SSEN has held a virtual meeting with its Medical & Emergency Response Team (MERT) for the Highlands, sharing plans and ways of working to ensure that local communities will continue to get the best level of support available if storms and bad weather lead to power cuts.

SSEN's Customer Relationship Managers work all year round to strengthen their existing links with community stakeholders, welfare groups and charities and with traditional methods of engagement temporarily off the table during the coronavirus pandemic, virtual meetings have proved to be a great way of maintaining these all-important links.

Speaking about the virtual meeting, Alan Smith from MERT (Highlands), said: "Our team was set up to provide support to communities and organisations, such as SSEN, during times of emergency or significant incident. In 2018 we received a grant from SSEN's Resilient Communities Fund, and that allowed us to upgrade our communications equipment which we would deploy to an incident.

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"This virtual meeting allowed us to discuss our current capabilities and how they could be utilised during adverse weather and particularly during prolonged power outages where communication support or welfare assistance may be required. As winter approaches it's great for our team to have named contacts who can support the team and who we can update regarding our capabilities as the team develops."

Speaking after the meeting, SSEN's Customer Relationship Managers, Shona Horn (North Caledonia Region covering the North East and Shetland) and Pamela Harvey (Highlands and Islands Region) highlighted the importance of everyone being prepared for the impact that winter weather and storms can have: "Meeting with Alan and his colleagues has been a great way of not only learning about their own plans for the winter months, it has given us the opportunity to ensure that SSEN is able to offer them as much support as possible should the weather do its worst and cause a power cut. 

"We'd encourage all our customers to take a few minutes to think about what they would do in a power cut, and if they would require any extra support, remember our Priority Services Register is here to help."