Here's my thought: Some idiot in your organization thought that all power poles were equally dangerous, and they reacted accordingly.
If that power pole had primary on it, I would feel like the whole safety meeting as described had a good chance of being justified. Likewise, if someone didn't know for sure that there wasn't primary on that pole or didn't know enough to assess the risks then that's another type of safety issue. (Don't do unless you have enough knowledge to keep yourself safe.) But in this case the only meaningful risk was damaging other infrastructure on that pole while removing the vines, and to a lesser extent a slight shock hazard but not much more than handling a plugged in extension cord. Neither of these are safety issues worthy of a "near miss" meeting. If I was to do a failure analysis here I'd point squarely at lack of training across the entire organization about this issue and particularly whoever it is who thought this should be treated as a BFD. On Fri, Aug 9, 2024, 7:02 PM <dmmoff...@gmail.com> wrote: > Just venting now. The more I think about this the more annoyed I’m > getting. > > > > We were going through the meeting agenda including root cause analysis and > so forth. I stopped him at some point and asked what rule was violated. > He responded with rhetorical questions like “if Elco tree trimmers couldn’t > remove the vines why do you think we could?” and similar. He got agitated > about it, and seemed flustered that I didn’t intuitively know that > something was wrong here. I dropped it, and apologized saying I wasn’t > asking to be combative, I’m asking because I don’t know. > > > > On social interactions I can be slow on the uptake so it took me some time > to realize that obviously the true answer to my question was *he doesn’t > know*, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it. That burned my ass so > bad that I spent several hours this evening digging into NESC and OSHA > documents, and now I am pretty convinced we didn’t do anything dangerous. > It’s possible the guys don’t meet every requirement for OSHA > “line-clearance tree trimmers”, but if not they’re within a hair’s breadth > of it. I’m talking like maybe they’ll need refresh their CPR certification > or something, but otherwise they have everything they need in terms of > tools and training to work near a secondary voltage line. > > > > -Adam >
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