The Housing Hour 3.23.13

Published: March 23, 2013, 4:44 p.m.

b"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 (2nd Edition), 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.\\n\\nAn increase in major natural disasters\\u2014and the growing number of damaging events involving gas, electric, water, and other utilities\\u2014has 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.\\n\\nThe book will help utility planners, trainers, and responders\\u2014as well as their vendors and suppliers\\u2014to more effectively prepare for damaging events and improve the level of the utility\\u2019s 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\\u2019s infrastructure, people, and resources."