Snowed In and Cut Off: How a Norwegian Municipality Dealt with a Power Outage

This case study investigates the impact of interaction and information-sharing challenges between a small Norwegian municipality and other Emergency Response organisations during a power outage. We explore how these challenges relate to time and the different phases of the disaster management life cycle. Through interviews and surveys involving various stakeholders, our findings point to deficiencies in notification and engagement among essential resources. These issues led to notification and engagement problems that hampered the municipality’s involvement. Our study identifies organisational boundaries and emphasises the potential improvements that operational procedures and action cards can bring to communication, information sharing, and role understanding in similar scenarios. We contend that examining such events through the lens of information Trading Zones (TZ) offers valuable insights into how collaborative efforts can enhance Team Situational Awareness (TSA) and foster a common operational picture (COP).