As some of you know, I started out my career in the Power Generation Industry at a coal burning electric plant here in Colorado and while many an average Joe or Josephine will immediately transform into some poo-slinging-chimpanzee at the mere mention of "those fossil fuel plants", meeting everyone’s needs for a 24 / 7 electricity demand that’s up more than 53% in the last 20 years is no easy task. To say that it has been "an education" getting an insider’s perspective to this industry and learning how we meet our nation’s grid demand with the current infrastructure (pun intened) would be an understatement to the n^th degree.

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On shift at Remote Energy Plants without the benefit of other employees or the designated Safety Representative watching over your every move – That’s right, it’s a “benefit” - a non-participant might make the incorrect assumption that it’s easy to make “Safety” a subordinate consideration.

I recall one day on the job with the aforementioned benefit of others – when a mechanic admonished me with, ”How do you get by without sideshields?”. I hadn’t realized that I had gotten up from my computer and walked into the plant while still wearing my regular reading glasses. His “calling me out” for my own good was greatly appreciated and I immediately corrected the situation. I won’t forget it.

In Remote Energy Plants, many of the work areas are out of the main stream (pun intended) and a lot of times we’re working nights/weekends/holidays when others are enjoying their earned time away. Either way, “Safety isn’t 9 to 5″ with this team and like many other individuals in this industry, we take personal ownership of it.

While preparing for a job the other night, I needed to grab some equipment from our tool cage. Since the cage here is professionally organized, it didn’t take me but a few seconds to grab some orange cones, a portable light and a cart on my way out from collecting the other tools I needed.

When I got to each of the areas needing my attention, it was easy to set-up some extra lighting, put the cones out and string the extension cord overhead. You’ll also notice a Fire Extinguisher, the wheeled glare screen, and the cart; the cart doing double duty as a good place to post the Job Safety Briefing & Hot Work Permit since I needed to relocate for each consecutive task.

Even though the possibility of foot traffic through this area at 1AM is very slim, I don’t want to be the one apologizing for someone getting hurt because I didn’t anticipate the possibilities of a Security Guard, unexpected late night worker, etc… and I can say that set-up and take down of the safety equipment added less than 3 – 5 minutes overall.   

You don’t need to milk a job to get it done safely and at the other extreme whenever someone tells me that they don’t have the time to do a job safely, I tell them that I don’t have time not to.

It’s how we roll.

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