Is your organization truly ready for a crisis? If your power went out without warning, and you found yourself consulting your emergency SOPs, would they guide you through the situation smoothly? Let’s walk through such a scenario at a fictional company to find out just how well it would do (and where there might be room for improvement).
Scribble Water Services: Monday, 6:17 AM
It’s early Monday morning at the fictional Scribble Water Services. Crews are changing shifts. Demand is climbing. Everything seems to be running smoothly.
And then the lights go out inside the operation.
SCADA screens, detailing tank levels and water quality, wink into darkness. The low, constant noise of equipment drops out, abruptly replaced by silence. Backup lights flicker on, but only in certain areas. Workers instinctively check their phones to figure out what’s happening.
The first 30 seconds see messages from internal teams and supervisors flying in, confirming the areas that have lost power — it quickly becomes clear that the entire organization has been affected. The immediate questions to answer are who’s in charge, and what happens next?
As the severity of the situation dawns on the workers, one thing is for certain: it’s time for the company’s emergency utility SOPs to stop being just documents and become decision-makers.
Act I: The First 15 Minutes
Staff begin pulling up outage response procedures, flipping through binders and screens while systems remain partially dark. Although they’re relieved to find the documents, they soon realize that they weren’t written for this exact moment, with this staff level, or for this technological footprint.
When things go wrong, it’s usually because of the lack of an SOP or lack of an updated SOP that all workers are familiar with, explains Peter Albrecht, a mechanic turned TWFH copywriter who writes SOPs.
“A worker attempting to resolve a problem by referring to outdated SOPs will find answers to problems they’re not experiencing or protocols that no longer make sense to follow.”
As the first 15 minutes trickle by, field crews remain at a standstill, waiting for supervisors to give them the go-ahead to work. Likewise, supervisors hesitate to authorize work without confirmation from superiors.
SOPs are meant to reduce uncertainty, but in this case, they seem to be amplifying it, exposing gaps inutility emergency preparedness. And as time passes, external pressure grows.
Early risers start to notice the weird water pressure in their homes, and social media buzzes with questions about why. Within the organization, two supervisors each make the incorrect assumption that the other is handling external communications, so no public message goes out. Customers are kept in the dark, and the local media asks why the utility isn’t ready with answers.
The SOP does cover communications, but it doesn’t clearly say who owns that responsibility.
“It may have been put together by a department manager or someone who is more disconnected from the day-to-day processes than they realized,” Peter says. So, while the SOPs might look great on paper, they aren’t usable in a real emergency.
By the 15-minute mark in this power outage, no irreversible damage has occurred, but momentum has been lost. Decision-making has slowed. Confidence is shaky. Organizational response is already drifting from coordinated to reactive. The outage itself may have been unavoidable, but the disorder taking shape is not.
Act II: An Hour In, Pressure Rising
As pressure rises, improvisation takes over. Field crews know something needs to be done, and with no direction from their supervisors, they fall back on the safest thing: doing things the way they’re used to doing them.
Pumps are checked. Valves are adjusted. Small decisions are made on the local level with no clear knowledge about what’s happening elsewhere in the system.
Meanwhile, a single senior operator has become the emergency’s unofficial expert. Having been with the organization for decades, this person knows the system best.
“While this type of knowledge is, in my humble opinion, often correct and sometimes the very key to ending an emergency or solving a vexing problem, tribal knowledge might only offer a patch that merely slows a bigger problem that’s still worsening in the background,” Peter says.
In this case, the fixes may solve the immediate problem, but might not prevent it from happening again.
For newer employees, the situation feels different. The SOPs clearly don’t apply, and decisions are being made in conversations they’re not a part of. This highlights the knowledge gap between themselves and older employees, whose institutional knowledge and instinct often prevent small issues from escalating. If older employees aren’t around during the next emergency, new people may struggle to handle it.
And what about the leaders? What are they thinking?
Well, they want answers. It’s been an hour. What’s stable? What’s still at risk? With so many decisions being made informally, there is no single, documented source of procedure to point to.
The situation is being dealt with, but not in a way that’s easy to explain, justify, or scale.
Act III: When Good SOPs Show Their Value
Let’s rewind. It’s 6:17 AM, and the power has just gone out. Within the hour, leaders will want answers, and customers won’t just be questioning what’s happening — they’ll be making complaints.
Fortunately, operators have easy access to a well-written, tested SOP grounded in utility documentation best practices. They consult it to find a quick, effective resolution.
“The keyword here is ‘tested,” Peter explains. “Every team member with responsibilities in an SOP must know their role.”
An SOP shouldn’t sit untouched until an emergency hits. It needs to be exercised, updated, and validated against real conditions, so that everyone knows who does what, and when. When systems change or roles shift, the documentation should change with them.
In this second scenario, supervisors delegate tasks with confidence. Newer employees can act without hesitation. And senior staff aren’t forced to devise a response alone. Decision-making improves, coordination tightens, and safety risks drop.
On the external front, Scribble Water Services communicates clearly with customers and regulators, backed by documentation that’s easy to access and easy to follow.
Despite its importance, an SOP isn’t a silver bullet in an emergency. Predefined roles and practiced actions are what really drive effective resolution.
The Leadership Lens: Not an Operations Problem
When cracks appear during an emergency, it’s usually not an operations problem, but a governance issue. Effective SOPs show that an organization’s leadership has prioritized readiness long before an outage ever occurs.
Peter puts it like this: “An SOP that everyone knows is severely outdated or ‘not really how we do it’ signals that the higher-ups aren’t concerned with crossing T’s and dotting I’s — which in turn can breed an atmosphere where workers have that same attitude toward other matters.”
The risk isn’t just cultural — it’s operational. When emergency SOPs aren’t treated as critical, they can fail to convey the seriousness of the situation itself. If the procedure doesn’t feel authoritative, the emergency doesn’t either. What should be a coordinated response becomes fragmented, informal, and harder to control.
On the other hand, strong SOPs tell teams that leadership is prepared, engaged, and accountable — and that when something goes wrong, the response will be deliberate, not improvised.
Asking the Real Question
Utility operators, if you lost power tomorrow, would your SOPs hold up? The scenario isn’t hypothetical. Power outages will happen, storms will strike, and unexpected failures will arise. But strong SOPs that are built for real-world use can greatly improve outcomes.
Peter advises: “Talk with the workers who actually perform the steps… listen to their input and feedback, correct any incorrect assumptions, and run through it with every team member with a role in the SOP. Collaboration like this creates procedures that work in the field, not just on paper.”
For Scribble Water Services, the lesson is clear: it’s time to stop scribbling, start planning, and make sure their procedures are ready when the next emergency.
