Recently, circumstances have meant I watched several power company crews work on primary voltage lines, both overhead and buried. It’s amazing how many steps they take to be double and triple sure the lines cannot be energized, also how many people and trucks they send. And it seems to be standard practice that disconnecting the taps manually, or opening the fused cutouts with a hotstick, seems to be assigned to the new guy. Some kind of powerco hazing ritual, or just a training exercise I guess. Maybe they figure it’s best to learn when there are 10 experienced techs on the site, rather than at 2am in the rain.
I watched them replace one of those big ground mounted 480V transformers in 8 hours from first report, brought in a big crane and everything. I figured it would be a 2 day outage. I don’t criticize people who do something I would never attempt. Your case was secondary voltage, but I guess safety culture means always follow procedures, no exceptions. I’m not sure that 100% extends to contract crews that do some of the work, then an orange cone and a yellow vest might suffice, maybe just a clipboard. Like when they do mass smartmeter changeouts. From: AF <af-boun...@af.afmug.com> On Behalf Of Steve Jones Sent: Sunday, August 11, 2024 1:06 PM To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <af@af.afmug.com> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Vines on utility pole growing into power space - safety questions I would have had the powerco send their arbor crew to remove the vines contacting the conductors The situation has little to no real world risk, but the little part could get big real quick if the stars aligned. I would not let my people touch the vines, though I know there is little to no actual risk of doing so. That little risk belongs with the power company, not with us or anyone else. I would probably give you a slap on the wrist, I dont know that it would be a documented slap, but it would warrant a process review, partially for safety reasons but primarily for efficiency, the repair should have occurred rather than workarounds. The biggest problem with this process review outcome is how uncommon it will be. by the next time it occurs, there is a chance no one will remember to tell powerco to call abor crew and it will replicate the issue (where would you put this in an SOP, and how often would you re-train that SOP section? probably the dont fuck around with powerlines section) The mentality of its no more dangerous than such and such is dangerous, as historically such and such has probably killed somebody, our goal is to minimize injury and zero out deaths. Its expensive to kill an employee and causes all kinds of production delays The biggest "near miss" IMHO here is the degradation of safety culture. I work with power company regularly and safety culture is pervasive. Every time something unsafe is deemed safe enough to do it lowers the bar of safety. I was riding with my power company PM the other day and he was talking about just this. It used to be that anytime there was any near niss, if no one was hurt or no one saw, then it was frowned upon to tell, this led to higher incidents of injury and production loss. Theyve since moved to a culture of bringing up any near miss, however small in the safety meetings to see if a process change is warranted to eliminate the risk. Overall the labor satisfaction has increased and the culture of safety exploded, this equates to a more fiscally friendly use of labor with a byproduct of less injury We had some vines that had overgrown our facilities power plant (it was an old hospital so it was a substantial powerhouse with big pole mount transformers) they needed to do some work, they did the same thing, cut vine bases and sprayed substantial killitall to let it die out before they came back to do the work in the powerhouse, but had they had pole work, they would have had the arbor crew remove the vines. On Sat, Aug 10, 2024 at 4:31 AM Forrest Christian (List Account) <li...@packetflux.com <mailto:li...@packetflux.com> > wrote: 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 <mailto: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 -- AF mailing list AF@af.afmug.com <mailto:AF@af.afmug.com> http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com
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