Safety culture is what people do when nobody’s looking.
That’s according to Joe Forline, senior vice president of gas for California’s Pacific Gas & Electric Corporation. “It’s demonstrated through a passion for training, for following procedures and for keeping your co-workers safe,” he added. “A big part of it is engaging and empowering every worker to take ownership for safety, with leadership providing the support they need.”
How leaders provide that support is constantly evolving as they respond to emerging hardware, increasingly powerful software applications, a regular flow of new employees, and the overarching desire for a safe today and an even safer tomorrow.
“When we think about safety culture and where we want to take the natural gas business, we boil it down to ‘zerozero-zero,’” said Holly Bowers, vice president for gas engineering and supply at Michigan’s Consumers Energy. “We want zero injuries, zero system incidents and zero violations. To make that happen, we believe in a strong culture that unites both engineering and operations and ensures that we’re aligned and aware of the critical concerns when it comes to the safety of the system, our co-workers and our business.”
To improve awareness of those critical safety concerns, Consumers Energy is transitioning to an operations-wide “probabilistic” risk model. The new model will analyze data gathered internally and from across the industry to predict where the next risk on the system is likely to occur. “We then will be able to look across all of our asset classes and determine where to focus our attention to improve safety,” Bowers said.
The utility converted its transmission system to the new model in 2023. This year, the focus is on the gas storage system, with distribution and compression assets to follow.
“Even though we have only completed the transmission system risk-model conversion, it already has been an eye opener,” Bowers said. “We are seeing areas where we can place additional controls to ensure system safety, such as increased damage-prevention activities or increased patrols.”
At PG&E, regular, focused reviews of existing processes are helping to highlight paths to safety improvement. “Every other year, we work through the National Safety Council’s Safety Barometer survey,” said Chief Safety Officer Matt Hayes. “In the off years, we do internal safety-culture assessments. When we see specific recommendations come through, or if we have any variance or statistically significant scores, we develop action plans for improvement.”
One of those improvements is bringing in “culture coaches” to further strengthen the utility’s safety culture. “We’ve identified some retired safety leaders who are respected in natural gas or electric who will come in and help partner with our middlemanagement team to figure out what their challenges are and how we can best align and support them,” Hayes said. “We’re working to explore safety from the top down, the bottom up and everyone in between.”
An all-encompassing approach helps to instill a safety-culture mindset across every department and every position, inspiring teams that work cooperatively to put safety first—even if those teams are not technically employees. For example, Florida’s TECO Peoples Gas hosts a biennial Contractor Safety Summit to ensure its third-party contractors are part of the company’s safety culture. The summit offers discussions, seminar presentations and keynote speeches that highlight the importance of safety for Peoples Gas partners and their communities.
“Beyond the Safety Summit, we have worked to grow our contractor relationships by treating our contractors just as we treat our team members,” said Timothy O’Connor, vice president of safety, operations and sustainability. “From a safety perspective, this means sharing best practices and lessons learned, cooperatively reducing risk at job sites through pre-job safety assessments and risk reviews, and ongoing quarterly meetings to review our performance and align future plans. Our contractors may not have the same logo on their shirts as our own team members, but when it comes to safety, we are on the same team with the same objectives.”
While safety is paramount for employees in every position, the possibility for injury increases for those workers who operate vehicles and other machinery, navigate unfamiliar roads and terrain, manage potentially dangerous situations, control traffic or oversee multiple response teams. This is leading utilities to focus on what happens before the actual work begins.
“We take the time to identify all of the potential hazards before we start to work,” said Eric Kozak, vice president of gas operations for Ameren Illinois. Each pre-work job briefing is “a conversation that documents the hazards, explains how the crew will mitigate them and clarifies who is responsible for what,” he explained.
Ameren Illinois has established a similar pre-work “stop and assess” practice specifically for responding to blowing-gas situations. “We came up with the acronym GAS, which stands for ‘Go. Assess. Shut down,’” Kozak said. “When you get the gas-leak call, you drop everything and go. When you get there, assess the situation before you act. People often want to go immediately into shutdown mode, but that can create problems. We want them to assess first, which means you’re checking for migration, you understand the whole scene, traffic control is taken care of in case you need to evacuate, and so on. We also have implemented two-person responses on all our blowing-gas calls. That way, one person can perhaps work on the shutting down and the other person can continue to assess.”
At Ameren Illinois, work in the field is always preceded by an assessment of potential hazards.
PHOTO COURTESY OF AMEREN ILLINOIS
While it is essential to communicate your safety message to everyone in your company, it is also beneficial to spread the word beyond your team members, creating “stakeholder engagement,” said Timothy O’Connor, vice president of safety, operations and sustainability at TECO Peoples Gas.. “That means we communicate frequently about natural gas safety, storm preparedness and safety, pipeline awareness and damage prevention.”
That engagement caught the attention of one of the planners of the Veterans Affairs VISN 8 High Reliability project who was preparing a safety-related presentation in Tampa, Florida, for VA Sunshine Healthcare Network facility leads.
