Tag: Safety Management

Electric utilities are among the most hazardous industries in which to work. This was recognized in the early days of electric power distribution when extremely high fatality rates occurred. Since those days, utilities have examined injuries and fatalities to learn how to prevent others. The examination process has included analyzing possible hazards, mitigating the identified hazards to a safe level of acceptable risk, creating policies and procedures, developing and providing protective equipment, and making the workplace as safe as it can be … or has it? Unless we make a conscious effort...

Safety champions Louisville Gas and Electric and Kentucky Utilities companies have created a culture of safety excellence with consistently low injury rates and hundreds of national and international awards to their employees’ credit. A key factor in LG&E and KU’s success has been a top-led, employee-driven approach to safety, which includes a concentrated effort to identify hazards and issues and proactively address them before they become injuries. Safety professionals know that even the most exemplary performance can turn upside down in a split second due to any number of factors. They...

Since its founding in 1984 as an electric utility contractor company, co-founder Steve Standish has always considered Standard Utility Construction an organization concerned about safety. Specifically, Standard responded to a fatality in 2003 by developing formal safety processes and documents. These included assigning employees to full-time safety-related work; increased emphasis and time devoted to safety meetings and incident response; deepened training and even more extensive use of appropriate PPE, often before an item was formally required by regulation; working toward formal OSHA certifications...

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, between 4,500 and 5,000 people are killed in the U.S. workforce each year. Approximately 20 percent of those workplace fatalities are in the construction industry. According to OSHA, the four leading hazards that contribute to fatal injuries in construction are falls, electrocution, struck by object and caught-in/between. In construction, especially in drilled shaft foundations, these four hazards are present each and every day. It could be argued that drilled shaft foundations are potentially one of the most hazardous types of construction work...

You have read and heard about all of the related standards for arc flash protection and you still don’t have a program or even a plan for a program, right? In this installment of “Train the Trainer 101,” I will sift through the rules so you can begin a practical approach to creating an effective and compliant program. Obviously, we want to protect employees and well-developed programs accomplish that, but this article primarily focuses on the administrative side of compliance. The BasicsArc flash is a recognized hazard and as an employer, you must evaluate the risk and respond accordingly...

Today, many contracting companies in the maintenance and construction industries are facing mounting pressure from utility owners to rethink their health, safety and environmental (HSE) cultures and work practices, which in turn can lower their common HSE indicators. Those companies that fail to meet client demands often find themselves excluded from bid lists while they search for a catalyst of cultural change. In this article, we will explore how Supreme Industries – a contracting company that specializes in right-of-way (ROW) clearing, environmental and sedimentation controls, access roads...

For anyone who has worked toward improving the safety performance of an organization, you are consistently led back to the fact that people keep making errors. If we could just stop people from making mistakes, we wouldn’t have all these accidents, right? Right. It’s true. If people didn’t make mistakes, we would have far fewer accidents and events. What is also true is that people are fallible, people make mistakes, and people will continue to make mistakes regardless of how much we wring our hands and tell them to be more careful. Without understanding and accepting these truths, there can...

Safety and human performance professionals have spent a lot of time trying to find that one nugget, that one silver bullet, that one thing that – if we used it – would stop people from getting hurt. I’ve always been a firm believer that safety and productivity can coexist at the same time. The gap between the two is a lack of focus on behavior. Companies hire people, show them how to use personal protective equipment and then teach them how to perform the tasks they were hired to do. They typically do not train employees on ideal work behaviors, those attitudes they want workers to have while...

I have been doing a lot of training and evaluation work over the past few years, and I have started to notice a trend. The workers who have had a formal in-depth training experience have a better perspective about the theories behind why they are performing certain tasks. Workers that are trained on the job are good at the tasks, but do not really understand why they perform the tasks that way. The Formal Training Process Let’s look at the training process that goes with a formal program. The worker is trained – via both classroom and hands-on training – on theories of electrical functions,...

It was Labor Day weekend of 2011, around 2 p.m., when I received a call that there was a fire in my hometown. A big part of Bastrop County, Texas, was burning and thousands of people were being evacuated – friends, co-workers, neighbors and me. Details were scarce, but there were poles and transformers on fire and lines on the ground. My employer at the time, Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative, believes in working and living its six foundation values: safety, courage, respect, reliability, community and love. Work got under way quickly, responsibly and safely. Bluebonnet’s emergency action plan,...

