Case studies
Five engagements, told honestly.
What was at stake, what I did, and what actually happened — including the one where we did not win.
Crisis communications · Piedmont Natural Gas
A fatal residential explosion in Ballantyne
A natural gas explosion in a prominent Charlotte neighbourhood killed one person and injured another. Intense media attention, an emotionally charged community, and no confirmed cause. I activated the crisis playbook I had written beforehand, stood up the response teams, and served as lead spokesperson and media liaison from the first hours.
The decision that mattered was engaging media immediately — before the facts were known — maintaining transparency while refusing to speculate. When the investigation established the cause as customer interference with a gas meter, I had the Fire Chief deliver that finding rather than the company. Independent authority carried it in a way our own statement never could have.
- At stake
- Public trust during a fatality, in a neighbourhood where the company had no room for error.
- Outcome
- Coverage stayed balanced and factual. The Fire Chief’s confirmation reinforced the company’s longstanding safety education on meter tampering. Reputation held.
- Transfers to
- Any system where the worst day involves a fatality, an investigation, and a community that wants an answer before one exists.
Executive positioning · Duke Energy
A first‑of‑its‑kind clean energy tariff
Hyperscale data centre growth was driving unprecedented electricity demand. Duke Energy partnered with Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Nucor on a tariff structure letting very large users fund new generation without shifting cost onto everyone else. I led enterprise communications across all five organizations and authored the executive messaging delivered at the White House.
The narrative I built it on was one sentence: large‑scale energy users should help fund the infrastructure their growth requires. Everything else — talking points, media Q&A, spokesperson strategy, five separate legal reviews — hung off that.
- At stake
- Regulatory scrutiny over cost allocation, and the risk that the public read it as ordinary customers subsidising data centres.
- Outcome
- A coordinated national announcement across five companies. Coverage in Reuters, Utility Dive, E&E News by Politico and Power Engineering, consistently adopting the customer‑protection framing.
- Transfers to
- Rate cases and tariff changes at any scale. The problem is identical — explaining who pays for what, before someone else explains it for you.
Disaster response · Duke Energy
Hurricanes Helene and Milton
Catastrophic infrastructure damage across Western North Carolina, and federal stakeholders including the White House needing an accurate picture that changed hourly. I was the communications liaison to Federal Government Relations, building the intake process that turned raw field data into decision‑ready executive summaries, and validating every figure with operations before it went out.
Continuous coverage, 24/7, across multiple weeks.
- At stake
- Federal decisions being made on our numbers. One wrong restoration figure would have cost the credibility of every figure after it.
- Outcome
- A single reliable channel between field operations and federal leadership for the duration of both storms, with no gaps in visibility.
- Transfers to
- Storm restoration at any size. A co‑op briefing a county EOC and a governor’s office faces the same discipline problem, with fewer people to solve it.
Coalition building · Duke Energy
The Southeast Hydrogen Hub coalition
The Department of Energy put eight billion dollars behind a hydrogen hub programme. Duke Energy, Dominion Energy, Southern Company, TVA, and LG&E and KU formed a six‑state coalition to compete. There was no governance structure and no communications function — I was asked to build both from nothing, under a federal proposal deadline, and led a ten‑person cross‑company team.
The coalition was not selected. The communications platform was nonetheless recognized by executive leadership across the participating companies as a best‑in‑class model for cross‑organization alignment.
- At stake
- Five utilities with separate brands, boards and regulators presenting as one credible applicant on a compressed federal timeline.
- Outcome
- A full communications infrastructure delivered on deadline, and a repeatable model the participants have carried into later joint work. The bid did not win.
- Transfers to
- Joint agencies, regional authorities, and any grant application where several organizations have to sound like one.
Systems and process · Piedmont Natural Gas
The enterprise message map
The organization had no unified communications structure. Messaging was inconsistent across departments, audiences and timelines, and nobody had a view of the whole. I built an annual message mapping system — initially just a well‑designed Excel workbook organized by month, mapping messages to audiences, timing and business priorities.
It grew into an enterprise operating model spanning corporate communications, regulatory, customer sales and marketing, and safety and operations, with a monthly cross‑functional alignment meeting and an annual refresh cycle. It is still in use today.
- At stake
- Functions communicating independently and contradicting each other in public.
- Outcome
- A single source of truth for communications planning, adopted across departments, and a planning discipline that has outlasted everyone who built it.
- Transfers to
- This one transfers most directly of all. It began as a spreadsheet. A utility with four people who write things needs it more than one with forty.