All three of IBEW 1245’s Peer-to-Peer safety groups traveled to IBEW Local 77 in Seattle to a second George Brooks Safety Initiative Safety Summit. The summit was held on Saturday October 10, with 25-30 members who came on their own time to participate. It was a great day of speakers and breakout sessions. Our Peer chairmen from Keep The Clearance (KTC), Control The Pressure (CTP) & Hold The Pull (HTP) committees facilitated the breakout groups with great success. The group was very interested in our program and had lots of questions. We continue to support Local 77’s efforts to develop and implement their own Peer-to-Peer safety program.
In 2019, CTP will be working to get more pitches into the individual yards to hopefully reach people on a more personal level. The committee is working on developing new content for their presentation to keep it fresh. They continue to do presentations at the PG&E Training Academy in Winters for the utility worker classes and UGSR classes. CTP has formed a keyhole subcommittee with a couple of the safety stewards who are on the crew who do the procedure. The committee and the workers are concerned that the normal procedure for this work is much more detailed and has less chance of error than the keyhole procedure. The subcommittee will be working on improving the procedure and presenting it to PG&E, hopefully influencing a change in this work procedure.
HTP has been to most of the PG&E GC groups in the north region yards, except for the Humboldt yard. This has been due to the fires and other extenuating circumstances. HTP will be jumping back into getting around to more GC yards in 2019. HTP continues to present at the Livermore Training Center for the OH 1 apprentice group. PG&E recently let us know that we would no longer be presenting to both the pre-apprentice and OH 1 groups. Originally it was going to be the Pre-apprentice group only, but after some discussion, we will be presenting to the OH 1 group, which we feel is more important since they are just turning out, and we want our safety message to be fresh in their minds.
The KTC group has lost a number of members recently, due to folks moving into management and/or other jobs or companies not associated with the IBEW. We have rebuilt the committee with new members, and hope to be starting presentations soon. We recently completed a public speaking class for the new committee members.