Bent Ear Solutions

Bent Ear Solutions Contact information, map and directions, contact form, opening hours, services, ratings, photos, videos and announcements from Bent Ear Solutions, Consulting Agency, 201 N Union Street, Alexandria, VA.

We work hand-in-hand with our clients to develop innovative solutions to address your complex challenges and help you get the most out of your technology investments.

We’ve spent months explaining how Ting Insights works.The electrical safety network, powered by 1.3 million sensors. The...
05/30/2026

We’ve spent months explaining how Ting Insights works.

The electrical safety network, powered by 1.3 million sensors. The outage polygons. The Census enrichment. The ArcGIS integration. The five-minute refresh cycle.

But there’s a moment that none of that explains, and it happens in almost every demo we give.

It’s the moment someone sees their own jurisdiction on the map for the first time.

They’re used to viewing outage data at the zip code level, including the county name and customer count. They’ve seen that view for years.

Then we show them the same event as an outage polygon, drawn from Ting Insights power outage data, overlaid on their infrastructure layers. They can see which neighborhoods are dark. Which hospitals are inside the boundary. Which evacuation routes cross the impacted area. How many people are estimated to be affected based on Census block-group data.

And the reaction is almost always the same:

“Why didn’t we have this before?”

That’s not a sales pitch. It’s a genuine question. And the answer is that until recently, independent grid intelligence at this resolution didn’t exist.
Now it does.

If your team manages outage response, infrastructure resilience, or emergency operations — and you want to see what your data could look like, we’ll show you.

No slide deck. Just the live feed, on your geography.

🔗 Start the conversation: https://bit.ly/4j7K4sT

Access and functional needs planning is still treated like a compliance checkbox in too many emergency operations plans....
05/29/2026

Access and functional needs planning is still treated like a compliance checkbox in too many emergency operations plans.

That framing costs lives during response and slows down recovery.

On July 7–8, the 2026 National Access and Functional Needs Symposium brings together emergency management, disability, public health, and community leaders to dig into what inclusive planning actually looks like when the lights go out and call volume spikes.

Ron Prater, Co-Founder & COO of Bent Ear Solutions and Executive Director of Big City Emergency Managers, will be moderating Panel II: Beyond Compliance: The Operational ROI of AFN-Integrated Planning.

The panel is built around a question most EOCs are still working through:
What changes operationally when AFN integration is built into the plan from day one, instead of layered on after an incident?

Joining Ron on the panel:
Jennifer Maradiaga, Senior Emergency Planning Coordinator, Santa Clara County OEM
Dr. Jeannette Sutton, Associate Professor, SUNY Albany
Jonathan Reeves, Resilience Specialist, Arcadis
Jason Ferguson, Director of Emergency Management, UC Berkeley

If you plan, fund, or run response operations for a city, county, or state, this is the conversation worth blocking time for.

📅 Virtual. July 7–8, 12:00 PM to 3:00 PM ET.
Register for free: https://bit.ly/4nUHjNU

Nats fans. Mets fans. Red Sox fans. Jake in a Montreal Expos throwback. (We're not asking questions.)Last week, the all-...
05/28/2026

Nats fans. Mets fans. Red Sox fans. Jake in a Montreal Expos throwback. (We're not asking questions.)

Last week, the all-star BES team, along with some close partners and friends, took over a section at Nationals Park.

Two things you learn at a team night like this:
The people who do the careful, technical work for utilities and emergency managers are also the ones who will absolutely chirp you about your team's bullpen.

And the trust that lets a small company move fast on hard problems gets built both outside and inside the office.

To everyone on the team, partners, and friends who joined, thanks for making this game one to remember!

Hurricane season starts June 1, and if your operational picture for power outages still depends on utility-reported aggr...
05/22/2026

Hurricane season starts June 1, and if your operational picture for power outages still depends on utility-reported aggregator data, you're heading into the season with the same blind spots that slowed response last year.

The gap between when a storm knocks out power and when decision-makers get a clear picture of what's affected hasn't closed. And it's not a technology failure, it's a data architecture problem.

