Earlier this week, I had the privilege of facilitating SGA Natural Gas Association's 2026 Mutual Aid Roundtable alongside our Spring Gas conference, and I'll be honest, I came into this event as someone still getting his footing in the mutual aid space. What I left with was something different. We brought together LDCs, pipelines, municipals, and industry org partners for a full day of candid conversation about what Winter Storm Fern taught us and what it exposed. The experts in that room were remarkable. Gas control professionals, storage managers, emergency coordinators, and operational leaders who have actually lived these events firsthand. My job was to get them talking to each other. They did not disappoint. A few things that stuck with me: → Mutual aid will always be about people, equipment, and expertise. What Fern reinforced is that those decisions have to live inside an integrated resilience playbook that also accounts for storage, peak shaving, and gas‑control realities, so manpower and molecules are pulling in the same direction. → We talk a lot about technology, but what really matters is a single source of truth. The best-performing teams described tools and processes where everyone, including mutual aid partners, was looking at the same information in real time. → Drills that stop short of actually “requesting aid” miss the point. The strongest examples we heard had gone all the way through the process – from recognizing the need, to filling out the RFA, to tracking resources and closing the loop SGA is turning this conversation into a concrete deliverable including an integrated resilience playbook that connects mutual aid procedures, peak shaving protocols, and communication plans to ensure a coordinated response when every minute counts. We are also offering a virtual, instructor led training coming up on April 10th to all members on Emergency Response Communication that will provide applied, operator‑focused training on NIMS and ICS structures and communication protocols, moving from foundational principles to real‑world interagency command, communication flow, and Emergency Response Center coordination during incidents. Grateful to Suzanne Ogle for her partnership in the room, to Jacob Isaac K. Abraham, Manager of Storage at Williams, for bringing deep expertise and partners on the storage side, to Tiffany Buffington, Director of Gas Control at Eastern Gas Transmission & Storage, who shared how gas physically flows on a peak day and other control room insights, and to Amanda Sramek & Kimberly Denbow from our partners at the American Gas Association for being in the room and actively leaning into this work alongside SGA and our member companies. This is what SGA does. Share. Grow. Advance. #NaturalGas #MutualAid #EnergyResilience #WinterStormFern #SGANaturalGasAssociation #GasControl #PeakShaving
