The CEA Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) Program is a proactive national initiative focused on ensuring appropriate communication of the Canadian electric utility industry’s performance and leadership commitment to the management of occupational health and safety including advocacy with regulators, national OHS performance reporting and benchmarking, and sharing of best practices. 

 

The CEA OHS Program has over the many decades provided an industry-wide occupational health and safety network dedicated to developing strategic priorities and safety initiatives that improve the overall safety performance in the electric utility industry and facilitates the sharing of general safety system development information, best practices, standards and safety incident related information and lessons learned adding a progressive edge in safety leadership to enhance the industry’s safety management practices.

Click here to view the CEA's 2012 occupational health and safety report, Achieving Excellence in Health and Safety.
 

 

CEA members have developed electrical safety programs that have been proven successful in creating a safe work environment for their employees where serious electrical accidents rarely occur despite the significant amount of live electrical work inherent to the industry. The Canadian electric utility industry is one of the safest maintenance, operation and construction related industries due in a large measure to: the highest level of training; establishment of safe work methods; the sharing and utilization of Industry best practices and engineering and design of the equipment, tools and facilities to allow for multiple layers of safety barriers to effectively control high voltage electrical hazards. The requirements of electrical utilities are distinctly different from general industry. The responsibility for the supply systems includes full safety management of the electricity product. Electric utilities draw upon existing national and international standards, but more importantly, Canadian electric utilities engineer the facilities and safe work procedures to optimally address the risk.  
 

 

In early 2010 the CEA Occupational Health and Safety Task Group supported an initiative in collaboration with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to produce a safety awareness video production to educate law enforcement, fire and EMS on performing their job duties safely around high voltage electrical utility systems. The two primary goals for producing the first responder DVD video production entitled: “Electricity ... The Invisible Killer” are to increase the level of awareness to law enforcement, fire, and paramedics of high voltage electrical equipment and facilities hazards that require additional cautionary measures to be taken when responding to any emergency, and to reduce the number of incidences involving the injury of the first responder when responding to an emergency that involves high voltage electrical hazards.

 

Visit www.electricity.ca/theinvisiblekiller, a dedicated web portal for police, fire and EMS to obtain more information on the DVD.

To order a the DVD please contact Mark Ciufo at ciufo@electricity.ca.