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As scary as it sounds, safety is absolutely contagious. If you start to have a safety mindset in everything you do, the more that we think about safety, talk about safety, and observe safety type of behaviors, the more that's going to spread across the entire organization. I'm Elizabeth Schilling.
And I'm Julia Perry. And today, we're here with Chad Orvis from our Safety Department. In honor of it being a safety podcast, let's go around and share our near misses recently.
So I'm recently becoming more acquainted with the world of horses because my stepdaughter has one, and I offered to help her clean out stalls. These horses have their own personalities. I found myself in a stall with one, and I didn't know what he was gonna do, but I started planning my out. Like, can I get over that fence if needed? Nothing happened. It was fine. We had enough distance, but just preparing for unpredictable behavior.
Near miss for me was letting my husband stand on the very top rung of the ladder while we were trimming old cable cords, and I was literally the person holding the ladder stationary on the ground as I was yelling at him, get down now. Get down. That's my near miss. Nobody died, but it felt like we were going to.
My near miss is we have some kitchen bar stools that swivel, and I decided that I was gonna stand on one of those to try to reach something way up high. And once you start swiveling on one of those things, it's really hard to keep your balance, and I quickly decided that this is not the right equipment to be using.
Why is it that whenever you need a step stool, there's only ever a swivel chair around?
Right.
It feels like a law of
nature. And every time I think I'll be able to get up there and be able to keep my balance and do just fine, and every time I realize it was a bad decision.
We may use some acronyms that people may or may not be familiar with. Can you tell me what does LMS and PPE stand for?
LMS is our learning management system that we use here at Tri-State, and PPE is personal protective equipment.
There's a lot at stake when it comes to safety at Tri-State. Is being the VP of Safety stressful or rewarding?
Well, there are no doubt stressful times in the work that I do, and I know it's in the work that everybody does, I think that more than that is rewarding. I have been probably rewarded in the workplace more in this safety role than in any other role that I've had. Safety gives you an opportunity to really touch all parts of the organization in a way that is very positive and really brings people together. Where I have the opportunity to be involved and part of that, that is what's really rewarding for me.
Can you tell us a little bit about your path here at Tri-State? You weren't always in safety. Right?
No. I wasn't. I guess initially started back in my last job where I was a labor and employment attorney for Employers Council, and Tri-State used to be one of my member companies that I worked with. Since taking on the role in employee relations, I expanded that into safety and health, into technical training, and human performance. What's really great about all four of those areas are that they are very synergistic.
I could be in a meeting where I have somebody from safety, employee relations, technical training, and then human performance all working on a similar issue.
What have you learned since starting this new,
more expanded role? Safety has been really
a great experience. I've really enjoyed working with the safety team. The one thing that I've learned is that safety is something that you've always gotta be thinking about. It's not something that we just turn on when we come to the workplace. Really, it's something that especially those employees who are in safety sensitive areas always have to be thinking about. But even here at headquarters, we can always be thinking about safety as employees also.
What's the most surprising thing you found out after taking on this safety position?
I learned why the speed limit at the Axial Basin solar site is 10 and a half miles an hour.
That seems kinda slow.
Not only does it seem slow, but very precise too at 10 and a half miles an hour. The concept behind that is it causes you to really pay attention to how fast you're going. You have to make sure you stay right at 10 and a half miles an hour. It just focuses you in on that as you're driving.
That's a good one, actually.
Has your new role changed any of your day to day behaviors personally?
They have. I have definitely found, even when I'm at home, adjusting my behaviors to be much more safe, even just putting up my Christmas lights this last year, making sure that I had anchors on the roof when I was up there, putting up lights. So really, it's just, again, me living that idea of I'm just thinking about safety more.
My dad used to be in the military, and by the time I got older, his back was too bad to go on the ladder to hang Christmas lights anymore. He'd have me climb up onto the roof when I finally got to the top of the ladder. And he goes, what's your plan right now? And I was like, what are you talking about? He goes, if this ladder somehow falls down, where are you gonna bail?
And then beneath me, there's the dry rock garden and a rose bush and a cement sidewalk. So it was kind of a mean time to bring that up. When you have that safety mindset, you're always quizzing everybody in your daily life or kind of admonishing them for little mistakes that they're making and stuff.
