergency action” and ready “to take the next step,” underlines Ricardo Messias, adding that it is necessary “to have a vision of the future and be prepared for all kinds of situations. The thing about storms is that we know they’re going to happen in the future, but a storm is always an unknown: we don’t know where it’s going to hit, what its impact will be and how long it will last.”
In this sense, EDP Distribuição decided to create the Business Continuity Department in May 2013, in order to “be prepared to respond, in any scenario, while ensuring priority services.”
EDP Distribuição received the “Most Effective Recovery of the Year” award. The company’s outstanding performance during the Storm Gong was thus recognised by the Business Continuity Institute (BCI).
After the response to the Storm Gong was submitted to the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) annual European awards, this effort was recognised in 2014 as the “Most Effective Recovery of the Year”. For Telmo Santiago, this award is the result of “our resilience, our ability to join efforts in difficult times. Organisations always have room for improvement, but I truly believe that our team spirit and willingness to solve every problem quickly and to swiftly restore power to all homes really drives us forward and earns us international recognition.”
Despite this distinction, the then manager of the EDP Distribuição Business Continuity Department reveals that “the Plan has continued to improve; we haven’t been resting on our laurels. There has thus been a lot of progress. We’ve mainly been focusing on drills since we operate normally most of the time. This means that many of our people haven’t experienced the 2013 storm.
It may seem like it happened not too long ago, but many of our current teams no longer possess that sort of knowledge. It’s extremely useful for people to have been through a similar situation when something untoward occurs. Therefore, it’s very important that we prepare these people. This preparation has been based on drills and specific training on how best to act in stressful situations.”