By Sara Burnam, RTA
November 19, 2025
Fall and winter bring ice, wind, and outages. This recipe poses a significant risk on America’s roadways, leading to accidents and road closures. Across all vehicles, the United States experiences approximately 220,000 crashes annually in freezing precipitation, resulting in roughly 34,000 injuries and 400 deaths. Fleet leaders anticipate the first ice advisory to test their plans. The fleets that fare best treat disasters like an operational discipline, not a once-a-year checklist.
The core approach should follow a three-step program: learn from every event, rehearse realistic scenarios, and keep people and communications flexible. Do that, and your team can adapt when the usual playbooks break.
1 – Learn Fast and Make it Visible in Your Systems
Within a week of any outage, storm, or fuel disruption, run a short after-action: What triggered the issue? What worked? Where did we lose time? Convert answers into specific changes and publish them to the written plan. Then wire those changes into the tools your team already touches:
- Work orders & inspections: Create “storm” templates for common repairs (chains, electrical, glazing, plow hardware). Use mobile inspections to log damage in the field when power or connectivity is spotty; reconcile later if you had to run on paper.
- Parts & inventory: Flag critical cold-weather SKUs, raise min/max seasonally, and pre-stage chains, anti-gel, batteries, and wiper assemblies by route.
- Fuel management: Blend card programs with contracted emergency deliveries; if systems go dark, capture slips and reconcile them to your fleet management information software (FMIS) afterward.
- Dashboards/scorecards: Track availability by asset class, incident jobs completed, and response times against winter baselines so leadership sees the lift.
2 – Rehearse Realistic Scenarios, Not Just Policies
Policies don’t make decisions; people do. Run short tabletop drills that mirror likely failures, such as frozen roads at 4 a.m., key staff unreachable, or a facility on generator power. Put drivers, dispatch, maintenance, parts, IT, and HR at the same table so handoffs are clear. Test a one-page “FMIS offline” runbook comprised of manual job codes, parts issues, fuel slips, timekeeping, and keep packets in each truck. Rotate roles so more than one person can open/close work orders, issue parts, reconcile fuel, and post updates.
3 – Design for Flexibility in People and Communications
Crosstrain so multiple employees can cover dispatch, parts, fueling, and communications. Pre-assign who talks to the Emergency Operations Center, who briefs leadership, and who keeps the work board current. Then confirm they have the right system permissions ahead of time. Keep communications redundant and simple: radio, SMS, phone trees, and a mass-notification channel the field actually uses. Build A/B/C teams with overlap, set fatigue limits, and cap auto-approvals with shift check-ins. If you support public safety, pre-position relief crews and kits at known chokepoints before ice forms.
Shore Up Facilities, Assets, and Fuel
Most plans break down at the shop, on the vehicle, or at the pump, so shore them up now. At facilities, test generators underload, verify transfer switches and CO monitors, protect pipes and compressors from freeze, and stage snow/ice equipment where trucks won’t block it. Post simple “dark mode” instructions in each bay for manual doors, fueling on backup power, and paper log storage.
As for assets, winterize them now, with special attention to tires and chains, heaters and defrosters, coolant and anti-gel, battery health, and cold-weather kits in cabs. For EVs, shorten routes and warm-stage vehicles, and align charging windows to times of grid stability or generator capacity.
For fuel, combine cards with emergency delivery contracts, identify on-route stations likely to stay open, and set clear priority rules. Assign fuel reconciliation to track usage during an incident and recover eligible costs later.
Let Your Technology Take the Lead
To improve your winter operations, you don’t need a total overhaul; you need to leverage the tools you already have more effectively. By focusing on light integrations that streamline workflows, you can eliminate unnecessary clicks and empower your team. Imagine your mobile technicians capturing critical data, such as photos, inspection notes, and damage reports, right from the curb, even when they’re offline, with all that information syncing automatically once a network connection is restored. This simple change can dramatically speed up your processes.
A dynamic “winter ops” dashboard can provide command with a real-time snapshot of availability, incident backlogs, and turnaround times, enabling swift, data-driven decisions. Standardizing how you capture accident data in the field will help accelerate claims processing. You can also use APIs and webhooks to automate the creation of emergency work orders from telematics alerts or dispatch tags, and automatically push status updates to a shared channel, keeping everyone on the same page.
But technology is only half the battle. Your team needs to be ready to use it. Make preparation a core part of your strategy. A hands-on approach ensures they’re not fumbling with new technology when the pressure is on. When the ice finally hits, your streamlined workflow kicks into gear. Trucks roll out efficiently, services stay online, costs remain controlled, and most importantly, people get home safely.