The great thing about that is every time you've probably climbed a ladder since then, you've always remembered that.
I always think, where am I gonna bail? Which I don't know if that's correct, but, see, what's my escape route if I have to leap off this ladder right now? You may have touched on this, but
What are all the pieces that make up Tri-State's Safety Program?
Our Safety Program starts at the field level. And whether you're on the transmission side or the generation side, it's really those field workers, along with their foremen and their supervisors, who are really kind of that first level of safety. They'll have a table board meeting every single morning before they begin working. Part of that is to identify hazards, to identify where they need to be safe. Then you have the safety department, which is really there to support all these different areas, right?
So we have coordinators that are out in the field on the transmission side and the generation side, helping to identify hazards and to identify ways that we might be able to do things a little bit different to make sure everybody stays safe. The other thing that we have are safety committees, and we have safety committees at the transmission, at the plants, Colowyo, the CTs, and even here at headquarters, we have a safety committee. And those safety committees are a combination of both safety leaders, managers, and employees. The one piece that's so important when you are creating what your safety culture is gonna look like is the involvement of those employees. Employees have to be very involved in making sure that we have a safe culture.
It sounds like that communication is actually working because you've been achieving awards every year, making so many safety records.
I'm really excited to share the safety achievements that Tri-State has accumulated over the past number of years. One of those is with Colowyo Mine, who was recognized by the Colorado Department of Mining Reclamation and Safety at its hundred and twenty seventh National Western Mining Conference. We also received the National Safety Council 2024 Superior Safety Performance Award for achieving ten years or more without a workplace lost time injury at Burlington, Frank Knudson, Lyman, and Pyramid Generation stations, as well as at flight operations. And finally, we also received 2024 National Safety Council Perfect Record Award for twelve consecutive months without a lost time injury at JM Schafer, Transmission Maintenance East, South, and West. And, again, those awards really are a reflection on our employees and having that safety mindset all the time when they're in the workplace because dangers can arise at any minute.
We all live here in Colorado or even if you get out into Nebraska, Wyoming, New Mexico. Some days we can see all four seasons in one day. Right? That's an example of, hey, we've got something going on and look at what's going on with the weather. What do we have to do to make sure that we can stay safe? It's just that mindset that everybody always has as they're working through their day.
Yeah. Speaking of weather, the scale you have to prepare for is pretty insane. I know that our transmission guys had to go out and move a mobile substation during a blizzard, I think, and they had to get special clearance from the Colorado DOT to even let them go onto the road to drive it where there was the power outage. And that's just how do you prepare to drive in a blizzard with a mobile substation. You know?
Absolutely. That really shows how amazing it is that transmission maintenance got this award of no lost days in the last year when situations like this all of a sudden facing them, and they're able to identify what the potential hazards are and make adjustments to what they're doing to stay safe through that entire project.
I guess that makes sense then to just have a perpetual mindset of safety because the accidents are unplanned. So you have to be constantly ready and prepared because you're not trying to do something dangerous on purpose, usually. Right?
None of us are intentionally trying to get hurt, whether it's in the workplace or out of the workplace, but it does happen. Injuries happen, and that's just a fact of life. And where we can reduce the risk of those injuries just through having that constant reminder and mindset really makes a big difference. I even encourage that for employees here at headquarters. Oftentimes, they think, how does safety apply here at headquarters?
It can be as simple as today when you're walking out to your car to leave work, just being aware of what's around your car. Some people walking up that you might have to watch for as you're backing out. Are there some hazards around your vehicle that you need to pay attention to? That's the idea of just always being in that mindset around safety that we can do and just the little things that we do in life.
Yeah. I think we need to issue some Tri-State Canada goose shields while they're in breeding season right now. We may
need to get an LMS on that of how to safely encounter and deal with the geese. Avoid them as best we can. That's oftentimes the best thing you can do with any hazard is avoid it.
Yes. We're thinking about our personal safety and the importance of that. But also, how does safety benefit our membership as a whole?
First thing I think when we talk about safety in our membership is reliability. That's one of our key missions is to provide reliable power. The best way that we can do that when it comes to our workers is to have them available to work, especially at times when there is a downline that we need to get to quickly. The best way we can keep those employees working is to keep them safe and keep them healthy. If we can avoid accident and keep them from missing work, then that's how we can maintain reliability from a worker standpoint.
