PREPA goes Mobile – Field Crew Enlightenment
Field Work
PREPA’s fieldwork can be organized as three major activities, as
represented in the following diagram:
Figure 1: PREPA’s most common activities performed in the field.
Each one of these groups has different characteristics, however,
some functions may overlap.
- Normal Operations. Includes scheduled work, such as,
construction, capital improvements, meter installation,
planned switching, tree trimming, pole inspections, etc.
- Emergency Operations. Includes “routine” non-scheduled
work dealing primarily with customer outages.
- Natural Disaster Operations. When a hurricane or natural
disaster hits and damages large portion of the electrical
network, crews of all types, including office personnel,
retired personnel, and sometimes crews from other utilities,
are pressed into emergency services to restore service as
quickly as possible. The number of field personnel may be
increased by 20 to 30 percent when allocating these
resources to the fieldwork.
All crews are managed at a district level. Some of the
construction crews may be managed at a regional level.
For Normal Operations, prior to AIRe, crews received daily
assignments at their offices early in the morning from District
Engineers. A District Engineer is responsible to manually
maintaining the Daily Report, which tracks each individual on the
crew, his work performed, his time spent in the field, etc. The
AIRe systems are now handling many of the tasks that were
formally performed manually by the District Engineers and their
staff.
Figure 2: PREPA has 7 Regions, 27 Districts, and 430 crews to work under Normal and Emergency
Operations. The available crews can grow during Natural Disaster Operations.
Natural Disaster Operations
Although AIRe is being implemented to support all three major
fieldwork activities, this paper will focus on natural disaster
operations. The work performed after a hurricane is almost the
same as that performed under normal and emergency operations –
the major difference is the amount of work and stress imposed on
PREPA employees.
