From December 31, 2022, to January 16, 2023, SMUD (Sacramento Municipal Utility District) experienced an unprecedented series of storms, prompting the utility to launch a “Storm Response Team.” In February 24, its service territory was once again battered by a strong winter storm. Attend this session to learn about the improved processes SMUD’s response team created in 2023 and how those processes and lessons learned were put to the test in its 2024 storm response efforts. The Storm Response Team, led by the Chief Operating Officer, with director-level representation from Line, Substation, Distribution Operations, Customer Care, Corporate Communications and Marketing, and Community Development met twice a week throughout 2023 to identify, prioritize, and drive a comprehensive portfolio of improvements representing the largest operational excellence initiative for SMUD in 2023. Sub-teams of managers and SMEs worked on individual improvement efforts, and progress was reported to the full executive team monthly. This presentation focuses on: Damage Assessment - increasing from 15 to 100 damage assessors utilizing new damage assessment mobile applications; Estimated Restoration Time (ERT), which set a new metric to provide ERTs within 8 hours of each outage start time and measuring the accuracy of each ERT: Customer Communications, upgrading the external website for customers to receive latest information on their respective outage and ERTs; and Line Crew Capacity, which increased capacity through several strategies to run more crews safely and expedite the repair work.