What Did You Choose Today?

By: Noah Beveridge, Safety Team Leader

Anderson Electric, Inc.

Some studies suggest the average human makes nearly 35,000 choices per day. Those choices lead to outcomes. Most of those outcomes we hope are favorable, but some of those choices can be made in haste, which may lead to poor outcomes. In the field of safety, a poor outcome is never a favorable one.

Workplace safety is rapidly evolving; new technologies are making it safer, new electrical PPE is becoming more comfortable, new tools are reducing soft tissue injuries, and, generally, employees are starting to buy into and help shift safety climates. Employee buy-in is a huge step forward and a trend that is visible each and every day they work without incident. Those days without incident show that they are making the right choices in an effort to return safely to their families at the end of the day.

Trying to implement new PPE is never easy. Supplying a pair of gloves or safety glasses to an employee is easy to do. It’s their choice whether to wear them or not. Don’t get me wrong, most of this PPE comes with the accompanying policy or jobsite requirement, but ultimately, it’s up to each employee to choose to wear them. Accompanying the PPE with useful information helps aid in their decision to wear it, rather than the age old saying ‘because I said so!’. That works with young children but is not an effective answer in a professional setting.

Selecting the proper PPE for performing work on live electrical circuits can be confusing. Different tasks being performed, different voltages, different clearing times, different equipment being worked on; one missed step or wrong calculation can put an employee into the wrong category of PPE, which could result in serious injury or death. When evaluating our electrical PPE policy, we challenged ourselves to help make selecting the proper PPE easier.

An aging fleet of arc rated gear once again had us wondering how we could make selecting the right equipment easier. Enespro’s 40CAL AirLite suits were the clear solution: as light as our aging 10CAL suits while offering our employees protection up to 40CAL. Employees no longer have to wonder if they’ve chosen the correct protection for the task, as the 40CAL AirLite covers all categories of work to be performed.

Comfort, durability, innovation, and excellent product knowledge helped us select Enespro PPE, and because of that we feel our employees are protected when they are asked to perform live electrical work. I hope that our employees never have to experience an arc related event, but if such an event should occur, I’m confident we made the right choice in selecting Enespro PPE to help protect our workforce.