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Meet the pros: Justin Winters
12/11/2024
Meet Justin Winters, a senior incident response specialist based out of Jackson, Miss. who serves as the system weather and damage forecast leader and incident response lessons learned program manager.
Justin manages the damage prediction program, which plays a crucial role in Entergy’s response to storms. As the liaison to StormGeo, Entergy’s contracted weather service provider, he ensures the company is equipped with forecasts and historical weather data to help leadership make operational decisions for storm response.
Justin has a pivotal role in helping customers and the company plan for and respond to storms. Through his damage predictions and forecasting data, leadership can make informed decisions to place crews safely out of harm’s way ahead of the storm, but close enough to be able to move into the affected areas immediately after the storm to start restoring power.
“When we get the damage prediction right, we know how many resources we need to request to be able to restore power quickly and efficiently,” said Justin. “If we don’t order enough resources or don’t have them in the right areas, it takes longer to restore power for customers.”
As the incident response lessons learned program manager, he champions a culture of continuous improvement alongside Entergy's corrective action program team, leveraging lessons learned from past events and exercises to respond to future challenges efficiently. He ensures gaps or areas for improvement are acknowledged, recorded and closed or improved with appropriate actions.
Justin began working with Entergy in 2017 as an incident response specialist after serving for 10 years as a detective at the Madison Police Department.
“When I was growing up, my father who worked for Entergy spoke highly about the company because of the opportunities and the people he worked with,” Justin said. “He always said that leadership cared for their employees. Every time I spoke with someone about Entergy, they said the same things as my father.
“When I first came onboard, I was shocked in a good way about how everyone works so well together and helps each other to achieve our goals. Incident response management cares about individual success. They give room to make important decisions and solve problems, which allows me to learn and engage with important business functions.”
Justin also enjoys his role because his work directly impacts our customers by restoring power as quickly and safely as possible after storms.
“Weather is such an interesting subject that is very important to Entergy,” he said. “It’s very easy to love this job because I believe in the work we are doing to help our customers keep their lights on by preparing for and responding to incidents.”
Justin explained what accountability and ownership of responsibility mean to him, two important aspects of the work culture at Entergy.
“Accountability is showing up and doing what you said you would do,” he said. “It means trusting colleagues by counting on each other and standing behind the results of our hard work. We are held to a certain standard of excellence here and I am thrilled to be able to deliver excellence with my team.”
Outside of work, Justin enjoys spending time with his wife and dog, building computers, flying drones, getting tattoos, gaming with his friends and riding motorcycles with his family.
