Pam Deutsch, Puget Sound Power and Light
MR. JANOWITZ: Let me begin by introducing Pam. She's a Senior Industrial Hygienist for Puget Sound Power and Light, and has been with the company for almost five years. Prior to her current position, she was an Industrial Hygiene Compliance Inspector for the State of Washington. Prior to that, she was an Ergonomics Consultant with HAZCON, a private consulting firm. Pam received her Masters of Science degree from the University of Washington in 1990. Prior to that, a Bachelor of Arts degree from Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana in 1983. Without further ado, Pam Deutsch.
MS. DEUTSCH: Good afternoon. As Ira mentioned, things have been happening in the Northwest, and I'm just glad that I'm even able to attend the conference today. I appreciate being given the opportunity to talk about efforts that our company has taken in the last year in expanding our ergonomics program from our office environments out to our operations or field employees.
In the last couple of weeks in Washington State a state of emergency has been declared in seven out of the nine counties that we serve. The counties have either been under water, under mud or under fallen trees, and I've actually been working an 18 hours on, 6 hours off shift, the 18 hours being on during the night. So it's a little strange to be awake at this time of the day.
This is what happened to us in the last 48 hours. This is our Snoqualmie Falls hydroelectric project. It looked like this one day, and within 48 hours later, we had flooding. We had an arctic express followed by a pineapple express during the course of a week. The temperature increased about 30 degrees.
Puget Power is the largest private utility in Washington State, and it's the descendent of more than 150 little companies that first started providing electric power in 1866. We're about to get bigger in this world of energy industry deregulation. Any utilities are considering merging or have already merged with another utility. We're about to merge with Washington Natural Gas. After the merger, we're going to have about 3,000 employees and over 2 million customers.
We live and work in a beautiful part of the country, as you can see from these slides. This is one of the reasons that we're willing to put up with a little bad weather every once in a while.
Our facilities are located in nine counties in Washington, and we're part-owners of a coal-fired plant in Montana. Our operating headquarters have what are called Line crews, Project Center crews, New Business crews and Wire crews working out of them. Our Line Worker crews do all of the maintenance work on our system. So doing tasks that would include things like climbing poles, using hot sticks, climbing up an H-frame structure, working out of a bucket truck and working with tools.
Our Project Center crew does all of the new transmission line construction, and the tasks that they're involved in include digging structures for footing placement of poles and lifting construction material.
Our New Business crews do all of the new distribution work. So this is mostly underground work. Doing tasks that include digging trenches and installing underground cable.
And then we have something that's relatively unusual for a utility. We have a wire crew that does all of our substation work, and that's all they do. They do a lot of loading and unloading equipment as they construct and maintain a substation. So as you can see from the slides that I've showed, our field employees are exposed to many awkward postures, a lot of forward bending work and excessive force. They're constantly being asked to lift things that folks shouldn't be asked to lift, repetitiveness of tasks, temperature extremes, awkward postures combined with excessive force, and fatigue.
This is the safety and health organizational chart for the company. And you can see we have a number of vice presidents along with our human resources director serving on the Executive Safety Review Committee that the safety department reports directly into. Joint labor and management safety committees are mandatory in Washington State, and we have more than 50 of those functioning around the company for each individual area in the company.
What we've found in the last year, year and a half is that almost half of our workers' compensation claims were related to ergonomics issues. This would include both over-exertion and some slips and trips. The claims were found to be about 15 percent of them from an office environment, and 85 percent of them were coming from our field employees. Fifty-two percent of the claims were related to back injuries, 14 percent were related to shoulder injuries, and 13 percent were related to hand-wrist injuries. The ergonomics claims accounted for 61 percent of our workers' compensation costs which are over $500,000 a year in direct costs.
Back in 1991, Puget Power hired an outside consultant to train several in-house employees on the principles of ergonomics and how to conduct workplace assessments. This was done just for the office environment, and it was in response to the growing number of carpal tunnel syndrome claims. The assessments were conducted when an employee requested it and training was given simultaneous to the assessment.
Training was provided to all of our customer service representatives. These are folks who spend their entire shift on the telephone and computer. The company purchased numerous ergonomics training videos which could be viewed during a safety meeting, but again, these did not relate to our field employees. And so, the field employees found the videos rather useless.
The company began a pilot back injury prevention program involving back belts in 1994 to see if back belts could decrease our injury rate. The program was never completed, and we asked them to discontinue the use of back belts until there was scientific evidence that they work. In 1996, we received approval from our Executive Safety Review Committee to begin providing ergonomics training to the field employees. Each one of our operating headquarters has a "Safety Day," which is an entire day that's devoted to safety training for the employees at that facility.
We hired outside consultants to assist us with the training. One of the consultants was a physical therapist, one was an ergonomist, and one was an engineer. We ended up calling the module back injury prevention, because we were told by our safety coordinators that we'd have a hard time selling it if we called it ergonomics. The challenge we were told we had to overcome was that our field employees saw ergonomics as being for the "office girls".
So at each one of the Safety Days, we spend about half an hour inside going through a slide presentation, discussing what the ergonomics risk factors are, and alternatives to how they might do their work, recognizing that, of course, there's an awful lot that can't be changed about what they have to do.
We then head out to the field and spend a half an hour with the employees going through some of their routine tasks and using the principles they've just heard about such as technique for shoveling. Alternatives that they could consider as they're shoveling, because our folks do so much shoveling.