Utility outage management systems are high-fidelity, accurate, and quick. But when that data is scraped by public aggregators and republished at the county or ZIP code level, it loses the precision and timeliness that emergency managers, enterprise operators, and infrastructure teams actually need. That middleman muddies the water.

Our partnership with Ting Insights provides a more precise, real-time picture.

A nationwide electrical safety network empowers outage polygons that refresh every 5 minutes. Not county-level estimates. Not batch-updated customer counts. The actual boundaries of the affected area in your Esri ArcGIS.

Then we layer Census block-group data on top — so you're not just seeing where the outage is, you're seeing who's inside it. Estimated population. Demographic indicators. Critical facilities like hospitals, nursing homes, and shelters.

All delivered as ArcGIS-compatible feature layers that plug directly into the tools your teams already use. That's the operating picture most EOCs, utilities, and critical infrastructure operators have long wanted and rarely had before a storm made landfall.

Get yours before the storm hits: bit.ly/4owGavB

We’ve all been in an EOC that has binders full of important plans lining the shelves.But are they being used during an a...
05/21/2026

We’ve all been in an EOC that has binders full of important plans lining the shelves.

But are they being used during an actual emergency? Does your team know what they contain, and can they execute those steps quickly?

The truth is that the emergency operations plan that you spent months writing is probably not getting opened much during an actual crisis.

Staff often default to memory and instinct because the plan they spent months building is too long and difficult to navigate when seconds matter.

❌️ This isn't about the plan. It's about the ability to use it. Communication, coordination, and collaboration rely on being on the same page. On following the plan.

Every. Single. Time.

You already have everything that you need to change that paradigm. Bent Ear Solutions has the knowledge to help you.

Imagine, when an incident is detected, it's automatically published to your situational awareness viewer.

Operations personnel are notified via Microsoft Teams or your preferred collaboration environment.

Then, your AI instantly reads your emergency operations plan and identifies the exact steps that apply to this incident.

These steps are published as a checklist, both on the map and in operators' hands, within moments.

The checklist can be modified or expanded upon as required. The watch officer isn't searching, guessing, or waiting. The plan shows up the instant they need it.

Everyone is on the same page.

And none of this requires new software. It runs on the technology you already own.

The plan you spent a year building is finally being used the way you designed it to be.

Curious how this would apply to your current EOC? Send us a message, and we'll walk you through it.

Learn how you can operationalize your plans.
🔗 bit.ly/4vfAEQX

When a neighborhood loses power, the emergency management team isn’t the only agency that needs to know.Law enforcement ...
05/17/2026

When a neighborhood loses power, the emergency management team isn’t the only agency that needs to know.

Law enforcement does too.

Streetlights go dark. Traffic signals stop working. Surveillance cameras go offline. Security systems at businesses and residences drop. In minutes, an entire area’s public safety infrastructure can degrade in ways that aren’t visible from a dispatch center.

Most police departments and Real-Time Crime Centers don’t have the quality of data they really need. They’re in a reactive posture for an agency that operates on situational awareness.

Here’s what changes when you bring real-time outage intelligence into a public safety GIS environment:

Outage polygons — powered by the Ting Insights electrical safety network of 1.3M sensors and updated every five minutes — can be overlaid directly on patrol zones, crime-density layers, and critical-facility maps.

When a polygon appears in a high-crime or high-traffic zone, command staff can see it immediately and redirect patrols before an officer drives into a blacked-out area unprepared.

When streetlights and cameras go offline in a residential neighborhood, the system can flag the overlap between the outage boundary and vulnerable populations.

And when power starts coming back, partial-restoration data show which areas are still dark.

🔗 https://bit.ly/4owGavB

| Powered by our partnership with Whisker Labs

If you have spent any time in emergency management, you know the most useful insights almost rarely make it into the off...
05/16/2026

If you have spent any time in emergency management, you know the most useful insights almost rarely make it into the official record.

The AAR gets sanitized. The hard lessons get softened. The names get removed. What is left is technically true and practically useless.

Fugate: Unfiltered is the antidote.

