By Dean B. Wisecarver
During a recent consultation at an electric cooperative, the Safety Director told me that when one of their people gets into a vehicle accident, the driver is required to radio in to HQ and either the Safety Director or some other key manager immediately goes out to the scene to manage things. This isn’t the first utility to tell me this and I understand using this approach reflects the recognition of how important it is to handle things well at the scene.
I certainly agree that managing the scene can be critically important, but I wonder if sending someone out from HQ is the best approach. It seems rather costly if the accident is relatively minor and with little potential for serious claims – such as backing into someone’s car in a parking lot or striking a fence post. (I suspect no one actually goes out from HQ is such situations, anyway.) More importantly, many of the most critical aspects of managing the scene need to be handled within the first 4 or 5 minutes. How can someone that has to travel out from HQ handle these effectively?
The most effective approach, I believe, is to give all drivers the tools and the knowledge to manage any vehicle accident scene they face without relying on additional support. Imparting the knowledge requires training in advance, while the tools are merely simple items like a camera and a very brief guide on which to record pertinent information that can only be gathered at the scene. Both the training and the tools are fairly easy to provide, so I’m surprised at the number of utilities we work with that don’t do so, especially with the potential exposure they face.
The training may require a little thought to prepare but should be easy to conduct. The vast majority of utilities have regular safety or administrative meetings for all outside people, so finding the opportunity to do this training can’t be an issue. The topic, properly outlined and planned, shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes, so the time needed shouldn’t be an issue. Most utilities require the majority of their linemen and servicemen to get commercial drivers’ licenses (CDLs) and to learn rather technical aspects of working with electricity so the drivers’ ability to learn about handling accident situations shouldn’t be an issue. So why, then, does this issue so often go un-addressed?
One answer might be that some management people simply assume their drivers would know what to do and how to do it if they are involved in a vehicle accident. After all, virtually every adult in our society has a driver’s license and operates some kind of vehicle. And probably 95 percent of adults have been involved in a vehicle accident at some point in their lives. They should know what to do, right? Frankly, both my professional experience and my life experience tells me this is a faulty assumption. Few people really know what to do and how to handle things after an accident. And it appears that I’m not alone believing many drivers are not well prepared for such situations, based on the number of utilities that tell me they send someone out to the scene when their people have an accident.
Another answer might be that managers expect their outside people to be pros at electric line work (or whatever they do for the utility) but not at driving. I hope this isn’t a valid answer because a major part of doing their jobs involves driving company vehicles and we should prepare them, set performance expectations and monitor them as pros behind the wheel.
Perhaps the answer to why such training doesn’t take place very often is that it’s not on the usual training rotation, and the leaders are not quite comfortable planning, creating and conducting this training, perhaps feeling they lack the technical knowledge of what to teach. If this is the real reason, we can help. In fact, I’ll start by giving you a brief outline of what the training should cover. The items in this outline are in the exact order they should be addressed at an accident scene!
1. Secure the scene so nothing more happens.
This is truly the first thing your driver should address. On a quiet, open street or in a parking lot, this may not require much time or attention, but out on a highway, such as an Interstate or other high speed road, or at a busy intersection, this many require considerable immediate attention. Place flares or triangles, get someone to direct oncoming traffic. Whatever it takes, the goal is to prevent anyone else from becoming involved. While these actions are somewhat just good sense, they should be discussed thoroughly in the training session to help your drivers get focused on this important action.
2. Attend to injured people.
After the scene is secured, this is the next most important action. Most of your people are probably already well trained in first aid and CPR and in calling for or radioing for help from EMTs, fire departments, and police. They should discuss and be reminded of what they should do to attend to anyone that has been seriously injured just as if those injured were co-workers.
3. Identify people at the scene that were not directly involved in the accident.
While this should only be done after the first two steps above, it is the single most important action your driver can take to gather information that will be critically important later. These people are those that were standing on the corner, or that stopped their cars to see if everything is okay, or that came out of nearby buildings to see what happened. These are all people who will move on as soon as they see that they are not needed or that nothing really interesting is left to see. Since they will go away very quickly, your driver has very little time to try to identify them so he/she needs to give attention to jotting down something about them that a professional investigator can use later to find them.
