Practitioner viewpoint - May 2025

IN THE last few days, Spain and Portugal have been hit by extensive power outages, resulting in widespread failure of communications, transportation and infrastructure systems.  At the time of writing the power grid is now back online.  There has not yet been any official confirmation of the cause, but the news coverage has served as a timely reminder of just how reliant we are on electricity, and how vulnerable our generation and transmission infrastructure is to external influence.

Rarely a week goes by without media coverage of targeted cyber attacks on businesses, infrastructure services and statutory organisations.  Criminal extremists are known to target critical infrastructure locations for physical attacks, and extreme weather events are becoming increasingly common place across the world.

In the medium term Governments will look to increase the security around these key assets, and to improve the resilience of systems and services, but in the meantime does your organisation have a plan to respond to a complete power outage?

Do you know how your equipment and systems will respond?  Do you have backup generation available?  If so, when was it last tested? And do you have a supply of fuel available?  Have you identified which systems are most critical?  If an outage is protracted it may be necessary to prioritise back up power, have you got a plan in place?  

The one thing that you can be absolutely sure of in an emergency is that nothing will work quite as expected!  So to ensure that your contingency plans are robust, it’s a good idea to test them in practice, in addition to having desktop exercises. Often referred to as ‘black building tests’, these exercises can offer really useful insight to the way that systems and people will respond to the complete loss of core services such as electricity.

It's surprising just how dark it can be when there is no lighting inside or outside a building. Emergency egress lighting is limited in extent and duration, but the simple provision of ‘snap light sticks’ in key locations can facilitate egress and help to ensure that staff are able to make their work areas safe before leaving.  Modern phone systems are often dependant on the IT infrastructure, and fail with the power.  Ready access to mobile phones can help – but they are no good unless there is offline access to important numbers, and even these will fail once the batteries become exhausted, so battery based emergency chargers may also be required, and the same will be true of handheld radios and other communication systems.  Failure of air handling systems can also mean that buildings heat up, or cool down very rapidly, and elimination of forced air can lead to a deterioration in air quality surprisingly quickly.  What’s your plan?  Would you just send staff home?  What if the outage is affecting more that just your site?  Public transport may be unavailable, and roads quickly gridlocked.  What can you do to keep staff safe and comfortable on site?  Even with back up generation, you may not be able to run the whole site, so which areas will you prioritise, and how long can these be maintained with the contingency arrangements available?  Will you need key staff to remain in order to manage recovery of systems once the power returns, if so do you have a plan in place to identify key functions and the processes to be followed?  Do you know how systems will respond when it comes to turning them back on once power is restored?

There are so many things to consider, and you may already have a contingency plan in place, but there is no substitute for actually testing it in practice. This will help to ensure that arrangements are as effective and robust as possible, and that staff are familiar with the processes that should be followed should a real emergency occur.  

Of course we all hope that contingency plans will never need to be implemented – but as my Gran always said – it’s better to be safe than sorry!!