Fatality
The end of November ended on a sad note with the accidental death of a long time member. On November 30th at approximately 02:00 am., Tom Flippo, a Troubleman from the Woodland Service Center and 39 years with Pacific Gas and Electric was responding to trouble during storm conditions in West Sacramento. While driving to his next location, Tom was fatally injured when his vehicle struck a steel signal light pole.
The accident investigation has been under way since the accident with members from the IBEW participating in the investigation process. A full report is not out yet and as always will pass along more details as they become available.
PGE FR RainGear update
The below message was sent regarding the anticipated delivery of the new FR Rain Gear. The supplier has not met the original date of delivery and anticipated quantity.
Over the past several weeks we have received very disappointing news from our supplier. The manufacturer of the new FR Suits has not been able to meet our request for delivery of 1,000 suits in November. At this time we are expecting delivery of 600 suits by year-end. The Raingear team is very disappointed in this development as we had worked very hard to have these suits in employee’s hands for this storm season. We are pressuring the manufacturer and supplier to do everything they can to speed to delivery of these suits without compromising quality.
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 promote awareness to others of those hazards.
On December 29, 2012 an employee working for a sub-contractor assigned to replace electric and gas meters to the new smart meters for NV Energy experienced an electric flash. There were no injuries and the employee was wearing all of the proper PPE. The incident occurred when the employer loaded a 480v meter location in the employees handheld. The employee was a meter technician which is assigned to only replace residential signal phase meters. The employee inserted the wrong voltage meter into the 480v meter socket which created the arc flash and causing the meter to catch fire.