Electric Outage Reporting System

One of the responsibilities of the New York State Department of Public Service (DPS) is to monitor and regulate the electric utilities within the state. The seven private utilities and 51 municipally owned electric providers are required to notify DPS anytime there is an extended power outage affecting a significant number of customers.

One of the largest and most devastating ice storms in New York state's history hit the upstate region in January 1998. Three days of freezing rain resulted in six inches of ice throughout large portions of upstate New York. As a result, more than 151,000 people lost electric power, some for as long as three weeks, as the two major utilities in the area struggled to rebuild their systems in the dead of winter.

After the ice storm, Bowne Management Systems, Inc., a Long Island, New York-based Esri business partner, developed the Electric Outage Reporting System (EORS) to provide the utilities and DPS with an integrated tool enabling DPS to receive, process, analyze, and report outage data quickly and in a uniform format. With the information compiled, responsible organizations can be notified quickly by DPS, priorities set, and remedies brought to residents as soon as possible.

These maps illustrate some of the reports processed by EORS by population and customers without power by electric localities and counties. (Simulated data was used to create these maps.)