Not By Chance - Not By Luck - One year accident free
Construction companies have safety programs to protect their employees from injury. Today Electric Conduit Construction (ECC) celebrates one year free of any OSHA recordable injury. How did the employees of ECC accomplish this?
ECC performs underground and overhead construction for telecommunications and electric power companies. In this work environment injuries can occur by a slip on an irregular surface, a fall from a work platform, a vehicle accident or electrocution, to name a few. For this reason, safety is emphasized constantly. Workers are trained to work safely, equipment is properly maintained, and certain tasks are only performed by qualified personnel, certified to do the work.
However, accidents can happen instantly due to complacency, or normalization of deviance. An accident impacts much more than the victim. It impacts the victim’s family, the company, and the overall project. This is why, for over a decade, ECC has been proactive with safety. An approach that involves every employee and strives to use leading indicators to the advantage of all.
The process starts with training, mentoring, helping the new hands and keeping an eye on them. Over the last decade cloud computing and ECC’s, proprietary, safety management system (SMS) has enabled data collection, analysis, and instant notifications. This powerful tool has helped our CSP safety coordinators leverage leading indicators like near misses and good catches. This information, received in almost real time, can hint at wider problems, and give coordinators an opportunity to flag a minor problem before it becomes the cause of an injury. This constant reminder of lessons learned from near misses and good catches has another important effect, it raises situational awareness.
Recently an ECC foreman met a one-call locator at a job site. The locator was detecting and marking underground cables near a 14 Kv. transformer. As he was walking away, the foreman, an experienced lineman, said that the marks did not look right and there should be more cables entering the transformer. This was an astute observation on his part. As it turned out the locator scanned the site again and discovered three more live cables. Had the ECC foreman not insisted on further evaluation a directional boring head from 1,000’ away, would have surfaced in a tangle of live conductors. This was a good catch that was then transmitted to all crews and foreman. This is how situational awareness is improved. ECC recognizes each employee for being skeptical, questioning and going above and beyond. This recognition in front of peers is contagious and causes every employee to want to emulate what they hear on the safety call. Even if they are the cause of the near miss, they are recognized and congratulated for their report and recognition of what happened.
Congratulations to every employee at ECC. One year without an OSHA recordable does not happen by luck or by chance. This performance is by design. This is one of the reasons Electric Conduit Construction is a safe, productive company, and a great place to work.