Below is a press release from PowerOutage.us:
Below you will find stats and insights on our post-event analysis of Winter Storm Fern, from our resident meteorologist, Jay Shafer. You can view the full report at https://poweroutage.us/research/winter-storm-fern-analysis.
Key Stats:
- Peak Outages: 1.1 million customers without power across 10 states (Tennessee 345k, Mississippi 189k, Louisiana 143k, Texas 142k)
- Historic Ice: Ice accretion exceeded 1.0 inch in northern Mississippi, one of the worst regional ice storm events since February 1994
- Restoration: Due to record ice, Mississippi's full restoration took over two weeks and 49% of outages lasted into day 3 of restoration.
- Historical Ranking: Among the top 10 most impactful U.S. ice storms
- Human & Economic: 174 fatalities, preliminary damage >$4 billion
Key Insights:
- Restoration timelines were primarily driven by hazard severity and infrastructure damage, not deficiencies in utility response.
- Extreme ice loading events require infrastructure rebuilding, extending restoration timelines.
- Data-driven resilience planning is increasingly critical, including extreme ice scenario planning, targeted vegetation management, and infrastructure hardening in high-risk corridors
- Independent outage analytics and standardized geospatial frameworks improve cross-utility benchmarking and can help regulators evaluate restoration performance objectively.
- Real-time geospatially standardized outage information can help utilities improve restoration time and reduce impact for major events.
You can access the full report at https://poweroutage.us/research/winter-storm-fern-analysis.