The technique for lifting compressed gas cylinders. We've actually had a number of back injuries from folks having to lift these things up and then placing them up at about a four foot high level.
Taking ladders on and off of rigs have caused a number of injuries to folks simply because there was enough force coming with the ladder that forced them off of the back of the rig, or simply just a cumulative trauma back injury. So we covered alternative techiques for this task.
Technique for lifting a box of insulators. Again, just covering alternatives for how they might normally do things. This gentleman is about six foot six, and I'm not going to even guess his weight. When we asked him the first time to pick up the box, he simply did a heavy weight lifters clean and jerk lift. We talked with him about some alternatives of how he could actually do that lift in the future.
We spent a lot of time with them talking about how to get in and out of the rigs. And one of the things we discovered was that our rigs are not designed consistently. The rigs first come into our fleet facility, and then fleet tailors it according to what the facility that purchased it asked them to do. So some of them have added on handles to the left or right of the door. You can see this gentleman's about to put his hand on it and use it for getting into the rig.
Some of the trucks don't have that additional handle. The rigs have different configurations of steps for getting in and out of them. We realize some people were literally having to vault themselves into the rigs. And some of them had that additional step that was real useful.
We had them go through the process of getting in and out of the bucket. That's one of the worse contortion processes that I see folks having to do. Again, no consistency in our bucket design. Some of them had little side doors that folks would have to bend down and over and get into. Some of them were made out of cloth material like this particular one. The other thing that we spent a lot of time talking about was lifting our vault lids. We've had lots of back injuries with lifting vault lids and so we wanted to give them some alternative ways to think about doing that task.
We're in the process of developing an ergonomics program, and we're basing it on the guidelines booklet that was developed by the State of Washington. We're creating an ergonomics task force that will have representation from all the appropriate areas in the company.
We're going to continue to train our Safety Coordinators on the principles of ergonomics in order to use their eyes and ears out in the field.
We're going to be training the Safety Committees on the principles of ergonomics and how they can actually work to solve situations they identify.
We will be training our tools committees, because each one of the areas in the company has a tool committee specifically tasked with looking at the tools that their folks work with. We'd like to be able to utilize them for coming up with solutions with issues that we or they identify.
One of the tools that we've been able to identify for redesign in the last couple of years was the heavy, hand-held, cumbersome computer unit the meter readers were using to do their meter reading. We found that there were companies actually were manufacturing smaller units, so less force was required for holding the unit. We also purchased holsters so after they're done with reading, they can holster the unit and not have to hang onto it through the course of the day.
One of the issues that we identified during the course of the Safety Days was that we had folks working with vibrating tools, including jack hammers; and nobody had ever talked about ways to protect their hands and wrists in the process of using those tools. We are going through the process of looking at some anti-vibration gloves to determine if something like that might help us prevent those kind of injuries.
We also identified the need for a different tool for lifting the compressed gas cylinders. That was one where the worker having to lift back and then put it up at a four foot high level. We identified that there is a tool, something they can clamp around each side and then they can actually lift up the cylinder with handles. But when they're getting into the space where they need to place the cylinder, there's not enough clearance to use that tool. So nobody uses it. So we need to design another tool that would work for that task.
We also identified the need to redesign the vault lid lifter tool that we have. And I'm sorry, I don't have a picture of this tool. It's basically a three foot long metal rod with a little hook on the end and then two little hook handles so that these folks are only able to use two fingers to lift a vault lid. Sometimes the force involved in the vault lids themselves can weigh up to 120 pounds. And then the impaction of being packed into the ground, the force that these folks are having to use, is pretty phenomenal.
So we're hoping to design a couple of different heights of the tool, because right now it's a one size fits all, and we'd like to create a different handle that could actually have a different grasp to permit better body mechanics.
We've also been working with our facilities staff on furniture and equipment design and purchase. And we're going to be training them on the principles of ergonomics. We'll also be training our work practices and standards group in order to utilize their expertise in creating solutions to work practice problems.
We are also considering a company-wide stretching program. Several areas in the company historically have had stretching programs which have fallen by the wayside for one reason or another. Either there was no management support or employees no longer felt motivated to actually lead the stretching exercises.
The company that we're merging with, Washington Natural Gas, has exercise facilities at each of their main headquarters. And so, there's discussion now about what happens when we become a merged company, the possibility of expanding that exercise program into more of our facilities so that more people have access to it.
I can't really talk about what the success has been other than antidotally from taking our Safety Days and incorporating an ergonomics training module. Antidotally, it's been very well received. Field employees don't seem to feel like ergonomics is just for "office girls" anymore, which is a major hurdle to have gotten over. We're actually getting calls from our field employees asking for individual ergonomic assessments where we can go out there and work with them on particular issues. We've had a number of line men approach us and say, you know, I've got carpal tunnel syndrome or I've had release surgery.
And so, this is pretty new, because for those of you who don't know, utilities line men see themselves as somewhere above God, and then there's God, and then there's the rest of us normal human beings. Line men do not typically talk about any problems or issues they might be having. So it's a pretty major breakthrough for us to have them volunteering information about ergonomics injuries. One of the things that I've seen in this last year unfortunately, but probably not related to implementing field ergonomics training, is a huge increase in our recordable reportable and time lost injuries.
Our feeling is that this relates more to our merger activities and the folks that are feeling disengaged and distracted. We're hoping that after that process ends, we'll actually start seeing a decrease in our lost time injuries, and hopefully a substantial decrease in our back injuries. So, thank you.
