Energy news from Omaha Public Power District
Energy news from Omaha Public Power District
OPPD’s Storm & Outage Center turned five-years-old in January.
The site is operated and overseen by the utility’s Corporate Marketing & Communications (CMC) department. In its five years, has become the go-to site for customers and the media seeking up-to-date information when bad weather threatens service.
New look, same message
OPPD “freshened up” the site in 2018. Original features such as videos, photo galleries, and stories on OPPD crews restoring power are added regularly.
The site replaced a text-only blog that served OPPD for five years before the current Storm & Outage site debuted.
“We continue with our original goal of pushing out timely outage updates and safety messaging whenever widespread outages or severe weather events occur,” said Paula Lukowski, supervisor of Customer Communications. “We’ve provided a lot of good information for customers as well as the media, who keep close watch on the site.”
Valuable tool
The Storm & Outage Center has proved its worth time and time again when customers experience outages. Since 2015, more than 282,000 users have used the site, and page views top 1.5 million, said Lukowski, who spearheaded the site’s creation.
Three storms brought the most visitors to the site – two snowstorms and one storm where multiple tornadoes struck:
- Oct. 14, 2018 – 26,930 users
- June 17, 2017 – 25,197 users
- June 18, 2017 – 11,799 users
- Feb. 2, 2016 – 6,893 users
Jason Kuiper joined OPPD as a communications specialist in 2015. He is a former staff writer and reporter at the Omaha World-Herald, where he covered a wide range of topics but spent the majority of his career covering crime. He is a graduate of the University of Nebraska at Omaha and has also appeared in several true crime documentary shows. In his free time he enjoys cooking, spending time with his wife and three children, and reading crime novels.
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