“Their goal of reducing incidents across team members and patients is similar to ours across our team members, customers and the general public,” O’Connor said. “So, we planned an event where their team visited our state-of-the-art GasWorX Training Facility, and we shared a high-level summary of our SMS [safety management systems] journey and goals.”
The event provided an opportunity for VA representatives from Florida, Georgia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands to see firsthand the TECO Peoples Gas processes, team structures and innovative practices that could be adapted and applied across multiple industries.
Vice President of Pipeline Safety and Regulatory Affairs Luke Buzard said, “I am so proud of opportunities like this where we can share how we live our commitment to safety every day. It’s a great thing to be known for.”
Of course, adding safety steps in the field will likely increase time spent on the job. But it’s critical that team members don’t consider this time wasted. “It can be a challenge to balance productivity and safety,” Kozak admitted. “But we don’t want anybody cutting corners when it comes to safety. If it takes three hours to set up to do a 15-minute job safely, then it’s a three-hour-and-15- minute job.”
A host of technologies—some mature, some cutting-edge—are in use to support safer field work.
“We have been expanding our advanced methane-detection program over the last few years,” said Bowers. “We are using a vehicle-based detection system. We’re now out surveying our system across Michigan to pinpoint emissions and target those locations that are identified as potentially more hazardous. It’s been very beneficial for us to have a clearer picture of the different emissions we have across our system so we can better determine whether our response is to enhance an existing safety feature or perform a replacement or repair to the system.”
Similarly, TECO Peoples Gas has three vehicles in its fleet outfitted with advanced leak-detection technology. “Due to the success of the vehicle-based technology, we are currently piloting a hand-held version,” O’Connor said. “The handheld device can detect small emissions that could go unnoticed by standard leakdetection equipment.”
Consumers Energy is using virtual reality to help prepare workers to be safe and successful in the field, according to Director of Gas Operations Rochelle Vagnetti.
“We are utilizing VR headset technology in operator qualification for performance-based evaluations,” Vagnetti said. “When we adopted the ASME B31Q qualification programs for pipeline personnel, we were challenged with the pigging qualification—specifically the in-service pigging qualification. How do we conduct a performancebased evaluation safely and appropriately? We got creative and found a vendor who developed a performance-based evaluation in a virtualreality world.
“The VR simulation is based on one of our launching and receiving stations. Because it is virtual, it allows the employee to ‘fail safely’; if they make a mistake, no one gets hurt. We can also use VR to train and evaluate for inside and outside leak investigation, and we are exploring other areas to utilize the technology. There is a great deal of potential with VR simulations.”
At Ameren Illinois, recent innovations are helping to make the company’s 800,000 installed advanced metering infrastructure smart meters even smarter—and the data they provide even more valuable. As a result, Ameren Illinois’ Scott Hixson, Scott Lithgow and Jeff Berry were honored with the American Gas Association’s 2024 Research and Innovation Award.
Ameren discovered occasional anomalies in meter data being collected that suggested potential safety issues. “For example, maybe people are moving appliances in their homes, or the copper piping gets stolen from a vacant house, and the result is an open line and a spinning meter,” Kozak said. “Every time we identified one of those events, we would give the data to the analytics team so they could develop an algorithm that would be able to pinpoint abnormal usage.”
As the data grew, the algorithm—developed in-house as the AMI Analytics Process Improvement initiative—learned. “We’ve been able to identify cases where people have had an open fuel line and weren’t aware of it,” added Kozak. “We were able to go to the site and shut it down before anything happened.”
The AGA Research and Innovation Award is presented to an individual, group or company that has made an outstanding contribution to improving natural gas system safety, delivery, design, construction, operation, maintenance, efficiency or environmental footprint through research and/or innovation. In the words of the award committee, the AMI Analytics Process Improvement initiative by the Ameren Illinois team yielded results that were “potentially lifesaving and provided unforeseen opportunities to inform customers of anomalous gas usage due to circumstances unrelated to gas leaks. This initiative is a testament to the effective collaboration between Ameren Illinois employees focused on enhancing safety.”
“If you are looking to be the best, you need to look outside,” Forline advised. “But the good news is that the gas industry is a sharing industry. If you’re a leader or a manager in a gas company, participate in the AGA Best Practices roundtable by sharing your data, attending the meetings and reviewing the reports. AGA also has a Peer Review process, where you can pick a process—damage prevention, pipeline safety management systems or employee safety programs, for example—and representatives from other companies will come on-site and review your practices. We schedule at least two of those a year. And we send our leaders out to assess other companies, which can be a great learning experience.”
In addition, Bowers added, “Building partnerships across your company—whether that means union and management or engineering and operations or whatever—is essential to move the safety culture forward. We need to be constantly looking for the next area to improve, while ensuring that everybody understands why it is so important that safety is at the core of what we do every single day. It isn’t tacked on. It is something that drives us, because that’s who we are, how we operate, and how we value our co-workers, our communities and our customers. Ensure you have built the kind of strong relationships that support this kind of culture.
“Because, at the end of the day, those relationships help to ensure that everybody has a voice at the table and is contributing to the conversation.”