Creativity sparks innovative use of state’s energy emergency management tool for coronavirus response

New tool helped ensure cold storage for vials of vaccines during winter power outages

||| FROM STATE DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE |||

The Washington Department of Commerce, home to the State Energy Office, plays a pivotal role behind the scenes in the state’s response to energy emergencies, such as major power and fuel supply disruptions. During the pandemic, Energy Emergency Management Director Elizabeth King recognized the potential of the Washington Energy Infrastructure Assessment Tool (WEIAT, known as “Wyatt”) to help guide important elements of the state’s coronavirus response.

The tool was originally funded in part by the U.S. Department of Energy which recently highlighted King’s work as a successful example of cross-agency collaboration between DOE and the state.

WEIAT is a collaborative GIS dashboard with data from power and fuel infrastructure, weather radar, road closures, public facilities and many other sources. It’s been crucial in successful response to wildfires, floods, refinery and gasoline supply emergencies and now coronavirus.

King expanded WEIAT to include new data to map community COVID-19 infection rates, track status of utility services, and identify critical-care sites and COVID-19 testing and vaccine distribution locations. The additional data has helped guide pandemic response and economic recovery efforts by Commerce and other state agencies.

One such example was prioritizing COVID vaccine storage locations, where keeping the vials at cold and ultra-cold temperatures was crucial. When a massive January storm caused power outages in several areas, King received a list of the storage locations and compared against outage data. She was able to quickly reach out to the affected utilities and elevate power restoration to emergency status. While utilities typically have priority restoration lists of facilities like hospitals, they don’t necessarily have lists of ad hoc facilities such as the vaccine cold storage locations. Local officials valued the specific information King provided, especially at one facility where emergency backup power failed, and they were able to quickly use the vaccine they had on site.