Utility Worksite Safety Articles

Progress Energy is a Fortune 250 investor-owned electric utility company that comprises generation, transmission and distribution businesses and a general services company. Progress Energy’s 11,000 employees serve 2.9 million customers over a 50,000-square-mile retail service area in North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida.

For the wind power industry, practicing safety has always been more than a mission—it’s required. After all, a wind technician may be working in a space the size of a bathroom located on a tower 80 meters tall, surrounded by massive mechanical and high voltage electrical equipment, in a harsh climate, far from medical services.

Some utility personnel have resisted arc-flash compliance with the presumption that arc flashes and blasts are not a major issue for the utility industry. Organizations and standards committees such as IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), NFPA70E (National Fire Protection Association), EPRI (Electric Power Research Institute), CRN (Cooperative Research Network) and others confirm this as a false statement. An IEEE study concluded, “To decrease the number and severity of non-fatal electrical burn injuries, direct worker exposure to electrical arc energy must be reduced.”

Although insulated tools are designed and tested to protect the electrical worker, dirt and other contaminants can greatly reduce the protection of live-line tools. Following is an overview of care to keep your equipment in good working condition.

Accidents happen when we least expect them. “Why?” is usually the first question. The common follow-up analysis is, “How could I have let this happen?”

If you consider personal safety equipment inconvenient and uncomfortable to wear, you may want to consider the alternatives.

As we are in the midst of summer storm season, many hazards are encountered during storm restoration. One hazard that randomly reveals itself is a fall due to a wooden pole breaking under the lineman’s weight. Of course, “good” wooden poles don’t break; the area of concern is the wooden pole that has reached the end of its life cycle due to decay. But how do you know if a pole is safe to climb?

A review of the relevant standards and training that companies need to provide.

Tower rescue presents a completely different level of difficulty in planning and methodology. Whether 250-ft communications or transmission towers, they are often necessarily placed in remote areas, and usually inaccessible to conventional paramedic rescue vehicles. While it is each individual employer’s responsibility to make their own determinations on how rescues will be accomplished, the following may help in preplanning for these unusual rescue situations. Pre-planning for rescue in these situations must answer several questions.

Could deployment of an Automated External Defibrillator prevent sudden cardiac death and save your utility from a perfect legal storm?

An integral part of any electric utility infrastructure, substations that are properly designed and maintained by qualified and trained workers are safe and reliable. If a failure occurs, however, it can be catastrophic and even disastrous.

Equipotential Grounding at AEPAmerica's line workers respond to outages every day. The recent snow and ice storms left customers in the dark for several days. Do you remember the hurricanes of 2005? They destroyed entire electrical systems along the Gulf coast.While working "at home," line workers have a consistent environment of personnel, safety rules, work procedures and construction standards. Protecting themselves from unexpected hazards is part of the everyday job. The hazards are there, but the people they work with, as well as the work procedures they use, are safe and familiar. However, the mutual assistance agreements developed in recent years...

Clearly a key component of the safety program at any facility, and particularly at a complex installation such as a nuclear power station, is its energy control policy. Commonly referred to as "lockout/tagout," it is the plan developed by an employer to protect workers from serious injury or death resulting from the unexpected start-up of machines or equipment or the release of stored energy.

How the Interagency Snow Rescue Task Force was well positioned to meet the challenges of Colorado's recent snowstorms and save many lives.

Inspired by life altering events, Art Seely of Safety One, Inc., has formed a unique team. The Interagency Snow Rescue Task Force (ISRTF) was initially conceived when EMS rescue attempts failed to reach a Denver victim stranded in less than one foot of snow. This was Seely's nightmare while he was a young paramedic in 1975, and it was this event that changed his life.

Understanding the principles of layering

Anyone who has grown up in any climate that includes cold weather has heard it said that to stay warm you have to layer. This holds true for the bitter cold of winter to moist cold spring evenings.

More than 2,000 workers are injured yearly in arc-flash incidents. High incident electrical energy traveling through the air results in an arc flash. Electricity jumps across a gap in milliseconds, heating a small quantity of air to temperatures reaching as high as 35,000 degrees F-three-and-a-half times the temperature of the surface of the sun-forming an intense fireball that vaporizes metal and burns everything combustible in the immediate area.

Identifying PPE Mistakes in Electric Arc Flash Programs

After a decade of electric arc testing, incident investigations and incident replications using electric arcs, a few lessons have emerged as critical in assessing a Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) program:

Have you ever heard "This is how we've always done it" or "We've never had a problem before" to describe events that have led up to personnel injuries or even death? While this is a common reaction when people are being questioned during an accident investigation, complacency in the workplace is one of the most dangerous states of mind for you or your employees.

While many analogies are true for the human body, of particular interest is comparing the body to a chemical reaction. All of our bodily functions are forms of chemistry. Respiration, digestion and excretion all have their fundamentals in chemistry, and one of the factors that affect most chemical reactions is temperature.

Excavation and trenching is statistically the most hazardous work in the U.S. construction industry. Frequent news stories from around the country attest to the danger. More than 100 workers are killed each year in trench cave-ins alone. Countless others are injured or maimed, physically and psychologically.
Recognizing the need for more effective regulations on excavation safety, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) published a revised federal standard in 1990 to establish more clearly the requirements for protecting employees in excavations. The definitive standard greatly increases the flexibility you and your workers have in choosing protective systems.