This series explores five personal practices of safety excellence, including steps each of us can take to become as safe as possible.
The first article in the series was a reminder that we have personal accountability and agency in safety – enough to stop work and even walk off the job if conditions are unsafe. We focused on mental preparation in the second article, exploring how our impulsive tendencies influence performance under pressure. Article three examined spiritual health, which requires each of us to develop a personal system to ensure that our work aligns with our deeply held…
Transmission line construction is one of the most complex and politically sensitive infrastructure endeavors in the United States. Crews routinely work across dozens and sometimes hundreds of distinct land parcels, navigating a patchwork of easement rights, property histories and landowner temperaments. What happens when that navigation breaks down isn’t always a polite conversation at the fence line.
In one documented incident in the Upper Midwest, a 12-member utility project team conducting a formal, scheduled right-of-way walkdown was confronted by a landowner wearing a bulletproof vest…
Walk through any industrial environment and you’ll hear familiar messaging: “Be proactive.” “Own safety.” “Follow the procedure.” Then step into the boardroom, where the conversation shifts to yield, uptime, injuries and cost.
We coach people on behaviors yet judge them based on outcomes, sending mixed signals to the frontline workers at the sharp end of the stick. People tend to rally faster and stay aligned longer when we direct them toward a clear goal and support it with a few nonnegotiable guidelines or guardrails. Most disappointment lies within the gap between what leaders expected…
The concept of mental toughness has long been embedded in high-risk industries. Workers are often taught to push through adversity, remain focused under pressure and get the job done regardless of circumstances. Utility crews, construction teams, first responders, military personnel and countless others routinely face demanding conditions that require determination, discipline and perseverance.
The ability to stay focused during difficult situations is undeniably valuable; it has helped workers perform well for generations. A challenge arises, however, when mental toughness is deemed the o…
At NASCAR’s Talladega Superspeedway, Daytona International Speedway and Pocono Raceway, there is always talk of “The Big One” – a wreck that often characterizes the three-hour, 200-mph, 40-car races on three-lane-wide ovals. Of course, The Big One doesn’t happen at every race, which could be due to luck or preparation, planning and skill. When it does happen, human error is almost always the cause. Sometimes, The Big One injures or kills people who were simply trying to do their jobs.
Whether you’re a NASCAR fan or not, you’ve probably noticed some parallels between racing and utility work…
I’m so pleased that we now have various social media platforms to recognize lineworkers for the critical services they provide, not to mention the sacrifices they make to do so. When I worked storms in the 1960s and ’70s, my crewmates and I rarely received more than the occasional note of appreciation from a customer, tucked inside our paycheck envelopes. It wasn’t difficult to feel unappreciated given the time we spent away from our families helping to restore power for others. Today we live in a different world. More than once, I’ve found myself wishing we had a social media outlet during m…
Q: How do consensus standards apply to the employer’s responsibility for safe work practices?
A: Consensus standards are part of a system that employers can use to develop their safety programs. The issue here is whether an employer can defend their programs. Compliance with a consensus standard does not necessarily ensure OSHA compliance; the agency has clearly defined consensus standards as useful for helping employers meet the more performance-based requirements of the OSHA rules, which typically tell employers what must be accomplished but not how it must be done.
OSHA states in App…
Since we celebrate America’s 250th anniversary this summer, I thought it would be interesting to examine a brief overview of the last 250 years of safety. Let’s see where we started, assess how far we’ve come and renew our commitment to continuous improvement.
To assist with this project, I asked Google Gemini to provide U.S. utility construction and maintenance safety data for the full historical period. Here are a handful of highlights:
Incident reporting was completely voluntary prior to 1910. At that time, employers typically did not pay anything toward work-related injuries or fa…
From leadership development courses and culture workshops to human performance training sessions and OSHA refresher programs, our industry spends countless hours talking about safety. There’s one question I find myself asking each time I attend one of these events: How can we coach courage in ourselves and others? Because often, safety failures stem not from a lack of knowledge but from a lack of courage.
Now, I know electrical workers rarely lack physical courage. What I’m referring to is the inner strength that enables a person to speak up, challenge a respected coworker, stop a job, adm…
If you’ve been following this series, you know that it was founded on a simple but powerful idea: personal accountability.
In Part 1, we discussed agency, or the degree to which you believe you are responsible for your own safety. Part 2 examined mental preparation, the “firmware” that governs how you think, react and perform under pressure. And in Part 3, we explored spiritual health; that’s the internal code that guides your behavior when the right choice is inconvenient or uncomfortable.
This article addresses physiological health, which is the bedrock of the previous three factors…
Our industry’s persistent serious injury and fatality (SIF) statistics indicate that we are aiming at the wrong target, despite our best intentions. A small shift in our industry’s approach to incident investigations, however, could lead to meaningful change.
Decades of professional experience have taught me that when we search for an event’s root cause, we typically get what we aim at. By that, I mean humans can easily fall victim to confirmation bias, choosing to believe seemingly logical but erroneous theories rather than wrestle with uncertainty. But unless we use objective facts to de…
Beneath every major American city lies a hidden electrical network that powers homes, hospitals and commercial industry. Manholes and vaults are the gateways to these underground systems, providing access to low-, medium- and high-voltage infrastructure essential to reliable power distribution. Because they also present some of the most hazardous conditions that utility workers regularly encounter, conducting thorough manhole and vault inspections is foundational to employee safety, system integrity and operational reliability.
Manholes and vaults are typically classified as confined space…
Despite decades of progress in occupational safety, serious injuries and fatalities (SIFs) continue to occur in organizations with mature safety management systems, extensive training programs and low total recordable injury rates.
Focused prevention programs have proliferated in response to these persistent events – often accompanied by executive attention, new metrics and a sense of urgency – yet many struggle to deliver meaningful harm reduction. This is rarely due to apathy or lack of effort, more commonly stemming from foundational assumptions that do not align with how serious incide…
During the annual T&D PowerSkills Trainers Conference earlier this year, several of our clients asked about OSHA’s stance on heat illness prevention. Months later, we are still fielding questions about the topic, as are Incident Prevention’s subject matter experts.
The bottom line is that employers are legally required to have a plan in place to protect all heat-exposed workers. It’s as simple as that. Confusion usually stems from the difference between state OSHA plans and federal rules. After reviewing state plans that include detailed heat illness prevention protocols, some industry…
The electric utility industry experienced some catastrophic events during the first quarter of this year, including the deaths of multiple employees. I always feel incredibly sad when I hear about another serious injury or fatality (SIF). My heart goes out to everyone who has been impacted by these incidents.
I know I am not alone in asking why catastrophic industry events continue to occur, especially since most were preventable. It is also curious that while lineworkers are often trained in leadership and human performance early in their career, they rarely receive any refresher training…