In 2004, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) entered into the Electrical Transmission & Distribution (ET&D) Strategic Partnership agreement with six electrical contractors: Asplundh Tree Expert Co., Henkels & McCoy, MDU Construction Services Group, MYR Group, Pike Electric and Quanta Services; one union: the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW); and two trade associations: the National Electrical Contractors Association (NECA) and Edison Electric Institute (EEI). The primary objective of this partnership is to improve worker safety in the high-voltage...

A hazard is essentially a condition or activity that, if left uncontrolled, may result in an accident or a serious injury. To effectively identify hazards, the observer must develop a means of recognizing a hazard exposure. What I see repeatedly in the field are hazard lists like “wear PPE, stay out of the bite, watch for cars, cover up well.” What I don’t see is an effective approach to identifying hazards. I had occasion to investigate a 4-kV contact in a metal-clad breaker where the worker brushed his hand against a control power transformer that had not been identified or tested. For three...

Helen Keller has been quoted as saying that blindness separates you from things, but deafness separates you from people. While noise in the workplace usually does not produce the profound deafness that Helen Keller had, it can contribute to permanent hearing loss. As the quality of hearing aids has improved immensely over the years, people with mild to moderate hearing loss can often expect significant benefit from them. However, hearing aids usually do not improve hearing as effectively as glasses correct vision. On two occasions, I have witnessed men breaking into tears after learning that...

The 2012 edition of the National Electrical Safety Code (NESC) hit the streets August 1. The updated code adds a new dimension to electric utility arc flash implementation with the inclusion of voltages from 50-1000V. Previous editions have required employers to assess voltages over 1000V for potential electric arc flash exposure and to provide clothing or a clothing system with an effective arc rating for the anticipated arc energy. Major ChangesNESC 2012 requires employers to assess low voltages, 50-1000V, for electric arc flash exposure. Many utilities are currently using NESC 2007’s exception...

Seat belt use – or the lack of seat belt use – continues to be an issue on the road and on our job sites. It is obvious that some of our employees and even some of our supervisors don’t get it. Seat belt use is a mandatory Department of Transportation safety rule and it does not matter whether the truck is used on a roadway or right-of-way. OSHA 1926.601, which covers vehicles that operate within an off-highway job site, requires seat belts. If the legal argument is not convincing, maybe statistics will be. Not coincidentally, states with the highest crash fatality rates also rate low in seat...

Every June, a forest of 45-foot power poles suddenly sprouts in scenic Walla Walla Point Park along the Columbia River in central Washington state. It’s a sign that the best power linemen in the Pacific Northwest will soon head to Wenatchee for the annual Andrew York Lineman Rodeo. Entering its eighth year, the rodeo is hosted by the employees of five public utility districts (PUDs) and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 77. It is held to honor Andrew York, a Chelan County PUD journeyman lineman who died in 2000 after being struck on the job by a drunken driver. Proceeds...

We all know high-quality training must take place to ensure the overall development of employees. Does having a well-trained employee mean the employee only attends a monthly safety meeting to gain training knowledge? Certainly not. Training should provide employees with a continual understanding of job task requirements, task-associated hazards and the appropriate abatement strategies for their safety. A monthly safety meeting may help validate these issues, but it cannot be the sole delivery method for training. Unfortunately, many employees receive no additional training beyond apprenticeship...

Behavior safety is gaining recognition as a significant safety resource in many industrial companies. In recent discussions, however, safety professionals representing traditional and fundamental safety programs have made me aware that acceptance, understanding and the status of behavior safety are still in question. These discussions brought back early challenges, in particular the claim that behavior safety is just good common sense or another flavor of the month. The value of being a behavior safety educator is knowledge, but only if used accurately.  Exploring issues and getting facts...

Nobody likes getting stuck in mud, rock, sand, snow or anything for that matter. As a company that maintains more than 1,600 miles of transmission lines in all kinds of terrain, Northeast Utilities (NU) understands this fact all too well. Environmentally it can be a nightmare, logistically it can affect job completion estimates and from a safety perspective it can put employees in harm’s way. It was these reasons, along with a proactive approach to safety, which led NU to invest part of its safety budget into a 4×4 training and recovery techniques program for its transmission line crews...

Electric utilities have unique issues that are not easily addressed in a traditional LOTO program. Traditional programs typically address equipment and system designs that rarely change. This is certainly not true with electric utility Transmission and Distribution (T&D) programs. LOTO procedures are dynamic, changing from day to day and sometimes from hour to hour. So the question arises: What is the difference between traditional LOTO and switching and tagging programs? Several key differences are equipment source and load conditions that constantly change; various types of switches and...