Melt away the challenges of winter weather. Prevent costly equipment damage and disruptions to daily operations by proactively preparing for winter weather conditions.

To enhance preparedness, we encourage you to utilize our emergency winter weather preparedness checklist. Regularly reviewing and implementing this guide ensures proactive building readiness for winter conditions. It safeguards against potential freeze-ups in steam and sprinkler systems, mitigates the risk of roof collapses due to heavy snowfall, and protects against potential flooding during extremely cold temperatures. These risks present safety concerns and entail substantial financial and time investments in repairs, with the possible consequence of building shutdowns.

Print out this emergency winter weather preparedness checklist and review it every winter to prepare staff and equipment.

Vicinity has rigorous cold weather protocols to ensure safe, reliable, and consistent operation of its facilities to prevent service disruptions. Our interconnected energy facilities offer 99.99% uptime energy delivery through multiple power supplies, backup generation, and several water and fuel sources in case of interruptions to other utilities.

Vicinity’s winter weather protocol includes:

• A comprehensive cold weather plan that entails pre-season preparation, pre-storm planning, weekly winter weather readiness checks, and post-season assessment.
• Identification, monitoring, and prioritization of components, systems, and other areas of vulnerability at our facilities which may experience freezing problems, pose safety risks, prevent the delivery of fuel or water, or result in other cold weather operational issues.
• Validation that critical equipment is operational through function testing.
• Implementing ongoing walk-downs throughout the season to ensure heat tracing is functional, sufficient pipe insulation is in place, and opportunities for continuous improvement are identified.
• Strict compliance with North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) – Emergency Operations (EOP).
• Annual training with specific checklists related to freeze protection panel alarms, troubleshooting and repair of freeze protection circuitry, identification of facility areas susceptible to winter conditions, review of special inspections or rounds implemented during severe weather, and fuel switching procedures.