4. Obtain basic information about the other vehicle and driver.
First, write down the tag number and state. Then, get the other driver’s information and a description of the vehicle. All this is about identifying the other driver(s) and vehicle(s), not about gathering insurance information. (If the other driver offers insurance information, fine, jot it down but don’t waste valuable time trying to get it. If we know who the driver was, we can find out about the insurance later.) Many ill-prepared people spend far more time gathering this information than is really necessary at the scene, often at the expense of missing other key information.
5. Identify any injured people and/or passengers in the other vehicle(s).
Injured people may disappear in an ambulance very shortly after the accident and are often the people the insurance adjuster will want to contact as soon as possible, so trying to identify them early in the process will be helpful. Still, there will be ways to get this information later so everything else to this point is more important. Also, passengers in the various vehicles are both potential witnesses and potential claimants.
6. Pin down the damages to property as best you can right after the accident.
This is where having a camera on board can be extremely helpful. But, even without a camera, it’s important to write down, in as much quick detail as possible, what damages there are. It’s not surprising that the damages sometimes “grow” between the time of the accident and the time the adjuster finally gets to see them. This is not just about the vehicles but also about property such as loading docks, poles and signs, etc. Someone else could damage such things days later and without a solid description of the damage at the time of our accident, it will be difficult to determine what damage occurred when.
Note that if you intend to provide cameras for your drivers to use in documenting damages, they need a bit of training on how to use the cameras effectively – including how the camera works and what angles to photograph.
7. Do not discuss the accident with anyone (except as noted below).
This item applies over all of the above steps. Your driver (and any passengers) should not discuss any aspect of what happened, how it happened, or who is to blame with anyone at the scene except the investigating police office, if one arrives. This sounds simple enough but it requires more training, reinforcement, and diligence than one might think. It’s easy to let little comments slip out like, “I’m sorry. I didn’t see you.” Or even “I thought you saw me coming.” Innocent as these slips might seem, they tell something we may not want to reveal just yet, at least not to the others around us. As for answering a police officer’s questions, stick to the obvious physical facts and avoid statements of your own judgment, vision, speed, or what you think caused the accident. Until all the facts are in and evaluated, no one can be absolutely certain who did what and how those things affected the accident.
This no discussion rule applies to identifying witnesses in item 3 above, too. Don’t waste time asking what seems a logical question of those standing around, like “Did you see what just happened?” It’s not your driver’s role to qualify these potential witnesses. Let the professional investigators do that later. Just get names, phone numbers, plate numbers from stopped vehicles, etc. If your driver starts discussing what someone did or didn’t see, he may get distracted and occupied talking to someone while the other (perhaps more important) witnesses leave the scene, forever lost to the investigation.
By the way, notice the above items pretty much cover the only information your drivers need to write down at the scene. They may need to provide more details and other information later at your office in order to comply with reporting requirements for both the State and the insurance company. Among these additional details are things like where the accident happened, what the weather was like, the name, address, and such of your driver, your vehicle’s description, and even the date and time. Most of these additional details are not going to be forgotten or lost between the accident scene and the office, so why waste time at the scene trying to write them down? Free your driver to focus on information that might only be captured at the scene and he’ll do a better job.
We can help you develop and conduct this important training.
My associate, Bruce Wright, and I both began our working careers many years ago as insurance claims adjusters. Nothing teaches a person how an accident scene should be handled better than investigating vehicle accidents after the fact and trying to determine who caused what and who owes whom for damages. We understand what can happen when a driver fails to handle the scene effectively, says things they shouldn’t have said, forgets to get crucial information that can never be recovered later, and fails to describe in some detail that damages that were apparent immediately after the accident. In fact, we have already shared some of our knowledge on this topic with you in a previous article when we shared a practical driver’s guide for accident scenes in the July-Aug-Sep, 2001 issue of RE-marks. You can read it by navigating to it using the "Archive" button above.
As customers in our national program, you may call on us to help you create your own training session on this important topic or have us actually do one for your people. We can work with you on establishing some administrative items, too, such as using the more practical accident scene guide we presented in the previous article referenced in the paragraph above.
Just give us a call or drop us an email by clicking here. We’ll be happy to help any way we can.