By the nature of generating and transmitting electricity, obviously, we're working with some pretty dangerous forces and large equipment. Can you tell us about how that plays into how we look at safety related to these kinds of extremes?
There are certain environments that our employees are in that could cause serious injury or even death when you're working around electricity like we are, whether that's on the generation side or the transmission side. We can have arc flash situations. If things aren't grounded properly, we could have very serious injuries. So really, the way I look at how we have to protect around that is I see it layered. It has to start with the individual, and that individual has to always be thinking about what's my environment?
What's going on around me? How can I stay safe? We do training around that with Safe Start, and that is what I consider our base layer. Then you start layering on top of things like making sure you have the proper PPE for whatever job that you're doing. But then when you're getting into the really dangerous type of work that we do, it becomes imperative that we have really good hazard identification.
Once we've identified the hazard, one, can we avoid it? Because if we avoid the hazard, there's not gonna be injury. But where we can't avoid it, what kind of controls can we put into place to really limit the risk, that injury? And that's what the field employees along with the safety coordinators are doing on a regular basis.
So you say that safety is starting with the individual. How are you encouraging the culture of safety with employees?
One of the things that we really try to focus on is this idea of near miss reporting and even just reporting in general. We created a an LMS for all employees to understand the importance of reporting safety concerns. But especially out in the field, it's the idea of near miss reporting. And you might ask, why do we have to report things that didn't happen? Why do we have to report things that didn't result in an injury?
The more that we can report a near miss where there was no injury that occurred, the better we can accumulate a better understanding of all the different things that can potentially happen in a given situation and be aware of it. And the more we can share that across the entire organization, the safer everyone can be.
You talked earlier about having people available is important to reliability. How do you balance the kind of rush to fix something versus the need to slow down and stay safe?
That really starts with that idea that we always have the stop work authority piece of it. And as fast as we have to move sometimes to be able to get the work done, we also have to balance that out, this idea of, hey, at any point in time, if an employee feels unsafe or sees something that we're doing that's unsafe, they have the single authority to stop work right there and say, Nope, we're stopping it. This is what I see. This needs to be addressed. And I think that really works well to balance out the speed to get something done all the way down to the lowest level of an apprentice being able to say, no.
We're stopping what we're doing because this is unsafe.
How do you make sure that when employees do report a near miss or something does happen, they still feel comfortable reporting this incident or coming back to management and telling them what happened?
The key there is to have a culture of safety that relies on trust. That is that the employees have to trust that if they are going to report a near miss or if they are going to stop work under the idea of stop work authority, that they are going to be supported in doing so by management, the company, and that there's not going to be any type of negative repercussions around that. So it's really important, and Tri-State really emphasizes this idea that safety starts with what the field employees see and them reporting up through the organization, and having trust that the organization is going to take that and continue to build an even stronger culture.
We have our headquarters. We have field facilities. We have generating stations. Work is done in a variety of different places across four states. How do you ensure that we have some consistency, some alignment in how we look at our vision for safety and how we execute on it?
That's a great question. When it comes to safety as a priority across the organization, it always has to start at the top with our executive team. Our executive team is very consistent with their priority of safety. They will talk about safety in every environment that they can or chance that they get. And I think that really helps to make sure that as safety gets pushed down, that message is very consistent across all the different fractional parts of Tri-State.
From there, then you really are relying on management and employees to make sure that they are implementing it at each one of the sites. And that's where we have safety committees that are making sure they're staying consistent, where we have our safety coordinators going out to all the locations and making sure we stay consistent with that message. It takes the entire organization to make sure that we are able to consistently have safety implemented across Tri-State.
How do you maintain your high standard when you work with other groups outside of Tri-State?
Our safety department really makes sure that we stay involved with a number of outside groups, whether that be with EPRI or Altricity. In doing so, we have the opportunity to do roundtables and interact with safety personnel from different organizations that allow us then to take best practices, whether we take them from those companies or whether or not we are sharing our best practices that they can take back to their workplaces.
