Utah Power sizes up its media effort

Utah Power's ability to get information about post-Christmas power outages to news media was hampered by some technology shortcomings, but the company is hopeful that a study of its response to the outages "will show there were a lot of things that the company did right," spokesman Dave Eskelsen said Thursday.

Speaking to members of the Utah Chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators, Eskelsen acknowledged that in early stages of the outages, the company had trouble determining outage areas because it did not know whether individual customers had power or not.

"This is what we were sorely lacking, because those two primary bits of information — did you know my power was out and when it will be back on — simply were not available," he said.

"The news was tough because there was a distinct lack of the information that everybody wanted to know, so it was filled with criticism. I think that's just a hazard of business. I don't think there's anything that can be done about it."

The company is expecting by month's end to file a report with utility regulators about the outage-causing snowstorm and the company's response to it. Company officials have said 109,000 people experienced some sort of power outage in the post-Christmas storm.

Utah Power's news media approach included an apology, an explanation and an inquiry, as well as a commitment to make improvements based on the inquiry's results.

As for the apology, "I think this is effective but seldom used by corporations," Eskelsen said. "I don't think the company gives anything up by making a sincere apology. The key in this kind of response is not to let the legal strategy dominate the public relations, and don't let the public relations strategy dominate the legal process."

A key will be to ensure, as much as possible, that troubles aren't repeated. "We know there is going to be severe weather. Regardless of whether electrical facilities are above ground or below ground, they are affected by weather and other events, and what we learn here we will need to apply and try to do better next time," he said.

Specific suggestions for the corporate spokespeople in the audience included having an action plan and having staffers well-versed about its contents.

"I think the important feature of an emergency action plan is its ability to be internalized. You really don't have time to go running to the manual to find out what to do when one of these things happens, because that is valuable time that you're going to need preparing for the news media crush," Eskelsen said.

"So, team members need to know what is expected of them in an emergency response without having to look it up in a manual. A large, voluminous emergency action plan isn't very useful because they (crises) usually unfold in very chaotic ways. We've been through a lot of outages, but no two really play out the same."

Eskelsen added that access to "the right company official" during difficult times is important, as is a proper process for information flow. "There have to be clear procedures in a crisis about how you gather official information, vet it through management or have a technical review, and then distribute to your target audience," he said.

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E-mail: bwallace@desnews.com