SAFETY REPORT:

FATALITY, SERIOUS ACCIDENT, AND NEAR-MISSES

Tree Worker Fatality

On Sept. 28, Local 1245 lost another member due to an on the job accident.  Davey Tree Surgery employee Carlos Amezcua, 46, died as a result of a fall from an aerial lift while working in the Monterey area.

Around 10:30 AM Carlos was trimming a tree out of a two-man aerial lift working approximately 35 feet  in the air when he fell from the manbasket.  There are not many details yet on what caused him to fall out of the manbasket. All indications at this time are that Carlos was not wearing his safety harness.  CalOSHA is investigating this accident and more details will be made available when they are known.

Carlos started his career with Arbor Tree in April 1996, and then began working with Davey Tree in May 2004. He lived in Salinas, CA and was married with 3 children.

Carlos Amezcua was a model union member. He will be missed.

Seroius Accident, Fall from Pole

On Sept. 20, a Local 1245 lineman working for PG&E was seriously injured as a result of falling approximately 25 feet from a pole after the flipline he was using for work positioning was severed by a drill bit augering a hole through the pole.

The member, Miguel Gutierrez, was transported to UC Davis Trama Center in serious condition.  On Sept. 23 Miguel had surgery to fuse broken vertebae (T-1 through T-10) and install a chest tube to drain fluid from his lungs. Miguel will be fitted with a torso cast, which will restrict movement of his fused vertebras for 2 months.  He said his doctor thinks he will be recovered in 3 to 4 months.  Because he is in great physical shape, it will hasten his recovery.  Miguel also has 4 fractured ribs, and a fractured sternum which makes it painful to breathe.

Peer To Peer Safety Campaigns

The first training session for the new Safety Stewards took place in Vacaville on Aug. 31 with approximately 40 members participating.  The training consisted of roles and responsibilities, expectations and resources as well as a presentation by Jeff “Odie” Espenship on approachability, which is key in intervening when someone chooses to take short cuts or works unsafe.

The new safety stewards will help deal with safety issues in the field throughout our jurisdiction and are part of the new approach of using peer pressure to get people to resist the temptation of taking short cuts.  The use of the IBEW’s Code of Excellence has provided the structure and guidelines for these safety stewards, while 10 of our members developed the Local 1245 Peer to Peer program.  Appointments were made by each area’s Local 1245 business representative.

This training was months in development, and dozens of presentations have been made to various work groups, with a couple more presentations scheduled. This group has worked hard to pull all of this together in an effort to not only turn around the unacceptable number of accidents and fatalities this local has experienced over the last four years but to change the culture that has been around for years.

The HTP committee presented to LMUD on Sept. 29. That leaves two employers who have not yet agreed to presentations: Mt. Wheeler and Wells REC. Business Rep. Randy Osborn is trying to persuade them to participate

Gas Safety Committee (Peer to Peer)

This committee continues to meet and put the final touches on this Gas Peer to Peer safety program which will be called “Control the Pressure”.  This program is also designed to use the Code of Excellence and peer pressure to deal with safety issues within this work group.  The CTP committee has been working hard and is ready to make a presentation to staff along with management representatives from PG&E and NV Energy on Oct. 7 at union headquarters in Vacaville.  Following the presentation we will be sitting down with the employers to work out a presentation schedule for our members.

First Annual Pacific Coast Safetyfest

Local 1245 has been asked to participate in the first annual Pacific Coast Safetyfest to take place in Dublin, Ca. at Camp Parks.  This will be a week-long free safety training event that will begin on Feb. 27, 2012 and run through March 2, 2012.  We are looking at sponsoring a trainer to put on a 4-hour training session on the NFPA 70e standard for Fire Resistant clothing as well as possibly putting together a training session for public safety and first responders who arrive at the scene of a utility type incident.

This event has been held annually in other areas and has been a huge success.  It is sposored by several groups such as OSHA, CalOSHA, US Depatment of Labors Mine Safety and Health Administration and many more.  Local 1245 will be considered a Founding Sponsor for this event and will be given a place to set up a booth.  It is a tremendous opportunity for our local union to be actively involved with these organizations in making this a success and possibly provide some valuable training to our community.  There will be more to come on this as the details become finalized.  PG&E and SMUD have also joined in on this and are active participants like Local 1245 in the planning and partnering to make this event successful.

PGE, FR Clothing Issues

There have been recent questions pertaining to the use of other vendors besides Tyndale for FR Clothing needs.  PG&E employees can only purchase FR Clothing from the approved vendor, which is Tyndale.  The main reason for this is quality control.  PG&E had worked with a couple of different vendors when this program was first starting up and they chose Tyndale because they provided at the time the quality control the company demanded for these products.  This meaning, Tyndale like other vendors, only sew the fabrics into the clothing type and styles in their catalogues.  PG&E performs their own tests on these fabrics to verify the best protection for the end user based on the hazard.  Not only do they test each individual garment, they test the different combinations of garments for layering.  Only the approved garments that have been tested are allowed for use in the field.  The testing and quality control concerns are why Tyndale is the only vendor that PG&E employees can purchase from as well as use in the field.