Which will be part of that continuous improvement is also leadership educating themselves in tandem with everybody else too. Yeah. Funny enough, once upon a time, the communications department had to go through minor training, and we were all certified minors for, I think, six months or something, which was hilarious. But I didn't realize that at these plants with this huge industrial machinery that if you don't wear ear protection, it could damage your hearing just from the size and volume and scale of all the machinery there, and that was wild to me.
The way we take safety as a priority, even if you're not the one completing the work, is huge. Because one of my first articles that I wrote for our internal publication, we were talking about some work being done on the training trailer. But as part of the training, they were energizing a line. So I showed up just to observe and write the article, and I got the full safety briefing as if I were doing the work. And it was just, if you're gonna be near this equipment, you need to know all these things.
You need to be wearing the appropriate protective equipment, and it showed how seriously we take it. That that was huge.
Yeah. Absolutely. And any employee who is going to go to the mine for their first time or go to Craig Station or even any of the CTs for the first time has to go through a safety briefing and training before they can even step foot into onto those locations.
Oh, yeah. Because we're the idiot lemmings walking around trying to take photos, and meanwhile, we could get totally squished by a dozer.
Don't be so focused on what's in the viewfinder. Look around.
We're the Wile E. Coyote is running around.
At least they rein us in. That
that Yeah.
That's good.
Thank you, field employees, for saving communications department.
No. Kidding. It feels like when we talk about safety, we're able to assign some structure and processes around it. But thinking more generally about the kinds of conversations that people need to have when they're looking at their own performance or the performance of people around them in their day to day work. Are there other tactics that we take to get at that performance element?
I think that really hits on my vision for safety as we go forward in Tri-State because so much of safety is reactionary. If an accident occurs, now we're gonna do an investigation and find out what went wrong. Where there's another opportunity for safety is to be a little bit more forward looking and see safety as a performance driver. That's where we integrate safety and human performance, with the idea that we're looking for continuous improvement. And where we can identify behaviors or practices ahead of time that give us positive outcomes from a safety perspective, if we focus on those behaviors, then we can hopefully eliminate the safety incident from even occurring to begin with.
The way that we get there is a couple different ways. One is we can use a leading indicator type of philosophy, which is, let's say, for example, reporting near misses. The more near misses we report, we have found that you have better safety outcomes. That's your leading indicator. The other way you can go about that is through human performance, and this is where you identify the human aspect of a potential unsafe situation, and then go back to that human element piece of it, educate people well on a particular situation.
Then you really reduce later on the risk of that incident from occurring to begin with. Safety is not a solo endeavor. We obviously want to keep ourselves safe. The great thing about keeping ourselves safe is that we're also keeping everyone around us safe. As we are looking at safety both in the workplace of recognizing hazardous conditions and wanting to make sure that everybody stays safe, we can also bring that same concept back to our homes at night where we are making sure as we go through our daily lives, we're keeping our family safe, we're keeping our neighbors safe, we're keeping our community safe.
Safety seems to be more effective when you're around people. The human element in which you recognize that safety is important because the person next to me might get hurt if something happens.
Is safety contagious?
As scary as it sounds, safety is absolutely contagious. And I think that really comes with what I said earlier about having that safety mindset. If you start to have a safety mindset in everything you do, then that starts to become contagious. The more that we think about safety, talk about safety, and observe safety type of behaviors, the more that's going to spread across the entire organization.
What are some of the challenges you face at Tri-State in the safety department?
I think the biggest challenge they face out in the field with safety is the unknowns, having to be ready for anything to happen at any time that maybe was not anticipated when you first started that project. It's almost like being a a football coach getting their team ready for anything that could potentially happen in the game. So when it happens, they're ready to go. The same type of thing when you're out in the field. It could be changing weather conditions.
It could be changing conditions in the the environments in which they're working in, and just having to be ready to make that quick adjustment and having had the training to know what to do under those circumstances.
What's one piece of safety advice you think everyone should know?
We live in a fast paced world where there are hazards all around us. And where you can take the opportunity when you find yourself in a situation where things are moving fast is to just slow down, take a breath, and pay attention to what is going on around you.
Thanks for tuning in to Western Watts. You can find us on Spotify, Apple Podcast, YouTube, or on our website at tristate.coop/wwpod. We'll catch you next time.