"The bottom line is that underbuilt clearance problems ... need to be monitored and managed effectively if you want to reduce the chance that they’ll contribute to accidents or mishaps."

As more and more companies compete for limited space on cooperative poles, it’s not surprising that clearances suffer. The problem is two fold. First, limited space leads underbuilt users to encroach on active conductors (and neutral lines), lessening the margin of safety for everyone. Just as important though, secondary users faced with a need to maintain clearances to existing services often choose to install new lines and cables with inadequate clearance from the ground, leading to vehicle entanglements, snapped poles, outages, and unfortunately, serious potential for third party contact accidents - if and when energized lines come down to the ground. Complicating matters, many secondary users are less than speedy when it comes to fixing clearance deficiencies involving their equipment even after they’ve been advised of a problem. If some of this is starting to sound familiar to you then read on, because listed below are a compilation of ideas for dealing with this issue, collected from your peers during our annual visits.

First and foremost, you can’t address the problem if you don’t know about it so, if you don’t do so already, you should provide appropriate training your staff. Teach them to notice and report any underbuilt clearance problems they see. An effective way to accomplish this is cover the subject thoroughly during regularly offered hazard recognition training. Photographs help, so use a digital camera to collect underbuilt hazard photos from your system and compile them into a presentation.

Establish a clear and simple policy on internal reporting and handling of underbuilt clearance problems. This policy should include designating one person in your organization to serve as a liaison between the cooperative and telephone companies, cable companies and others who use space on your poles. The policy should prescribe a simple system that allows you to efficiently track each situation by recording the date the problem was found and reported, the location, the date your liaison gave the underbuilt owner notice of the problem, and date by which the coop expects the situation to be resolved. (An accurately maintained phone log or use of a certified letter system will work well for keeping track of your notice to underbuilt owners.) Also helpful in this process is to provide your designed internal liaison with a prepared list of all underbuilt operators on your system, along with specific contact names and direct phone numbers at each. Specific contact names and direct phone numbers will let you bypass switchboards and cut red tape, allowing your person to notify directly a responsible party who can do something to get problem fixed quickly and efficiently.

The policy should also provide a clear, unambiguous guideline for how your organization will deal with underbuilt clearance problems that go uncorrected, and then enforce it uniformly. Cable and phone companies may have a legal right to attach to your poles but they do not have a right to allow hazardous conditions to fester uncorrected indefinitely. When faced with a non-responsive party some coops adopt a “no excuses” policy and will simply cut or otherwise remove any lines that don’t meet requirements if the owner doesn’t correct things in a timely manor. This approach will certainly get their attention but it’s very confrontational so I suggest it only as a last resort. Perhaps a better approach would be to let your own crews fix clearance problems that the owner fails to promptly address and then to bill the owner for your time and materials. Experience shows that once cable and phone company managers start to see that ignoring hazard reports ultimately results in substantial relocation charges, responsiveness tends to improve dramatically - if you know what I mean.

As attachment contracts with phone and cable companies expire, use the renewal as an opportunity to strengthen your contractual position for dealing with uncorrected clearance problems or other hazards. Have legal counsel modify the wording in the new agreements that gives your cooperative wide latitude in dealing with slow responders. Some cooperatives even go so far as to offer either rebates or surcharges on attachment fees based, at least in part, on timely correction of clearance problems that the cooperative reports. Granted, it requires an extra effort to track and grade this kind of performance but, if you have the manpower to do so, you might find that the old “carrot verses the stick” approach is still relevant.

Finally, don’t assume that the cable and phone companies do a good job teaching their employees about clearance requirements. If you think that I’m being a little harsh in that statement, I respond simply by asking you to take a short ride on your own system and see if you don’t reach the same conclusion. Ironically, based on our experience from seeing claims from all over the country, it is usually the cable or phone company employee who winds up getting hurt from line contacts due to bad clearances - yet it’s the coop that usually gets sued, even if it was the underbuilt owner that created the clearance problem in the first place!

You may not like it but, as the owner of the “potentially hazardous instrumentality,” catastrophic civil claims from injured cable or telephone workers (or their families) attributable to inadequate clearances most likely can and will wind up at your doorstep. As such, its just good business to look for opportunities to create and share training programs on clearance problems (and other underbuilt hazard conditions) with those companies using your poles.

About now I am sure that more than a few of you are probability saying, “But can’t the cooperative get sued if we provide that kind of training and someone ultimately winds up getting hurt?” The honest answer to that question is yes, you might. However, if you’re going to let that stop you then I’m afraid that you’re missing the bigger picture, which is, if someone gets hurt and inadequate clearances are present then the cooperative is almost certainly going to get sued anyway, regardless of who created the clearance problem in the first place. You might as well do something proactive now to try to help those other companies prevent such accidents in the first place.

The bottom line is that underbuilt clearance problems are like any other issue impacting your organization. They need to be monitored and managed effectively if you want to reduce the chance that they’ll contribute to accidents or mishaps.