Articles
4 Strategies to Facilitate Effective Knowledge Transfer
Effectively transferring knowledge from tenured employees to new hires and those climbing the ranks is one of the most significant challenges utility organizations must reckon with. The workforce is continuously evolving, so it is essential to ensure that valuable insights and expertise are not lost when employees leave or retire. This Tailgate Topic explores four strategies that utilities and contractors can deploy to facilitate successful knowledge transfer among employees.
1. Design and Develop a Mentorship Program
Mentorship has long been recognized as a powerful tool for knowledge sh…

Beyond the ABCs: Fall Protection for Unique Tasks
The electric transmission and distribution (T&D) industry often requires work in challenging environments. Whether crew members access tall structures by helicopter, use rope-access methods to climb lattice towers, or ride wire carts to install and maintain spacers along energized lines, their approach goes beyond standard ground-based operations. These specialized techniques can speed up projects, minimize ground disturbance – especially on protected and sensitive land – and reduce the need for site preparation (e.g., building roads).
Yet all of them present complex fall hazards.
M…

Using the Prediction Model to Prevent Incidents and Near-Misses
As someone employed in the electric utility industry, would you be willing to consider that there may be incident prevention strategies yet to be discovered and tested? Are you open to the idea that a better model could exist to create change in our industry – change that could reduce or even eliminate significant injuries and fatalities (SIFs)?
If so, I encourage you to read further.
Here’s a logical equation many of us were taught in school: If A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C. Tell me, do you believe the organization you work for takes a logical approach to workplace safety…

Making the Safety Connection: The Impact of Total Well-Being in the Workplace
Utility workers perform essential tasks that touch millions of lives every day. The critical nature of the services they provide coupled with the perilous nature of their tasks exposes these workers to life-threatening hazards. This is why the industry highly values and prioritizes safety.
Many utility companies operating today have made significant strides in improving their safety culture. Critical risk management programs and a human performance mindset have become increasingly common as organizational leaders more fully understand the link between human behavior and risk. These compani…
Safety By Design: Leadership and Employee Involvement
In the first part of this six-part series, I discussed the reasons why it’s important for utility organizations to develop safety systems that align their safety initiatives. This article will address employee involvement, an often overlooked yet fundamental component of any effective safety system.
According to ANSI/ASSP Z10, “Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems,” the phrase “employee involvement” refers to the active participation of workers in the planning, implementation, evaluation and improvement of an organization’s occupational health and safety management system (OHS…
Equipotential Grounding is the Law
I’ve written about equipotential grounding for Incident Prevention magazine dozens of times over the past 15 years, both in this column and in the Q&A. Those articles have had thousands of views on Incident Prevention’s website, which suggests that their messaging should be getting through to industry employers and lineworkers – but my experience says otherwise.
As I’ve mentioned in past articles, my consulting work includes serving as an expert witness in the litigation of both OSHA and civil cases. I’ve consulted on more than 40 cases overall; currently, I have 16 open fatality cases…
A Checkup from the Neck Up
The pastor of the church I attend recently delivered a sermon that deeply resonated with me and inspired the title of this article. Around that time, I’d been ruminating on some incidents I was investigating as part of my consulting work. I’d read the accident reports and conducted employee interviews, all the while wondering why these events were given the opportunity to occur. Then I heard the pastor’s well-timed sermon and was reminded once more that what’s going on – or not going on – in a worker’s mind can significantly impact their personal safety and the safety of others.
Fallibilit…
April-May 2025 Q&A
Q: I’m a municipal utility substation engineer, and I’m hoping you can help me with this question: Does an engineer taking photos in a substation fall under the OSHA 29 CFR 1910.269 work rules?
A: The simple answer is yes. No matter your training or education, if you must be inside the fence to take the photos, you are required to meet the 1910.269(a)(2) qualification standards.
The error people often make is assuming a degreed engineer is automatically exempt from the (a)(2) standards. The issue is found in the employer requirement to ensure the employee’s qualification. Educational de…
The Good Shepherd
If you’re like me, you’ve only encountered sheep at a petting zoo, so here’s a fun fact about them: sheep have rectangular pupils. I included that to make sure you learn something today and to challenge us to explore other sheep characteristics and what we can learn from sheep-shepherd relationships. In doing so, we’ll use the C5 safety leadership model from the Incident Prevention Institute’s Frontline training program to establish what it means to be a good shepherd and then apply that understanding to enhance our roles as safety leaders.
Sheep and Shepherds
Sheep are valuable assets th…

