Utility safety can sometimes feel like 12-dimensional chess. With hazards coming from all angles — not to mention variables like weather, traffic, and even time of day affecting them — it’s easy for safety professionals to get overwhelmed.
Unless you have a systematic way to identify hazards and make sure you have controls for them in place, your workers face injuries — maybe serious ones.
Every day on the job, safety professionals need critical information:
That’s exactly what safety and risk experts James Upton and Sonam Kala cover in Urbint’s webinar, Setting the Energy Wheel in Motion: How Leading Safety Science and Predictive Insights Help Utilities Prevent Serious Injuries and Fatalities to Their Workforce.
Here’s a rundown of key takeaways from the session, including tips on how to put the latest safety science into action. Read on to learn more (or watch the full webinar here.)
Most of the current knowledge about safety identification comes from studies on situational awareness: “The process of perceiving an important stimulus, understanding its meaning, and anticipating outcomes,”1 says Upton, director of safety operations at Urbint and former vice-chair of serious injury and fatality research at the Construction Safety Research Alliance.
Situational awareness comes down to four key steps:
“Most safety programs focus heavily on this behavior aspect, ignoring the first step in situational awareness: hazard recognition,” says Upton.
That’s a problem. Workers can’t respond to a hazard they don’t notice.
Fortunately, research over the past decade has made important discoveries about the causes of injuries and how workers’ brains perceive the world.
“Injuries, especially critical injuries, arise from the release of energy,” says Upton, “and there are all kinds of different types of energy on our job site.”
But because of how the human brain has developed, some types of energy are much more easy to spot than others. Workers typically identify about 67% of hazards that involve gravity, but only 40% of electrical hazards, and only 19% of chemical hazards.2
The Energy Wheel is a tool developed to call attention to all energies that show up on a job site, especially the ones that are easy to miss. Workers, supervisors, and inspectors can use it to assess the job site, step by step, to see if any hazardous energy is present that may harm anyone.
Hazard recognition is only the first step in staying safe. Not all energy sources you identify are likely to cause a problem. Rather, only situations with large amounts of energy are likely to cause a life-altering or life-ending injury.
“This can actually be quantified,” says Upton.
Hazards with…
Since this energy theory has become more widespread, construction and utility safety programs have started to focus on the STKY — “the Stuff That Kills You,” says Upton.
The Edison Electric Institute drew on this research to develop its Safety Classification and Learning (SCL) model. This model is designed “to help organizations consistently and reliably classify and define incidents and observations.” Organizations use the SCL model to dial in their safety initiatives on high-energy hazards and direct controls.
At its heart, the SCL model comes down to four questions:
By answering these questions, organizations can better identify scenarios in which their workers habitually face potential SIFs (and then make sure to mitigate those risks in the future).
To help supervisors and inspectors answer these questions, the model includes a set of 13 high-energy hazard icons that represent about 75% of the high-risk scenarios utility workers encounter.
While knowing about hazardous energy and the 13 high-energy hazards is helpful, this information alone doesn’t keep anyone safe. “Safety is the presence of controls. At its core, fundamental value, that is what safety is,” says Upton.
To make sure all the potential sources of serious injury are controlled on a job site, safety professionals need to perform a high-energy controls assessment (HECA, also known as energy-based observations), concentrating on energy over 1,500 joules.
During these observations, supervisors or safety inspectors move through the job site, looking for scenarios that correspond to the high-energy hazard icons (e.g, suspended loads, falls from elevation, excavations, etc.) Whenever they find a matching work type, they check to see if a direct control is in place.
For example…
If the answer is yes, capacity to fail safely has been created, and the work is ready to perform. (Congratulations to the crew on a job well done!)
If no, there’s an opportunity to stop work, reassess the situation, and put the proper controls in place before proceeding.
The principles of energy-based safety are simple, but putting them into practice on the job can prove much more difficult.
Resources are a common constraint. Contracting crews may know to check for hazardous energy and controls, but staffing shortages, inexperienced workers, and tight deadlines sometimes let best practices fall through the cracks.
“It takes a lot of time and a lot of effort, and rightly so, to do a pre-job assessment for a task where the most likely outcome of a mistake is a serious injury or death,” says Upton.
Likewise, utility safety inspectors often have several job sites to visit each day. They simply cannot do a thorough evaluation for every hazard that might result in a bump or scrape. They need to focus on the STKY.
To make sure the highest-risk tasks get the most safety oversight, utilities and work crews need a way to sort serious hazards from trivial ones. With all the variables and resource constraints involved, though, it’s a challenge to figure out which tasks need that attention — especially across multiple job sites.
This is where Urbint Lens for Worker Safety can make all the difference.
Regardless of resources and budget, there are ways utilities and construction crews can improve their job site safety today.
“Over the last two years, Urbint has been fortunate enough to be involved in some research through the University of Colorado and the Construction Safety Research Alliance,” says Upton. “We wanted to know — ‘What are the things that are always there before the bad thing happens?’
“What we’re able to talk about are the three unique precursors to SIFs.”
Using the Energy Wheel to walk through all the types of hazardous energy on the job site can increase hazard recognition by >30%.
High-energy controls assessments make sure you have direct controls implemented for the highest-risk job tasks happening today.
Taking time to plan your work for high-risk scenarios is key to reducing SIFs.
***
Hazards are unavoidable in utility work. Every day, workers dig trenches, string electrical wires, and trim trees along motorways. But as they perform these vital tasks, they don’t have to put themselves at risk of a SIF.
Take the time to plan out the day’s work. Search for sources of hazardous energy. Ensure direct controls are in place for high-energy hazards. By following these three steps, supervisors and inspectors can keep workers building and maintaining the critical infrastructure the world needs — while moving the risk of SIF closer to zero.
Interested in hearing more about ways to put energy-based hazard recognition into action? Watch our recording of Setting the Energy Wheel in Motion or request a demo of Urbint Lens for Worker Safety to see for yourself.
—