How to request mutual aid crews through a regional mutual assistance group

When a system takes a hit bigger than your own linemen and contract crews can clear in a reasonable window, you call for help. That help comes through a regional mutual assistance group, and how you ask for it matters almost as much as how bad the damage actually is.

How regional mutual aid groups are organized

Most investor-owned utilities belong to one of the geographic mutual assistance groups built under the EEI mutual aid framework, outfits like the Southeastern Electric Exchange, the Northeast Mutual Assistance Group, or the regional groups covering the West and Midwest. They operate as utility-to-utility agreements, each one keeping a running roster of member companies, their typical crew counts, and who's got trucks free on short notice.

Every member utility names a mutual aid coordinator, usually someone sitting in emergency management or T&D operations, and that person starts working the group's resource-tracking system and phone tree days before a storm makes landfall or an ice event sets up, not after the first pole snaps.

The request process, step by step

1. Pre-event notification. Before the storm arrives, you send the group coordinator an advisory. It's not a formal ask yet, just a heads-up that lets neighboring utilities start checking crew availability and holding equipment back.

2. Damage assessment and crew estimate. Once the event passes and you've got eyes on the system, your team builds a rough count: line crews, tree crews, damage assessors, broken out by voltage class and circuit type. This number drives everything that follows.

3. Formal resource request. You submit through the group's standard request form, specifying crew type, crew count, duration, reporting location, and any special equipment, bucket height, terrain access, digger derricks. Mutual aid groups run on standardized templates so a crew rolling in from three states away knows what they're walking into before the trucks load.

4. Assignment and staging. The group matches your request against what member utilities can spare. Crews get routed to a staging site you've designated, often a fairground or a truck stop lot with room for a fleet.

5. Check-in and work assignment. Crews check in with your logistics team on arrival, sit through a safety briefing specific to your system, and start pulling assignments off the restoration plan.

Where the crew count actually comes from

The number you write into that formal request, crew type and count by district, is only as good as the damage picture behind it. In the first hours after a major event, most coordinators are still leaning on trouble tickets and windshield patrols to guess where the worst concentrations of broken poles and downed spans sit. That's slow, and it tends to undercount areas where customers can't call in because the cell towers are down too.

A damage concentration picture built from imagery, rather than call volume alone, lets you size that first request closer to right. Fewer amended requests mid-event, fewer crews staged in the wrong district while a harder-hit circuit waits.

That's the gap Storm Grid Damage is built to close, flagging likely damage concentrations from pre/post-event imagery so your mutual aid numbers reflect the territory, not just the tickets that happened to come in. If your current damage picture is still built on call volume alone, it's worth seeing what one pass of comparison imagery looks like before the next event.