How our independent restoration forecast works

What it is

Live outage status tells you what is out. Our restoration forecast estimates when power may come back — including before your utility posts an official ETA. It is independent and unofficial: computed from public outage data, never the utility's commitment.

How it's computed

We analyze how quickly customers are being restored, whether the outage is still growing, current weather, outage size, and similar past outages in the same area. The estimate recalculates about every 15 minutes as new readings arrive. Where enough graded history exists, the forecast carries a calibrated range (for example "likely 2–5 hr") instead of false precision.

When we don't show a time

Honesty beats filling the card. You'll see "Forecast gathering data" when there aren't enough readings yet, when an outage is too small for a meaningful county trend, or while an outage is still growing (a falling count can reverse — we wait for evidence the peak has passed before quoting hours). We never invent a return time.

Official ETA vs our forecast

When the utility posts its own restoration time, we show both, side by side, labeled separately — the official ETA is never silently replaced. The two answer different questions: the utility knows its crews; our forecast watches what the outage is actually doing.

How it's graded

Every completed forecast is compared with when power actually returned, automatically — and we publish the results, including misses: median absolute error with sample sizes, error by outage size, and a time-matched comparison against the utility's own posted times. The reliability research grades utilities' posted ETAs by the same ground truth.

Limits to keep in mind

County-grain estimates cover a whole county — your street can come back earlier or later. Coverage depends on utilities reporting to public feeds, and missing data is not the same as zero outages. In any emergency, follow your utility and 911 — never this site.