Issue link: https://fhpublishing.uberflip.com/i/883776
NETWORK / 16 / OCTOBER 2017 Q: What are they key health and safety challenges at UK Power Networks? Peter Vujanic: We cover a large geographic area, owning and operating a distribution network that serves eight million homes, and covers 30,000 square kilometres. We have 6,000 staff as direct employees, and anything up to 3,000 more contractors working on our behalf on any given day. Our assets are quite literally everywhere – overhead lines, underground cables and substations. Our key risks include working with electricity, because we do a lot of live operations, and working at height. We have around 700,000 wood poles and lattice towers, which our linesmen climb. We also have cable jointers who work on underground cable systems, which means working in excavations and trenches. These cra-smen are o-en required to work on live electricity networks and so need specific skills and competencies to carry out their work safely. There are also several other cra- skills requiring different specialist competencies such as our tree-cutting operatives. They ensure that vegetation is kept clear of our overhead line network to maintain supply reliability. The other major risk is driving. We have a liveried fleet of more than 2,000 vehicles. Our fleet travels around 40 million miles every year. We are proud to be the safest DNO in the industry but we recognise that our biggest threat is complacency, and we are working hard to safeguard against that. Q: What makes a good health and safety culture? PV: The key element is risk management, and having the controls in place to man- age those risks. They have to be rigorous, CYBERHAWK Safeguarding our network Network catches up with Peter Vujanic, head of safety, health and environment at UK Power Networks.