October has arrived, and with it comes the wind, snow, sleet and, of course, ice (at least for those of us in Alberta). While not impossible, digging has become significantly more challenging, and amateur gardeners and semi-professional shrubbery designers have hung up their pruning shears and dirt spades for the season. While professional excavators, pipeliners, and civil engineers continue to sate societies' needs for holes, stuff to put in the holes, and planning out those holes accordingly, everyone else is putting on their woollies and avoiding leaving the house for five to seven months.

Every winter, hundreds of vehicles leave the road and collide with electrical power facilities like power poles and transformers. Knowing what to do could mean the difference between life and death. First, stay calm. Remain inside your vehicle and call for help. Wait in the vehicle until electrical workers arrive and give the all clear. Warn onlookers to stay clear and tell them the ground could be electrified. 

Real world examples of emergency work are repairing a hit and blowing gas line, repairing a broken water main, replacing a broken power line, house fires, etc. Examples of priorities include repair to a slow leaking water main, repair of a sinkhole where the area is safely cordoned off, repair to water service where the affected property has been provided a temporary water supply, etc.

In a NEW EPISODE of The Safety Moment podcast, host Mike Sullivan engages in a discussion with Jason Manning of PelicanCorp, shedding light on the imperative role of damage prevention in the utility sector. The conversation traverses the spectrum of modern technological applications aimed at bolstering safety and operational efficiency within utility environments.

The locate request software in Western Canada is getting a new look! Before You Dig Partners and PelicanCorp developed a two-phase improvement plan to enhance the online locate request form. The first phase of the improvement plan launches on Jan. 24, 2024, and introduces the following features. 

Becoming a registered asset-owner company with Utility Safety Partners starts with reaching out to our member services team to start onboarding. The short, yet thorough, onboarding process provides both the registering facility company and Utility Safety Partners with detailed information pertaining to that company, as well as the proper documentation to have the account set up. This process can seem like a daunting task — but this process has been streamlined to ensure it can be completed efficiently and in a timely manner. It’s simpler than you think and we are here to help!

On February 26-28, 2024, USP will Honour Our History and Embrace Our Future at our 40th Anniversary Celebration and Safety Conference at the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel. Since this is a spooky Halloween edition of our newsletter, it’s only right for us to explore the spooky history of the hotel hosting our conference.  

As we see the last of the baby boomers retiring and the beginning of the exodus of GenX from the workforce, it should change how we structure our organizations for the future. While GenX is responsible for the introduction of the new technologies we take for granted today (personal computers, cell phones, the internet), millennials have been fully immersed in those technologies throughout most of their lives and their expectations about how businesses provide services is vastly different than those of GenX.