The worst electric outages are those that don't make any sense. Anyone can understand how a truck hitting a pole or a backhoe digging up an underground cable can cause a widespread outage. But a balloon causing an outage? Where do you even start managing people's use of balloons?
Balloon sales blossom in the late spring—with people celebrating Mother's Day, weddings, and graduations. Balloons cause thousands of power outages every year—when released, they float up into power lines and blow up.
I saw a shocking balloon video that went viral. In it, a foolish young woman deliberately released an armload of balloons as if symbolizing her own freedom after graduation—right under a power line! Within six seconds, those balloons exploded in a spectacular ball of fire and plunged her into total darkness!
Despite some spotty legal restrictions, mylar balloon sales are rising, and so are outages caused by them. Long after the party is over, balloons are still full of surprises. Their polyester resin film holds helium for many days. Their shiny appearance comes from a thin coating of aluminum—an excellent conductor of electricity. The story takes a dark turn when they cause a short circuit and knock the power out.
When the power goes off, removing balloons from electrical wires is expensive and disruptive. It interrupts scheduled work or gets a line worker out of bed for some predictable overtime. Throw in high-priced bucket trucks, traffic control, overheads, and travel time. The costs add up quickly. And it's all so avoidable.
As a utility operations manager, I hated seeing daily outage reports that featured another balloon incident! Even worse was having to explain how the utility powering our modern society was once again brought down by a balloon!
Whose problem was it anyway? Operations, engineering, customer relations, or programs and services? The utility made no progress; we didn't understand the problem, let alone how to address it.
In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Dr. Stephen Covey's habit no. 5 encourages readers to Seek first to understand, then to be understood. The secret to reducing balloon-related outages is to understand that most utility concerns involve place. Equipment, customers, employees, and construction are all tightly coupled to their location. I decided to look at where these mylar explosions occurred. Maybe we could learn something.
Using ArcGIS, we located all balloon-caused outages in our service area for a 10-year period. In the GIS, a clear pattern emerged. Surprisingly, balloon incidents were concentrated in a few distinct geographic regions with certain demographic characteristics. We could not ban balloons overnight as some dreamed, but we could help educate the customers that enjoy balloons.
We started with billboards in the heart of the problem areas. We added presentations on balloon dangers to the local elementary school outreach program. I could almost hear a clever fourth grader at a graduation party saying, "Be careful with those balloons—don't let them go—they burn up the power lines!" Way to go, kid!
The following year, we saw a marked drop in balloon-caused outages.
Today, the options to target customer messaging are superb, extending well beyond direct mail by ZIP code. When I listen to Pandora, the ads are personalized to my location. Neighborhood businesses message me specifically because of my whereabouts. Utilities can do the same if they know where to focus their efforts.
Location is powerful. Location matters. To paraphrase Covey, you must understand something before you can address it. For utilities, putting problems in the context of location helps them find solutions.
ArcGIS is a location intelligence platform. It turns almost any dataset into a colorful picture, quickly revealing the underlying business meaning. For more information on how ArcGIS provides the enterprise infrastructure for location-aware business insights and solutions, please download our free ebook.