BONITA SPRINGS, Fla.—As Hurricane Idalia churned closer to the north central Florida service area of Tri-County Electric Cooperative in August 2023, the co-op sprang into action, alerting its dozens of commercial and business accounts to prepare for the worst.

One of those accounts was a correctional facility whose backup generator had failed, and it faced an unimaginable scenario of relocating inmates should the outage stretch into a multiday event.

Fortunately, the Madison-based co-op quickly restored service to the facility in the aftermath of the Category 3 hurricane. But the proactive outreach left it better prepared for the next storm.

“They knew who to call at the co-op,” TCEC Community Relations Director Kaitlynn Culpepper said at Monday’s pre-conference session of Touchstone Energy® Cooperative’s 2025 NEXT Conference.

“We worked closely with the warden and staff, providing pertinent updates on the status of their restoration,” Culpepper said. “Knowing what they were facing and their timeline, we focused additional manpower and equipment, restoring service to the facility just in time to avoid the process of relocating all of those people. Our established relationship and communication with that key account made all the difference."

The session featured discussions by Culpepper and other co-op experts on ensuring business continuity and safe conditions for commercial and industrial members, or key accounts, before, during and after natural and manmade disasters.

Constant coordination with local officials and stakeholders and outreach on storm preparation with C&I members are critical before a disaster strikes, because severe weather events are happening with increasing frequency and intensity, the speakers said.

“Doing this communication through the year really helps with our reputation,” said Brandon Ashley, director of business development at Jackson EMC in Jefferson, Georgia. “Members in our area know we’ll be quick to respond. And when there are issues during a storm situation, our prior pro-active communication gives us a little bit of grace with our members.”

Procedures at the Georgia co-op include customized text messages to elected officials and key accounts before, during and after weather events and personal, one-on-one assessments with key accounts each year.

Jackson EMC and Tri-County EC have also developed detailed outage tracking methods to provide C&I members crucial information on estimated time of restoration.

In 2024, the state of Oregon dealt with their most devastating wildfire season to date. Oregon Trail Electric Cooperative was ultimately spared but had over 500,000 acres on fire on all sides of their service territory. The Baker City-based co-op says its participation in community coordination efforts has been an effective preparedness mechanism.

During last year’s fire season, OTEC took a more direct participatory role in the U.S. Forest Service’s Incident Management Team, which handles complex emergency situations by addressing operational, logistical, planning, safety and public information aspects of an incident.

While attending the IMT meetings, the co-op had access to technical data that it could relay to members and was also able to share the co-op’s weather data, which assisted in more precise predictions by the IMT meteorologist. And while it felt like they were “overcommunicating with members,” said Lea Hoover, OTEC director of member and strategic services, the exercise set the tone for what members could expect from the co-op.

“Not only were we setting the level of communication members could expect, but we increased our involvement to a level that we could act quickly alongside our county emergency management partners and key accounts if something did change or move drastically.”