Consolidate Incidents

Available in Responder Explorer.

The Consolidate tools allow you to manually combine two or more incidents into one. Depending on whether the incidents are confirmed, Responder combines the faults or cuts into one incident or locates a common upstream device and places the incident there. Incidents containing electric features (faults or cuts), location features (non-electric) or hazards may be consolidated as long as the Confirmation Status is equal for both incidents (e.g., both confirmed, both unconfirmed or probable).

The Probable status is treated as Unconfirmed. An incident with a Probable status consolidated with an Unconfirmed incident will end up with a Probable status.

When incidents are consolidated, the Remarks fields (Dispatch and Field) are also consolidated and labeled with FIELD and/or DISPATCH. A carriage return is placed between the Dispatch and Field remarks to separate them. The Responder Explorer grid displays only the first five lines. Edit the incident to view all remarks if they exceed five lines.

If both Owners are set to <Unassigned>, then the Owner will default to the user performing the consolidation. If one is unassigned or both are assigned to different people, then the owner of the older incident becomes the owner of the consolidated incident. You may select an Owner on the Edit Consolidated Incident screen.

Multi-Customer Load Point: If an incident on a multi-customer load point (e.g., apartment building) is rolled upstream, all customers are included in the new upstream incident. Should the new upstream incident be cancelled, the original downstream incident will only include those customers who called. Any changes made (e.g., additional customers checked to indicate outage) using the Select Affected Customers tool will be lost.

The way incidents are consolidated depends on their confirmed status as well as their feeder:

All Confirmed: If all incidents being consolidated have been confirmed, the devices will be added to the same incident. Confirmed incidents can be consolidated regardless of whether they reside on the same feeder or not.
All Unconfirmed or Probable: If all of the incidents being consolidated are unconfirmed or probable and contain at least one network device, Responder will locate a common electric device and place the incident on that device. If the incidents being consolidated contain location features or hazards, all location features and hazards are included in the consolidated incident. In this case, a common upstream feature is NOT identified. The user is warned if the resulting incident falls in a different region. In all cases, Location features and Hazards remain in their original locations. Unconfirmed/probable incidents can be consolidated ONLY if they reside on the same feeder. Incidents may NOT be consolidated to a device that has any type of Do Not Operate tag.

Confirmed or Unconfirmed/Probable: Two incidents cannot be consolidated if one is confirmed and the other unconfirmed or probable. The user will receive an error message indicating this.

Quick Steps

Consolidate Incidents

Select two or more incidents.
Right-click and select Consolidate.
Edit incident data.
Click OK.

In Responder Explorer, select two or more incidents. You can select multiple incidents by holding down the Ctrl key and selecting. Incidents must have the same confirm status (confirmed or unconfirmed/probable) before they may be consolidated.
Right-click and select Consolidate. If both incidents are confirmed, the incident devices will be added to the same incident. If both incidents are unconfirmed and contain electric faults, Responder will locate a common upstream device and place the incident there. Otherwise all faults, location features and/or hazards are combined into one incident.
The Edit Consolidated Incident screen allows you to modify information about the incident.
Click the Set to Now tool to set the field to the current date and time.
Click OK.

Figure 1, The incidents highlighted in blue will be consolidated.

Figure 2, The Edit Consolidated Incident screen. Note that the values in the Total and Critical customers fields are the sum of the values in the corresponding fields for the individual incidents.

Consolidation and the Address field: Note that when consolidating, the final incident will have the address of the first device in the Electric Features list. You can use the Use As Incident Address tool to assign the address of a different device.

Figure 3, Because both original incidents were confirmed, the fault devices are combined into a single incident.