Investigate an Incident Before it Happens

Jon Travis interviews Lanny Floyd about the importance of safety by design and continuous improvement in your electrical safety program.

 

Lanny Floyd — Electrical Safety Group Inc.

Jon Travis — Leaf Electrical Safety

Watch the full interview here — 

Jon 

Let’s start with Risk Management. What is it?

Lanny 

Sure, Risk management, from my own experience, predates what most people take for granted today, and that's what regulations require,  what the industry standards require. 

And so, all my work has been about looking at the residual risk that exists after you have complied with the regulations and standards. There's always a risk. And sometimes you can't reduce it anymore.

But often with a few questions and a few knowledgeable people involved, you can find ways to reduce that risk even further than what the code, standards and regulations call for.
There are things that come up in everyday work activities that get outside the boundary of what the regulation is addressing. And what I recognized back then was, that's true with electrical safety too. So, I started looking at, how do you find what I call residual risk or the hidden danger that exists?

Jon 

So would you say a way to think about this… when you look at the regulations and compliance, that might be the obvious risk with whatever job you're doing. And the residual risk, maybe not so obvious. Is that a good way to think about it?

Lanny

In many cases it may not be obvious, but once you stop and ask the question, it may become obvious that we've been accepting a risk just because we believe that complying with the regulation or the standard achieve the level of safety that we want.

And again, I'm not saying that the regulations and standards are deficient, because, they have demonstrated the ability to save lives. But what is the issue, is that people concluded that, that's all they must do. And often, you can get away with just doing them. And again, the regulations and standards, if you talk to anyone who's knowledgeable, that's been involved in the development of regulations or the industry standards, they'll tell you that these are the minimum requirements. 

Jon

If you've identified a hazard, considering what the regulations or codes say, the right thing to do is to mitigate the risk?

Lanny

How do we mitigate, how do we reduce the likelihood that someone could be exposed to that hazard? And again, to ask that question before the accident happened is a lot more effective than after it happens.

Jon 

For somebody who's trying to take that next step and they've done the typical compliance things, What's the thought process there?

Lanny

Well, electrical safety is not simple. Safety is not simple. 

But a simple way to get started and to be thinking about how to look for that residual risk is, again, after whatever the job is, I use the lockout, tagout example, but it may be involves something entirely different. That doesn’t involve lockout, tagout at all. But, you know, after you've done everything that the regulations require, then a simple question is, well, where is the hazard now? It’s on the line side of the switch, or it’s in the air on an overhead line, or maybe it's behind this cover. And so, once you're clear where the hazard is, then you can ask, well, what controls do we have in place?

I had a case one time where a guy dropped a wrench and it went down threw a crack into the switch gear. And so, his focus switched from doing whatever he was doing over to retrieving the tool. And so, he said, all I got to do is take this cover off and I can get the tool. Well, what he didn't recognize was taking that cover off, exposing it to a high voltage bus bar. 

And again, you could step back and say, well, what can we do to prevent that? 

Jon

When thinking about an programs, you kind of have, three documents, or at least in Canada you have, how to build it safely, how to work on it safely and how to maintain it. But the trick is, how do you fit all those together? So, when you design it, you're thinking about all those three things.

Lanny 

Yes, that’s what we're trying to achieve. Some people think, well, our electrical safety program is based on the industry standard. We just copy that over into our procedures or we send people to the training session for the industry standard and, okay, we've done it. But the reality is, your electrical safety program needs to incorporate information from many different sources. And so, you integrate these things in a way that makes sense for your facility, for your work environment.

They may have to be stated differently than it's stated in the standard. It may be, there’s a nomenclature or word choice difference between the standard and what people are accustomed to in your facility. Well, you need to use what they're familiar with, what they understand and know. And so, you can't just take the regulation or the standard and throw it at them and say here.

This is your electrical safety problem. That's not enough.

Jon

Yeah, which that probably happens a little bit too much.

Lanny 

Yeah, I've seen that happen and I agree with you. I mean, the content of those standards is awesome. I mean, they save lives, but to do it without customizing it, to integrate with other standards and regulations is shortchanging. And it creates an illusion that you've got an effective program, when you may have a lot of holes just in the basic minimum requirements.

Jon 

Yeah. So, I know one thing you talk about is continuous improvement while creating and cultivating a continuous improvement environment around your electrical safety program. What are some things that people could think about introducing into their own organizations?

Lanny 

Technology is always changing as so many things have come on the market in the last decade around electrical safety. And if you're not aware of it, you may miss an opportunity to incorporate it on your next project, whether you're a design firm or an industrial end user, you need to be able to know what to ask for, or how can we adapt this to new facilities.

The workforce is certainly different today than it was 25 years ago. People are being asked to do more. The equipment is more complex. 

So just constant, that mode of continuous improvement is just, it's a mindset that we're always looking for what's different, what's different today than it was the last time we did this. Whether you're planning a job, or you're planning a new project, or you're training, retraining people today.

Also, the electrical safety committee, I think is critical to ongoing improvement. Whether you're a big company or a small company, if you're a small organization, there’s a way to partner with other organizations, companies in your area.

Jon 

That might be one of the things when you talk about compliance, there are the companies and organizations that think, oh, well, we did an Arc Flash study, so we're compliant now, or, oh, we sent our guys on training, therefore we're compliant. And if you get into an organization that has its own committee designated to electrical safety, that's exactly what's going to happen.

The more they learn, the more they're going to realize they don't know and how big this thing really is. To me, you almost must have that at every organization. 

Lanny Final Thoughts –

Ask those simple questions.
-    how could those controls fail? 
-    And what could we do differently?