By R. Bruce Wright
All of the consultants at Synebar Solutions believe that constant process improvement represents a key step to improving operational quality. If you define quality as we do, as doing things right the first time, every time, it is axiomatic that safety is an automatic byproduct of quality performance. Even so, despite your best efforts, things can go wrong, and it is in the response to those events, in the ability to see behind the obvious, that the best organizations show the ability to learn from experience and respond effectively. This separates excellent organizations from the pack. And, while experience is the best teacher, it is a costly way to learn. With that in mind, here’s a chance for your organization to learn from someone else’s experience for free, and use that learning to take steps to avoid your own expensive lessons down the road, if you will pardon the pun.
I bet that virtually every system insured in our national program has had a least one experience with a motorist colliding with a pole in their system. As we go around the country visiting systems we often learn that systems have had certain poles struck multiple times by motorists; some twice, some three times, and amazingly enough, some even more often than that! This is disturbing to observe, for a number of reasons. It costs the systems money, it exposes them to liability and it obviously leads the public to suffer injuries and property losses.
Before I go any further, I need to make a clear statement of fact, and that is that your engineers are the experts in situating poles and meeting the various regulatory requirements that govern system design, not me. You may use qualified engineers of your own or you may use those from consultants. Either way, they are the ones trained and qualified in the field, and I don't pretend to be. But, from the outside looking in, even a non-engineer like me can still raise some questions that should be considered. We call the process “asking dumb questions.” So, here goes.
Every time a vehicle strikes one of your poles it should raise an alarm bell for you. No, I do not mean to say that you should automatically not replace a pole in the same spot every time a driver manages to hit one. I am saying though that you should make a conscious decision to put it back there or not, rather than doing it out of habit or inertia. Immediate repairs may be needed, and that’s fine. But right away, within the next business day or two, a qualified person or two should offer a formal, written evaluation of the event and of the reasons behind the choice of where to put the replacement pole. A record of the event should be created and indexed so that it can be found in the future. You can’t afford to rely on individual memories in order to determine if a particular pole was hit before.
If a pole is struck a second time, the process described above should be repeated with considerable care. Resetting a pole in the same location a third time should be done with reluctance and great care. And, if it has been knocked down or hit 3 times, it is likely that you need to find a better solution.
If you are now wondering how long I sat around dreaming up this idea for an article, you can stop. Hey, you know that’s not how we work. I didn’t pull this one out of thin air. I pulled it out of the claims records. Try this story for size.
A system is notified by the police in the middle of the night that a drunk driver has lost control, run off the road, and knocked down a pole. Worse yet, the passenger died when she contacted a line that was hanging down low, but was not on the ground, as a result of the fallen pole. Several homes are now without power. The night on-call service crew comes out and replaces the pole. The safety manager is also called out, takes photos at the scene, comes back the next day for more photos and secures the police report. The investigation reveals that the driver in question (who was only slightly injured) had spend the night in a bar and was found well above the legal threshold for intoxication when tested in the hospital after the accident. The car traveled off the road, on the outside of a curve, and eventually struck the pole some 50 feet in from the road and several hundred yards from the point where he left the pavement. The replacement pole was deemed safely located, and was left in the same location. No one gave it a second thought, even when the suit papers arrived. But the verdict got their attention, when the trial court found the distribution system liable to the dead girl's estate, and when the appeals failed they were really alert!
How can this be? Is this just another example of a crazy jury verdict that is beyond anyone’s ability to anticipate or avoid? Well, maybe not this time. In the course of the case's progress through the courts, some interesting facts were brought out that had an impact on the issues to be decided.
First, you need to remember that the passenger (or in this case her estate) has a right to recover from anyone who contributed to the event. The fact that the driver was drunk serves as a useful defense for the defense to you against him, but the passenger was an innocent victim. In order to use the fact of the driver’s inebriation against her, the defense would have to show that she knew the extent of his impairment and then show that by disregarding this fact she had been negligent in regard to her fatal injury. Proving these is hard enough to do in themselves, and even tougher with a deceased victim.
Second, it was demonstrated by testimony, backed up by a search of the police accident report records, that this was not the first time a car had knocked down this particular pole. 10 years earlier another DUI driver had done virtually the same thing, although he was driving alone and there was no serious injury or fatality.
Finally, the utility had no records documenting any investigation of either event. It looked as though they simply put the pole back again without any consideration of the situation. And, maybe they did.
As a result, a very large verdict was rendered against this utility, and the Supreme Court of the state involved has decided that there is no reason to overturn the trail jury’s verdict. That’s a costly lesson.
I don’t tell this story just to scare you, or simply to show what can happen to you, but rather to serve as a case study for what we mean by “learning from experience.” If you can learn from this experience you will be able to get the same lesson they did, but at far less expense.
So, if a vehicle hits one of your poles, what should you do besides moving fast to secure the area and made the repairs necessary to restore service? We suggest that you need to analyze the situation and document your decision process, only replacing it in the same spot if there are good and compelling reasons to do so. You should retain the record of this decision and record the location where the event took place in some type of easily searchable file, either on paper or on an electronic database, as you prefer. Then, any time a vehicle vs. pole event occurs, one element of the review process is to search the history to see if this pole or adjacent poles have been hit in the past.