The Trust Before the Storm: How Two Mississippi Utilities Used Transparency, Visibility and Preparation to Communicate Through Winter Storm Fern

On January 23 of this year, a powerful Arctic air mass pushed south as moisture streamed north from the Pacific and Gulf of Mexico. As the two collided, Winter Storm Fern was born. Over the next four days, this massive storm system wreaked havoc, dumping more than 2 feet of snow from New Mexico up to New England and dropping catastrophic levels of ice across the Southeast.

Here in the Tennessee Valley, Fern landed with a combination of freezing rain, sleet, snow and a prolonged period of extreme cold temperatures. Distribution systems across parts of North Mississippi, North Alabama, and Kentucky, along with West, Middle and East Tennessee, were among the hardest hit, facing severe damage to infrastructure from ice and falling trees. Compounding the situation, TVA’s transmission system was also impacted. Meanwhile, the extreme cold drove electricity use sharply higher as crews worked to repair transmission infrastructure damaged by the storm.

At the peak of the outages caused by Fern, the National Weather Service determined there were more than 189,000 customers without power across the state of Mississippi. As temperatures plunged into the teens, North Mississippi residents were without heat, light and, in some cases, even water. At the same time, thick ice coating power lines and trees continued to hamper restoration efforts, while ice-covered roads and falling limbs created dangerous conditions for lineworkers. As the outages stretched on, local power companies (LPCs) faced mounting pressures to restore power as quickly as possible without compromising the safety of line crews.

Balancing the safety of his employees and mutual aid teams with the urgent needs of his community was exactly the challenge faced by Sean McGrath, CEO of Alcorn County Electric Power Association (ACE) located in Corinth, Miss. “Safety is our No. 1 core value at ACE Power. This includes the safety of our team members and the members in our community. We will not compromise on safety. When communicating with our membership about outage restoration, we did make a deliberate effort to explain that safety was a nonnegotiable. At the same time, we also felt like this was a humanitarian crisis and tried everything within our power to move as quickly and safely as we could to restore power,” McGrath said.

With all 19,000 ACE members without power by midday on January 26, McGrath’s challenge was made worse by the fact the damage wasn’t limited to ACE’s distribution system. Across the Valley, 17 of TVA’s delivery points to LPCs remained out of service that day, along with 25 sections of TVA’s 161-kV, 69-kV and 46-kV transmission lines. Those outages included TVA transmission lines serving ACE, leaving the cooperative waiting for power to be restored to its substations before damage to its system could be fully assessed.

Naturally, community members were anxious, worried and eager to know when their power would be restored. Managing member communications — and expectations — quickly became central to ACE’s restoration efforts. For McGrath, the only way to approach the situation was with candor. “We were very honest and transparent with our membership. We communicated things that we were doing well, things that were a struggle for us, and things that were outside of our control. We also made requests for assistance from our community, and they absolutely answered the call for everything that we required.”

That didn’t mean there wasn’t criticism. McGrath heard from some friends and family that negative comments about ACE’s restoration efforts were circulating on Facebook, but he made a deliberate choice not to let them become a distraction from the cooperative’s real work. “I wasn’t interested in giving any credence to those comments. We had a job to do and I felt it was important to make sure that my noise to signal ratio was sound. I wanted to block out all the noise and concentrate on the signal,” he said.

ACE made a strategic decision about how the organization would use Facebook during the outage. His experience leading the communications effort following Tropical Storm Olga in 2019 taught McGrath that ACE would be flooded with comments asking about individual service locations. Knowing that focusing on isolated outages wasn’t an efficient way to manage an outage event on the scale of Fern, McGrath said he and his team chose to turn comments off on their Facebook posts and, instead, focus their communications on educating members about the restoration process.

In their video communications during the Fern restoration, ACE focused on helping members understand how the restoration process worked, while acknowledging their frustration. “From their perspective, I get it,” McGrath said.

One source of that frustration was ACE’s outage management system, which groups individual outages with larger neighborhood or circuit outages. Once the larger outage was restored, members could receive notification that their power should be back on even if an isolated service wire failure left them without power. Complicating matters, ACE had lost communication with meters in many locations, making it important for members to report if their power remained out.

“If the customer did not report that their power was still out, we would assume that power had been restored because in a lot of places we had lost communication with the meter,” McGrath said.

For McGrath, maintaining trust during the restoration came down to one thing. “This was a deliberate communication strategy, one that I think was highly effective. As the members received updates, they were seeing that we were making significant strides each day. One thing that we didn’t want to do was to over promise and underdeliver. We made sure that if we told the public we were going to do something that we delivered on that. Ultimately, that is what built the trust in our communications.”

For Frankie Moorman, CEO of Pontotoc Electric Power Association (PEPA) in Mississippi, building trust among his membership has been years in the making. That investment paid dividends during the preparation for Fern and in the storm’s aftermath.

Moorman began watching forecasts roughly a week-and-a-half to two weeks out. He was concerned, knowing that younger lineworkers and supervisors had never worked an ice storm. His communications effort began with his staff. He held meetings beginning about a week out, educating employees on the potential impacts of a severe ice storm.

