Page 71 - Occupational Health & Safety, June 2018

During the last year of working before I retired, I was preparing to close a high-voltage switch just outside of a substation when I asked myself,
“What am I not seeing?”
onds before I noticed a jumper going over a crossarm that had broken off a lightning ar- rester. This jumper was three inches from an opposing phase swaying in the wind. It was not visible from the ground and could easily have been missed from a bucket truck. If I had slammed the switch closed without no- ticing this hazard that close to a substation, I would have only been eight feet away from an arching ball of fire.
Utilizing these two approaches to in- crease my natural ability for seeing hazards only takes a few minutes longer per job, but it pays dividends many times over. The next time you are around any hazard, remember to focus on the presence of the hazard and not allow your mind to get lost in unrelated compulsive thought. Tomorrow on the job, ask yourself, “What am I not seeing?” No- tice as more details emerge when you give your vision more time to see. Share this technique with your co-workers, since it will only be through the combined efforts of all employees that we will succeed in keeping each other safe.
Steve Opper is a retired power-lineman with forty years of power production and electri- cal distribution experience. He started his career in the United States Navy and retired from Ameren Corp. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Management from the University of Illinois. He has studied for 22 years seek- ing answers for accidents caused by human error. He is the author of the book “Be Safe, Growing Awareness for Accident Prevention in Dangerous Occupations,” published in 2016. The book is for sale in the book store at powerlineman.com.
In the next Safety on Offense article, he will expose the inconsistent nature of mem- ory and how to best compensate for this hu- man limitation we all possess. If you have found this article helpful or think he’s missing important information, please let him know at s.opper@sbcglobal.net.
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