Performing accident investigations will eventually become part of your job duties when you transition into your role as frontline supervisor. As a foreman your only involvement will typically be to provide information if the accident occurred on your job site. In this new role, the most important thing for you to do is to gather the facts, be impartial and understand the process involved when performing this task. You will be involved in investigations that range from minor, minor being on the level of first aid, to catastrophic, a fatality, to property damage, etc. It is imperative that you receive some training or have an experienced supervisor, Human Resources person, or a safety professional provide you with mentoring and coaching in this area, in addition to assisting you during the investigation. Your phone is ringing in the middle of the night, a lineman has been injured on the job. You need to ascertain as much information as possible in a short amount of time.

           Who is calling you? Is it the foreman, Law Enforcement,…? Has the injured party been transported to a medical facility? Do you have a policy manual, or a written list of protocols that need to be implemented? Who do you call? Questions about procedures and protocols should already have been answered prior to you taking on the role as a supervisor, particularly if you are responsible for on-call and emergency outage restoration operations. You should have someone that can assist you in this incident; a representative of the company should be going to the hospital to check on the injured worker. In this case it should be someone who is responsible for workers compensation documentation and can act as a liaison between the injured worker and their family. You might be asking “shouldn’t the line supervisor be going to the hospital to check on the worker?” Again, it depends on the company’s procedures. However, I would advise against that. Your main priority is to go to the job location and meet with the crew. When you were initially contacted you should have talked to the foreman and told him to secure the work location and make it safe, no more work is to be done and you are on your way.

            You’ve arrived at the job; you and the foreman have a brief discussion about the accident, you also discuss the status of the job and if it’s safe to stop work and secure the job till the next day. You gather everyone around for a tailboard and ask how everyone is doing, does anyone need to go home, can they stay and complete the work? The crew might be down two workers, typically you don’t send an injured worker to the hospital alone, another person from the crew will accompany them. You might need to call in additional resources to finish this job. You may have already done that based on a conversation you had with the foreman before you came out to the job.

          There is a lot that needs to be considered when an accident occurs, as a supervisor you will need to know and understand the policies for handling these situations. A lot more paperwork, documentation, investigation work and fact-finding. Take the time to work with your supervisor, human resources and the safety department to ensure that you understand how to properly and effectively deal with these unfortunate situations.