Safety is no accident. It takes work to make it happen. Employers must foster a safety culture that encourages workers to want to adhere to the industry’s best practices, according to Jim Vaughn, senior consultant for the Institute for Safety in Powerline Construction (ISPC), Alexandria, La. Vaughn shares insights about how to create a true safety culture learned from his five-plus decades of experience in the industry.

What advice do you have for safety professionals to overcome challenges at their companies?

Many safety people have good intentions, but nobody ever guided them in the right direction, and that brings us to the Certified Utility Safety Professional, or CUSP program. When you take the CUSP exam, you’re tested on your knowledge of the best practices and the guiding standards that keep workers safe in the field. We also test how well you can make a determination on the elements and levels of risks that are involved, so you can provide the most appropriate guidance possible.

Many employers think they’ve done a good job by creating work practices and a safety manual that they believe will result in a safe work area and a good safety culture. But the practices and procedures you write are only as good as the training you do when you roll them out.

When we do an audit, we ask the crew to show us their company’s safety manual—and they can’t find it. It may be somewhere on one of the five trucks on the job site. And when they do find it, sometimes the cellophane wrap is still on it. That says that the employees either think that they don’t need to see it, or they don’t find value in it.

Employers need to recognize that it’s not enough just to put the material together. They must make sure that the material is useful and practical to the crews that are actually out there doing the work. And if it’s not, then that’s when we say, well, if you have a good safety record, is it because of conduct and culture or is it luck? 

Luck runs out, but culture does not. When the way to do work is built around the OSHA and the consensus standards, as well as good training, evaluation and good job hazard analysis, then we simply don’t have the accidents.

The second challenge is optimizing safety communication to and from the field. Each contractor is encouraged to invite field leadership and their workers to the monthly Safety Alliance meeting, and this has provided extreme benefit not only to the discussions with their feedback, but it also acts as a form of communication to the field through trusted team members back. Which brings us to the other thing we say—safety is no accident—it doesn’t just automatically happen.

What are some of the most challenging safety issues to be aware of?

There are a lot of people working in the field who think they are safe because they were brought up with on-the-job training and historically, they learned to do this and this and this. But what they don’t realize is that some of the practices they do have drifted away from what we should be doing, decided both by OSHA and by the consensus standards, like ASME, IEEE, NFPA and ANSI, to name a few.

There are also now what I like to call “TikTok linemen.” They post videos on the internet of the work they’re doing, but some are posting very, very bad practices. What worries me the most is when I see posts of them unknowingly doing exactly the same bad practice that resulted in the loss of one of their fellow lineworkers. These young workers don’t recognize that the practice that they’re doing is outside of the boundaries of best practices, and that it has resulted in a very serious incident or even a fatality when things went wrong. 

What do you do at ISPC?

At ISPC, I do live line bare-hand training and hot stick training. I also help develop customized training programs for utilities and contractors, and I write a lot of technical training material for our sister company, T&D PowerSkills.

I also handle all of ISPC’s expert witness litigation support. I have learned so much doing this, because [of] the level of accuracy, research and examination involved in litigations. Once you get into contested citations and the realm of lawyers and courts, now you’re trying the facts of the case against the expectations and the interpretation of one OSHA regional director.

When we conduct training or when we help safety people develop their own expertise, we tell them that you have two customers: the employee and the employer. One is not more important than the other. If you’re protecting the employee, you’re also protecting the employer. Since we have a lot of experience, especially on the legal side, we can better explain the bigger picture to employers and provide a much more durable service to them.