Editorial policy

How content on this site is produced, who is responsible for it, how it is sourced, and how to get an error fixed.

Our standards

• Every number traces to a public source. Outage counts are the figures reported by the utilities and by ODIN, the U.S. Department of Energy's county outage data, and we never add outages a source didn't report; where a utility's area-by-area counts and its own total disagree, we reconcile the two before placing its outages in counties, by rules the methodology sets out. Where a displayed number that combines the utilities' own numbers with the federal county count differs from the county count alone, the page says so. Our sources page documents where our outage counts, weather alerts, utility territories and location lookups come from and how often the live ones update; the federal historical outage records some pages cite (EAGLE-I) are described on the methodology page.
• Safety and preparedness guides cite their sources. Each links the public sources its advice draws on (among them Ready.gov, the CDC, FoodSafety.gov, the FDA, the CPSC, the American Red Cross and HHS) and is general safety information, not medical or legal advice; our guide to how the forecast works cites our own accuracy, research and data sources pages.
• Predictions are graded in public. When a county outage that reached 200 or more customers ends, our county-wide estimate is re-run at each of its readings after its peak where the time was not withheld, from the outage's own recovery trend, and scored against when power actually came back, and the accuracy page publishes the results, misses included; the methodology sets out which outages are graded and how. The restoration times utilities post through the federal county outage data are graded by the same yardstick.
• No fabricated anything. No invented quotes, no fake author personas, no speculation presented as fact, and no content written to fill space. If we don't have the data, the page says so.

How content is produced

The site's operator is responsible for everything it publishes. Most of it is generated from data:

• Live pages are automated. The map, county/city/state pages, and utility pages render live utility and federal data on a ~15-minute cycle. No human writes "12,304 customers out" — the sources do.
• News reports are closed. Software drafts reports on major outages from the live data, but none can be published until a person can review the whole article and its sources first. The reports that were once published automatically were taken down on October 1, 2026 (see the corrections log).
• Restoration estimates are algorithmic — computed from each outage's own recovery trend, leaning on what past outages in the same place did while that trend is thin (method on the methodology page) — and clearly labeled as ours, separate from the utility's official time.
• Guides and pages about the site are drafted and kept up to date with software, including AI tools, under the operator's direction. Each guide links the sources its advice and figures rest on. Each page shows the date its words last changed; a page also shows a Reviewed date once the operator has checked it against its sources, and none has been reviewed that way yet.

Authorship

Content is published under organizational authorship — "When's the Power Back? editorial" — with a visible date. We don't attach invented human bylines. The structured data of the guides, the methodology and the research report names the organization as author and publisher; that of the other pages about the site names it as publisher.

Corrections

If a number, claim, or citation is wrong, tell us via the contact form (choose "correction" or mention it in your message). What happens next:

• We check the claim against its source — the live data, the archived reading, or the cited authority.
• If it's wrong, we fix it. The corrected page shows the date of the correction as its updated date, and the correction is listed in the corrections log. News publishing is closed, so no article is up to correct; when it reopens, a correction to a published article will be published in place with an updated timestamp distinct from the original publication time.
• If our data source itself was wrong (a utility's own outage map reporting an impossible number, for example), we correct or remove those readings in our records, so the affected pages and their outage history show the corrected figures.

Live outage numbers correct themselves on the next data refresh (~15 minutes); the corrections process above is for published articles, guides, and methodology claims.

Every correction to what the site told readers is listed with its date, what was said and what the page says now, in the corrections log.