Year-Round Resilience: A 360° Approach to Storm Preparedness and Response

2025 marked the first time in a decade that no hurricanes made landfall in the Southeast U.S. Although that may seem like good news, it underscores a more unsettling reality: Extreme weather is becoming increasingly erratic and unpredictable. Despite the lack of direct impacts, 2025 still brought 12 named storms, including the devastating Category 5 Hurricane Melissa, which registered slightly below the average of 16.4 named storms over the past 25 years, but well within expected ranges.

We’ve entered an era where “storm season” no longer captures the year-round reality utilities face. Aging infrastructure is now exposed to a continuous cycle of overlapping threats, including hurricanes, typhoons, bomb cyclones, tornadoes, microbursts, polar vortices, blizzards, wildfires, flash floods, mudslides, and more.

Storm-related outages are growing in frequency, severity, and cost. In 2024, NOAA reported 27 unique weather events with damages in excess of $1 billion. Swiss RE recently reported that the 4-year annual average for severe weather outages in the U.S. rose 57% from 2020-2023 when compared to 2016-2019, and outage-related grid damages exceeded $100 billion in some recent years... Continue Reading