“I was talking with all my employees about what we were going to be dealing with. Just something as simple as unlocking a lock on a substation gate or a piece of equipment — that lock is going to be coated with ice and frozen. Something that would normally take 30 seconds may take five or 10 minutes. Just little things like that,” Moorman said.

In the lead-up to the storm, PEPA stocked poles, crossarms, transformers, wire and other vital materials. They lined up mutual aid, secured lodging for outside crews, and staged equipment throughout their service area. Moorman reached out to municipalities within his service territory and county supervisors, and he made calls to contractors and tree-trimming crews to line up the help he anticipated needing during a recovery.

“I knew if I ever got behind, I couldn’t catch up. So, I had to be prepared. And one of the ways of being prepared was communicating to my membership,” Moorman said.

Moorman began communicating with PEPA members about a week before Fern arrived. He focused on preparing them for what they might face if forecasts proved accurate and warned them that the type of widespread outages that come with winter storms could require an extended restoration effort.

Moorman appeared on local television before the storm and worked with Jennifer Johnson, who manages PEPA’s communications efforts in addition to her role in human resources, to develop a plan for communicating with members on Facebook. His early messages emphasized preparedness while letting members know that restoration would take time.

“I started this prior to the storm. I let everyone know that we were prepared. We had material ordered and coming into the warehouse, our trucks were ready to go, personnel were on standby and I had outside crews already lined up through our statewide association. I told them, if the power goes out, it’s going to be a slow process. It’s going to take time. We’re coming to get your lights back on, but be patient with us.”

Moorman wasn’t starting from scratch when he asked PEPA members for their patience. He was leaning into a relationship that he and his staff had been actively cultivating for many years. It’s a relationship that has been built by being present in the community, supporting community events and getting to know the membership.

“We’ve always tried to have a good relationship with our members. We do community events and try to be out in public. Pontotoc is a small town. We’re local. I was born and raised here, and everybody knows me. Building those relationships has taken time. It’s been years of dedication to build those relationships to where, I guess you would say, the community is on our side,” said Moorman.

Fern put that relationship to the test. Ice began affecting PEPA on the night of January 24. At the peak of the impact, 18,054 meters — nearly 89 percent of PEPA’s system — were without power. The outage was spread widely across PEPA’s six-county service territory. Throughout the outage and restoration effort, Moorman made himself the face of PEPA’s communications.

He appeared nightly on the cooperative’s Facebook page. Dressed in his work clothes and going live between 8 and 9 nightly, Moorman would update members on what crews had accomplished that day and their plans for the following day. According to Moorman, “There was no glamour to the Facebook Live streams. It was just me talking from the heart, letting the membership know, this is where we’re at. I always stayed calm. I told them, I don’t have power either. I was cold at my house, and we’re still getting the lights on. I was just trying to be me.”

Line crews also shared photos from the day’s work with Johnson, who posted them to PEPA’s Facebook page. These efforts not only kept the PEPA membership updated on the restoration progress, but grew an audience beyond PEPA’s service territory. Moorman later learned the updates were being watched by people in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana who had family in the Pontotoc area, as well as by the families of mutual-aid workers from Mississippi and Missouri.

“A gentleman from one of the Missouri co-ops came in one morning and said, ‘Frankie, my wife and kids watch you every night. They stay up and wait on your message every night. That gives my wife comfort that I’m OK.’ I didn’t realize that. I was only trying to get the word out to my membership.”

Staff and members began calling his nightly appearances “The Frankie Show.” For Moorman, those appearances online to communicate directly were core to preserving the relationship he had built with PEPA’s membership.

“I am the face of PEPA. People want to hear from the person in charge. They want information straight from the horse’s mouth. You can’t stay behind the scenes and expect trust from your membership.

You’ve got to be out there in front and be seen for people to trust you.” Moorman took that visibility a step further, keeping PEPA’s main and branch offices open during normal weekday business hours so members could still speak with someone in person.

The impact of that transparency and visibility became evident on social media. When misinformation or misunderstanding about the restoration process appeared on social media, PEPA staff rarely had to address it directly because supportive PEPA members would jump in to provide accurate information.

For Moorman, that response was proof that the relationship PEPA had nurtured with its members long before Fern struck was holding up under those extraordinary circumstances. And while McGrath and Moorman took different approaches to communicating through the storm, their shared experience points to a common lesson: Effective communication during a crisis begins long before a community finds itself in crisis.

“Don’t wait to communicate. You don’t have to have a large production; it can be as simple as using your iPhone to do a Facebook Live post. The most important thing is that your customers know that you are working to restore services as quickly as possible. They need to know that you and your team have a plan in place. There’s nothing wrong with honest and transparent communications to your customers,” said ACE’s McGrath.

Moorman offered a similar perspective, saying, “Be prepared. Have a plan in place. Make sure all of your employees are on the same page, know what the plan is and execute it correctly. Once the storm has passed, get out there and relay correct, truthful information. Be upfront with the membership: This is what we’ve got in front of us, this is what we’re doing and it’s going to take time. Don’t go crawl up under a rock and try to hide. Meet it head-on.”