Press Information:
Stacey Johnson
Miner & Miner
Telephone: 970-223-1888, x151

General Information: info@miner.com

Fort Collins, CO -- Kissimmee Utility Authority (KUA), a community-owned utility serving 58,000 customers in central Florida, experienced the advantages of Responder, a GIS-hosted Outage Management System, in quickly restoring power to victims of three devastating hurricanes that have passed over the state of Florida in the last two months.

Ken Beville, GIS manager at KUA, reported, “Responder performed extremely well under these circumstances. We were able to easily visualize the concentration of outages geographically to support better crew dispatch without the guesswork involved in using trouble tickets. Maps enabled us to pinpoint exactly where each customer was located and respond quickly and appropriately.”

In mid-August, Hurricane Charley disrupted service to KUA's entire distribution network. With over 60 transmission poles down and a devastated distribution system, the GIS department worked around the clock to restore power to the community. Immediately after becoming fully operational, Hurricane Frances entered the mainland and left 21,000 people without power. KUA was able to restore power to all affected customers in only three days.

Hurricane Jeanne flooded the area again on Sunday, September 26, leaving 59 percent of KUA's service area without electricity. By Tuesday, crews had restored service to 99 percent of the customers impacted by the storm. KUA completed restoration by Wednesday evening.

“In the past, it would have taken us at least a week to restore power to the amount of people left without electricity by Hurricane Jeanne. Responder has helped us shorten that time down to just a couple of days. Having an OMS that leverages the central GIS database to support the restoration effort is a tremendous advantage,” said Ken Beville.

Responder was essential in helping communicate current outage information to both customers and upper management, while crew tracking allowed KUA to efficiently route crews to the next logical location based on geography and the number of predicted customers affected. Responder's call taking web application assisted personnel with logging calls by informing them whether the caller was part of a known outage or a newly reported incident. KUA periodically released outage numbers to the media by using Responder Dashboard, which provided the total number of customers confirmed out, total number of customers predicted out, number of affected critical customers, and current available crew count.

“On one hand, we are very proud and gratified that Responder was able to make a difference for Ken and the people of Kissimmee under such extremely difficult conditions,” said Jeff Meyers, President of Miner & Miner. “On the other hand, our hearts go out to all the people of that region. To see the way they have responded to the destruction, their perseverance and matter-of-fact approach, is really inspiring.”