CalOSHA Advisory Committee Meeting on the New Crane Standard

On Oct. 4-5 I will be attending two full days of meetings with CalOSHA to discuss the recent crane standard and conflicts between the existing standard and the new one.
The recent rulemaking regarding cranes and derricks (the State CDAC adoption) was necessary in order to ensure that the state’s regulations were at least as effective as newly-adopted federal standards.  In order to make the needed changes expeditiously, the Horcher process was used, and under that process, the state rulemaking is limited to adopting provisions that read virtually the same as the federal provisions except where existing state standards are more protective.  That rulemaking disclosed a number of concerns that could not be addressed within the Horcher process.  The purpose of the present rulemaking is to address those concerns.  Therefore, this proposed rulemaking, and the deliberations of this advisory committee, will be limited to the following:

• Coordinating differences between Construction Safety Orders and General Industry Safety Orders where they cover the same subjects;
• Reviewing issues brought up during the State CDAC adoption which were outside the scope of the Horcher process (i.e., issues that called for something other than the adoption of federal wording).

Crane and derrick regulation is a vast topic, and it is possible for a range of topics outside those parameters to arise, but in order for the advisory committee to be productive within a reasonable time frame, these limitations should be strictly observed

Accident Reporting

Forms and guidelines are on the website. Units should use them as part of their unit meeting and submit them to this committee whether or not there are accidents or concerns. This should be a standard reporting practice at every unit meeting every month. All accidents reported this month on the green form as well as accidents reported at the safety committee meeting are listed below. This is our best resource to share the information with the rest of the membership. We are continuing to see an increase in the number of these forms being turned in and want to thank everyone who is doing this.

In addition to the accidents mentioned above we have two  more accident to report.

• A member working for Hotline Construction was involved in a vehicle accident while in transit at the end of the day to Brentwood.  The member was involved in a vehicle accident that is still currently under investigation.  It appears the other driver was attempting to pass on a 2 lane portion of the road which was marked, “ Do Not Pass” and hit his company vehicle head on. The other driver is believe to be died in the accident.  Our member was treated and released, and returned to work.
• We were made aware last week that new member Jeff Washabaugh, a groundman was dispatched on Sept. 26 to a job and never arrived arrived.  Details of what occurred on his way to work other than his vehicle was found off the road in what appears to be a single vehicle accident with Jeff passing in the accident.  Jeff was 23 years old and a recent graduate of the Northwest Linemans College.

Near Miss

The Safety Committee is encouraging everyone to report all near misses to the committee through our IBEW1245 Safety Matters web page.  Anyone with a near miss should sanitize the report to omit names and companies as the intent of reporting a near-miss is to provide others with information about potential hazards that members find in the field in order to provide awareness to others of those hazards.

• Transmission Heli-Wash Crew was in the process of hot washing insulators on the SLO-Callender Sw Station 115 kV line when the main rotor system of the helicopter made contact with the top phase conductor (336 aac) slicing the conductor in two. The separated conductor fell to the ground and locked out the circuit. The pilot landed the Bell 407 back at the Landing Zone without incident. There were no injuries to the Pilot or Lineman. The ship did not have any damage.
• A structure erection crew was in the final stages of setting a Tubular Guyedí¢â‚¬V (TGV) structure when one of the 7/8″ guy wires gave way, allowing the tower to twist in a counter clockwise direction. As the tower spun, the twisting motion allowed the guy wire to get tied up into the shackle release rope. Ultimately pulling the release shackle on the west side of the spreader bar, where the tension on the load line of the crane had just been “slacked off” to accommodate the plumbing of the structure. After the release shackle was pulled out, it let go of the sling that held the spreader bar on the west side of the arm. This allowed the tower to continue rotation counterclockwise until the entire load was suspended by the east side of the spreader bar. Once the weight shifted to that location, the crane rotated counterclockwise, sliding three of the outriggers off their pads. At that point, the operator remained calm and had the presence of mind to hold the swing brake on in order to keep the load from continuing to swing, thereby avoiding the potential of the structure to cause harm or damage. Before the incident occurred, the setting crew methodically stood up the tower without incident, and attached the four guy wires down to their respective anchors. The tower was plumbed with the use of “airline blocks” (4 part blocks) which are attached to the down guys and anchor attachments, with the fall line of the blocks being attached to the winches on the front of the crew trucks. In the process of plumbing the tower, the appropriate steel grip attaching the winch cable to the airline block “fall line” was sucked into the block causing the grip to be knocked off. Once this happened the airline cable ran approximately 50′ of cable through the blocks until the eye hit the block. As the eye hit the block it created a shock G …, u p wave which transferred up to the grip on the 7/8″ down guy kicking it off the guy wire. Within a very short period of time the tower began the counterclockwise rotation previously described. After the load had safely settled, and the side load removed from the crane, the crew safely lowered the tower back to the ground, without injury or equipment damage. The crane has been inspected by the Crane Manufacturer as being safe to operate and no harm was done to the boom of the crane. Root Cause: the near miss is due to the lack of attention to detail. With the grip nearing the blocks, the crew should have cut off the guy wire and lengthened out the blocks to avoid having the grip come into contact with the blocks.

Submitted by,
Ralph Armstrong