A newsletter written entirely by Craig Fugate, former FEMA Administrator, drawing on 40 years in the field. Real stories. Lessons that did not make it into the AAR. The kind of plain-spoken takes the EM community has always counted on him for.

Bent Ear Solutions has zero editorial input. We do not review drafts. We do not suggest topics. We do not own the content. Craig writes what Craig wants to write.

Our only role is sponsorship and distribution, because we believe this insight should be free for every emergency manager, planner, responder, and student who needs it. No paywall. No gatekeeping. We don't even ask for your name.

Issue #2 drops on Wednesday. If you want it in your inbox, subscribe at bit.ly/42GyaP8.

What is the one lesson from your career that never made it into an official report?

Jim Featherstone spent three decades leading emergency management operations, including serving as General Manager of th...
05/03/2026

Jim Featherstone spent three decades leading emergency management operations, including serving as General Manager of the City of LA's Emergency Management Department.

His latest article for BES cuts to something most organizations don't want to hear: your plan is only as good as its worst assumption. And the disaster always gets a vote.

It's the lead story in our quarterly newsletter, alongside the behind-the-scenes on how we shared Ting Insights power outage data for free during Winter Storm Fern, open GIS roles on our team, and what's ahead at Esri UC and ES3 this summer.

We keep it quarterly because we respect your inbox. Subscribe to stay in the loop.
🔗 https://bit.ly/4el7aM5

The best OSINT analysts don't talk about the tools. They talk about patterns.The right thread to pull. The query that fo...
05/01/2026

The best OSINT analysts don't talk about the tools. They talk about patterns.

The right thread to pull. The query that found what wasn't supposed to be findable. The moment two unrelated data points turn out to be telling the same story.

If that's how you think about the work, we should talk.

Bent Ear Solutions is hiring an OSINT Analyst/Consultant to support a federal client monitoring incidents that impact critical operations. The role spans open-source research, deep and dark web investigation, query-building, ongoing monitoring, and briefing senior officials on what you find.

What we're looking for:
— 1–3 years in OSINT, intelligence, emergency management, homeland security, or a related field
— A bachelor's degree in one of those disciplines
— Strong writing — you'll deliver reports and brief senior stakeholders
— Comfort working independently while priorities shift
— Ability to obtain a Top-Secret clearance

Hybrid in the DC Metro area, with 2–3 days onsite in the city.

patterns.

The right thread to pull. The query that found what wasn't supposed to be findable. The moment two unrelated data points turn out to be telling the same story.

If that's how you think about the work, we should talk.

Bent Ear Solutions is hiring an OSINT Analyst/Consultant to monitor and identify incidents that could impact critical operations. The role spans open-source research, deep and dark web investigation, query-building, ongoing monitoring, and briefing senior officials on what you find.

➡️ Apply online or send it to someone who'd be a fit:
🔗 bit.ly/40Z1wYB

Spring severe weather season doesn’t wait for your data feeds to catch up.When a derecho or tornado outbreak hits, the f...
04/24/2026

Spring severe weather season doesn’t wait for your data feeds to catch up.

When a derecho or tornado outbreak hits, the first question in every EOC is the same: where are the outages and what critical facilities are affected?

If the answer depends on utility-reported data aggregated through a third party, you’re making decisions based on a picture that’s already 15–60 minutes old. In a fast-moving weather event, that gap matters.

Here’s what real-time sensor data changes about storm response:
Your outage picture updates every five minutes — not whenever the utility’s OMS pushes a batch.

You see outage polygons, not county-level shading — so you can overlay them directly on hospitals, nursing homes, shelters, and evacuation routes.

You see grid instability before it becomes a full outage — giving you lead time to pre-position resources or activate backup plans.
And when power starts coming back, you see partial restorations in real time — not a binary “restored” flag that may not reflect conditions on the ground.

Storm season isn’t a planning exercise anymore. It’s happening. The question is whether your situational awareness is keeping pace.

🔗 https://bit.ly/grid-intelligence

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201 N Union Street
Alexandria, VA
22314

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