Rediscover Your Inner Superhero
Several years ago, a good friend of mine who worked in the utility industry drove his truck headlong into a tractor-trailer parked along a highway shoulder. In the blink of an eye, he was gone, leaving his wife a widow and their children without a father.
Fast-forward one year later. After conducting some training sessions with a utility company in Mississippi, a co-worker and I were driving home to South Carolina. My co-worker was asleep in the passenger seat, and everything was going smoothly as I navigated the truck and trailer east on I-20 under a clear, starry sky.
I had the radio…
Targeted Training: Reducing Stress-Related Cognitive Load in Lineworkers
Lineworkers are accustomed to hearing that they must completely focus on the task they’re performing. For safety reasons, staying fully present and mentally focused on the work at hand is critical in the high-stakes, hazardous environments these employees often find themselves in.
Maintaining full focus for an extended length of time is the goal to strive for – but realistically, that doesn’t align with how the human brain works. An individual can be easily distracted, especially when experiencing personal or professional difficulties. Distractions impair a person’s ability to perform at t…

Optimizing Arc Flash Protection: The Crucial Role of Layered Clothing
Given the arc flash hazards and other risks that exist in electric utility work environments, an employer’s commitment to employee safety must never falter. It is essential for workers to wear personal protective equipment in these environments; in particular, prior to exposure, workers must don flame-resistant (FR) or arc-rated (AR) garments that meet or exceed assessed incident energy levels.
And while single-layer FR/AR garments are common in the utility industry, it’s important to recognize that they can fall short in areas such as weight, heat retention and comfort. Additionally, alth…

Safety By Design: A System Approach to Organizational Safety Initiatives
Let’s kick off this new series by considering a simple question: Why do we need safety?
Here’s my answer: Safety is a must because hazards and threats exist in our work environments that could cause harm to both our employees and our organizations.
Any initiative designed to protect workers from danger falls under the umbrella of safety. If we were to use minimum approach distances as an analogy, safety is the air gap that insulates an organization. When severe injuries and fatalities occur in our industry, weak safety initiatives – that is, initiatives that do not provide the insulatin…

| Sharon Lipinski, Wesley L. Wheeler, SMS, CESCP, MSP, and Keith Wheeler | Safety Management, Leadership Development
The Roadmap to Gaining Senior Leader Buy-In for Safety Initiatives
In a recent survey we conducted, 97% of safety professionals who responded confirmed that gaining senior leader buy-in for their safety programs was either very important or extremely important to them.
This research project was a joint effort between the National Electrical Contractors Association, HR Resources of the Carolinas LLC and Habit Mastery Consulting, with the purpose of discovering the secrets to gaining greater senior leadership support for safety initiatives. Our research included surveying 128 safety professionals and conducting in-depth interviews with 15 deeply experienced…

‘The Worst Day of My Life’
This story is about a devastating accident that took the life of one of my best friends many years ago. I have always been somewhat reluctant to speak or write about it because dealing with my friend’s family in the aftermath of his death was extremely painful. As time has marched on, however, I’ve found myself thinking it’s time to share the details of the accident with other lineworkers in hopes of helping them avoid and prevent similar accidents in the future.
Background
During my high school years in Salinas, California, I became friends with a fellow student by the name of David Whit…