Find where the damage is concentrated before every circuit has been walked.

01The job today

What the restoration sequence rests on

The storm passes at night. By morning the outage management system is full of trouble tickets, the damage assessors are out patrolling feeders, and mutual-aid crews are arriving at the staging area with trucks that need an assignment. The restoration coordinator has to say where they go first.

Tickets are the best signal there is, and they are lopsided. A dense subdivision lights up the board. A rural feeder with few customers, where the road is blocked by a fallen tree and the line that feeds the whole circuit is on the ground, may show a handful of calls or none. Assessors can't reach everywhere at once, and every road that's closed adds hours before someone can report back. So the first sequence gets built from partial information, and the crews you did not send to the quiet zone are the ones that were needed there.

The damage that matters is often the damage nobody has called in yet. Weather on the day makes it worse: you can't see much through a line of storms, and the ground is not passable until it clears.

This is where a before and after comparison helps. Imagery of the territory taken ahead of the season, set against a pass taken once the sky clears, shows what the storm did to the ground: downed trees, debris fields, roofs gone, water where there wasn't any. Mapped across the whole territory, those changes show where to send people first. It is one more input for the coordinator, next to tickets and the assessors' reports.

02What you get

What comes back from a storm pass

On a pilot, it covers the territory, or the part of it, that you set up in advance.

1. 2.1Territory damage-concentration mapGIS layer

   Flags across your service territory where the pre/post comparison shows concentrated change. You open it in your own GIS next to your circuit and feeder layers.

2. 2.2Zone rankingRanked list

   Zones ordered by how much change was flagged in each, for the coordinator building crew assignments. It is a starting order for the meeting, and the field reports still change it.

3. 2.3Change layerPre and post

   The comparison itself, so an analyst or an assessor can look at what was flagged and see the before and after side by side, instead of taking the ranking on trust.

4. 2.4Feeder and zone exportCSV

   The ranking as a spreadsheet keyed to your feeder or zone reference, so it can be pasted into the crew assignment sheets or joined to outage data.

03

How it works

1. 1

   Territory and baseline

   You send your service territory boundary and, if you keep one, your circuit or zone layer. We capture or line up the pre-event baseline over it before any storm. This step comes first because without it there is nothing to compare against.

2. 2

   Storm pass

   When an event hits, the post-event pass is tasked as soon as conditions allow. If rain or cloud is still sitting on the territory, the pass waits for a usable window.

3. 3

   Comparison

   The post-event pass is set against the baseline, and zones with concentrated change are flagged.

4. 4

   Delivery

   The map, the change layer, the ranked list and the CSV go to you as the imagery becomes usable. You hand the ranking to the coordinator and the planning section.

04Where it fits in your workflow

Alongside the trouble-ticket board

Read it with the outage management system open. Where the tickets and the map agree, you have a good reason to send crews there first. Where the map flags a zone the board is quiet on, send an assessor to look before you commit a mutual-aid crew, since a flag means the ground looks different there, which is short of proof that a line is down.

Field damage assessment carries on as it does today. Individual pole and conductor failures are found on the ground, and incident command still owns the sequence.