OPD Board Discusses Safety Matters

By VERNON ROBISON

Moapa Valley Progress

Safety was a main topic of discussion for the Overton Power District (OPD) Board of Trustees during its monthly meeting held in Overton on Wednesday last week.

The meeting began with a heartbreaker when OPD Operational Manager Bruce Hughes announced to the board that the district’s long-standing perfect safety record had come to an end last month.
Hughes explained that the district had maintained a perfect record of no lost-time accidents on the job for nearly ten years. A lost time claim is created when a worker suffers a work-related injury resulting in being off work past the day of the accident.

The perfect record came to an end, however, on July 15 when an incident occurred where an OPD employee suffered a broken rib. The district would have reached the ten year mark in early October this year.

Ironically, Hughes had been planning to make a presentation to the board of a special award bestowed by Federated Insurance, the district’s insurer. The award had specifically acknowledged OPD staff for its outstanding safety record over so many years. Unfortunately, the accident had occurred before the award could be presented.

OPD General Manager Mendis Cooper emphasized that the July 14 incident was not due to a breach in any safety protocol or an oversight of policy. Rather it was a freak accident.
“The employee just fell coming down some stairs,” Cooper said. “He felt so bad about it that he had to be coaxed to go to the hospital to receive treatment. But that was the right thing to do.”
Cooper added that the employee ended up being okay and, after treatment, was sent safely home to recover.

In an interview following the meeting, OPD spokesman Keith Buchhalter highlighted the landmark which the district staff had achieved before the incident occurred.
“In what is considered to be in the top ten most dangerous professions, the district staff keeping a safety record for that long is really pretty remarkable,” Buchhalter said. “It just speaks volumes to the culture of safety that has been developed here at OPD. At the end of the day, we always say that the most important thing is that all of our employees go home to their families safe and sound.”

On a separate agenda item, the subject of safety resurfaced when Hughes made a presentation about the possibility of contracting with an outside company to perform safety inspections of OPD vehicles and equipment. Hughes said that he had received information on this service from a company named Irby Tool and Safety.

The OPD is required to have safety inspections done on its vehicles on a regular basis. Inspectors certify OPD trucks, digger derrick rigs and cranes every year, Hughes said. Recently, Irby Tool had been contracted to perform those vehicle inspections.

Hughes also learned that the company could perform inspection services for vital tools and equipment used by OPD linemen; such as hot sticks, grounds, high voltage jumpers and other protective gear.
In the past, the district staff had always performed the smaller equipment inspections in house, Hughes said. But there were advantages to having a specialized company come and perform those inspections, he added.
“They bring a big box trailer and test everything all at once,” Hughes told board members. “They use the most up-to-date modern devices for testing, while our in house testing equipment is somewhat neanderthalic.”

In addition, if the company finds equipment that is in need of repair, they can perform most of those repairs right away on site, Hughes said. Previously, if a tool was deemed to be unsafe or in need of repair, it was set aside and put out of service.
“Irby has the equipment to fix it right then giving a quick turnover to get the equipment back up and running again,” Hughes said.

Cooper added that having the company do the inspections could reduce some significant liability to the district. “The concern is that when we do it ourselves, if someone was injured using that equipment, OSHA would come in and ask who had tested the equipment,” Cooper said. “If the answer is that we did it ourselves, then that might open us up to additional liability as opposed to having an expert company that has done those tests.”

Board members instructed Hughes to put together a contract which they might review at their next meeting for possible approval.