‘Each day I’m making sure we’re prepared’
If there’s one thing Meghan Fonda has learned as part of her job at PPL Electric Utilities, it’s to be prepared for the unexpected every day.
It’s practically part of her job description.
As an emergency planning supervisor for the Emergency Preparedness department, Fonda is responsible for helping to keep employees prepared for any emergency or storm that may occur in the utility’s 29-county Pennsylvania service area. She also helps prepare her co-workers for a safe and swift response when power outages occur.
“My job is all about making things better for our 1.5 million customers,” said Fonda, who earned a mechanical engineering degree from Florida State University. “It’s all about being able to restore power in a safe and timely manner when our customers experience outages. Each day, I’m making sure we’re prepared.”
Fonda, in her fifth year at PPL Electric, has a wide range of responsibilities, from making sure employees are familiar with their storm response roles and keeping them up to date on training to maintaining procedures and relationships with companies that provide assistance when PPL Electric needs to supplement its workforce to help restore power when severe storms strike. She also keeps in close contact with emergency management organizations.
Fonda is one of hundreds of employees who have an emergency/storm response role in addition to their normal job. We always have a team of employees on call to respond at a moment’s notice when outages occur. That includes engineers, lineworkers, damage assessors, environmental staff and logistical personnel.
When storms and storm damage are imminent, we activate storm teams with additional personnel in the field, control centers and customer service centers across our 29-county service territory. When we activate these storm and emergency response teams, their priority is to assist with our storm restoration work.
We participate in training exercises each month throughout the year to help ensure our employees are well versed in their emergency response roles. That regular training includes drills that help us stay familiar with what we need to do in cases of storm-caused outages, but also other emergencies, such as wildfires.
We also have staff closely monitoring weather forecasts and consulting with meteorologists to ensure we’re well prepared for any storm activity that may cause damage to our power delivery system.
“I really do like the emergency response aspect,” Fonda said. “It’s rewarding to know that the work we’re doing each day is benefitting our customers in some way. And whatever issue comes our way, we’ll be as prepared as we can be to meet it head on.”
For more about how you can prepare for storms, check out this video. And for more about how we respond to power outages, click here.