DISPLAY ON ALL RELEVANT HSE NOTICEBOARDS

SAFETY BRIEFING NOTE–222017

HV Maintenance – how a straight forward job can go wrong

1.Background

An Electrical Supervisor had a small team of engineers at MOD Shoebury. He failed to properly brief his colleagues and, as a result, his two co-workers were hit by huge electrical shocks.

The Supervisor, along with the two other employees of electrical engineering company SSE, were undertaking routine high-voltage maintenance work on a substation. The base has a large electrical grid owned by the MOD, but run by Qinetiq who in turn sub-contracted the maintenance to SSE.

The accident occurred when work began on a cable now known obviously to have been live.

The Electrical Supervisor had been briefed by staff from Qinetiq who explained exactly what had to be done. There should have been no confusion as to what was live and what was not. The Electrical Supervisor was in and out of the switch room while the two other men started work on what they believed to be isolated cables without having been briefed.

One went to check a cable by giving it a tug and as he did so, there was a huge bang and flash. One of the men described how his clothes were on fire as he ran out of the substation. The other man described how his jacket melted. They found a tap and stayed under it until emergency services arrived.

Both men who were in their 30s were rushed to a specialist burn unit in a serious condition.

2.Lesson Learnt

The main lesson here is to note the emphasis and importance attached to the briefing we give our contractors. This, coupled with the clear labelling of adjacent live areas with danger signs, forms a significant part of the safe systems of work we implement on HV (and LV) shutdowns.

We often spend a lot of effort (and rightly so) on the design of a safety programme up front, but this just goes to prove that the pre-planning counts for nothing if the works are not communicated and supervised correctly at the time and point of works.

Remember the five rules for HV working

•Risk Assessment & Method Statement/Switching programme

•Isolate

•Prove Dead

•Earth

•Issue PTW at the point of work (this will also include a going through of the precautions taken, the methods used and the pointing out of adjacent live equipment to the working party)

Allison Connick, MSc, CMIOSH, IIRSM, MRSH, FCMI

National Director of HS&E

Prepared by / Approved by / Issue Date / Alert Ref No / Source / Attachments / Pages
A Connick, National Director of HS&E / A Connick, National Director HSE / 02nd June 2017 / 222017 / Internal / No / 1 of 2