NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Randy Nicholls, Montana Power Company
MR. JANOWITZ: Thanks, Fran. Our next speaker is Randy Nicholls. He's an Industrial Hygienist with Montana Power Company. He's a certified Industrial Hygienist with over 18 years of experience in the safety and health business. Randy.
MR. NICHOLLS: Thank you. I put up my address, and phone number and E-mail address in case you want to get in touch with me after the presentation. A couple of observations. The more you see the presentations, the more you realize your program starts to look a lot like other peoples' programs, and we experience much the same problems.
I've got essentially three objectives in my presentation. First, to give you an overview of our total program, some of the specific highlights and what we think are unique features to our program and some of the results and lessons that we've learned.
We started in 1991, and this was actually before I even worked for the utility side of the company. We partnered with Montana State University right at the beginning of the program and developed a three point strategy.
First, develop internal expertise to be able to deal with ergonomic issues. Secondly, and I think just about everybody has brought this up, you have to develop an employee awareness to ergonomic related issues. And thirdly, we felt there was a need for some research and development to find solutions to problems in the utility sector. By the way, we're a combination gas and electric utility.
To develop the internal expertise, we had our company field safety directors and our facilities dept. that deal with office furniture attend a day and half workshop that was put on by the university back in '92. This slide is just kind of a chronology. In 1995, the company hired its first industrial hygienist. Actually, the program had kind of stalled, and I think we've picked it up and got it going back in a good direction.
In the utility business, traditionally, safety and health people have been brought up through the ranks and a lot of them through the craft ranks. We've started to move away from that a little bit. We're requiring all of our safety directors to attain an Associates of Science degree in safety and health.
We are fortunate in Montana that we do have a four year degree program offered within the university system. They can even obtain a Masters in industrial hygiene as well. So we feel that it's critical to get some credibility and some expertise, not only experience-wise, but educational-wise for the people to lead the internal effort.
Probably in February or March this year, we plan another workshop. This is going to be an eight hour, more of an advanced workshop for this same group. And we plan to focus more on field applications and assessment tools so that we can, in the future, start doing more actual field observation assessments.
On the employee awareness side, we had awareness training back in '93. It was a two-hour session. Our message here was instructing employees how ergonomic principles can apply to their daily work, and then the empowerment word was thrown out at that time to say, yes, the company wants you to look at your job, and we are empowering you to make modifications within your realm of influence. So that was the first effort there. We keep that in front of the employee.
We, like many other utilities, have an annual -- we call them Employee Safety and Health Seminars, and we include an ergonomic component to that presentation. Typically, this is in the form of retraining on lifting, updates on our research activities, new tools, et cetera.
This, risk versus load profile chart has been a component of our lifting training over the years, and we really have made some headway in this regard. People do now understand that when you start lifting things over 70 pounds, you are starting to go into a higher risk category here. And we think that has been effective based on the reduction in lower back injuries in the company.
The third element of our strategy is the research and development. The first study that we conducted is what we call the Crimping Tool Study. Fran has already shown you a crimping tool. I'm sure you're all aware of what that involves. Here's a picture of a lineman using a manual crimping tool to connect conductors. We took that tool into the lab at MSU and did four studies. Then we brought that information back to the crafts.
This is really kind of hard to see. This is a chart comparing the force over here in pounds, and this is time down here of two different types of connectors, same size wire. You can't quite see the graph, but it basically goes like that. Same size wire, two different connectors, a 508 versus a 502, and you can see the force is considerably more, almost double for the 508 versus the 502.
And people say, well, why do you even use the 508 or why do they make two different types? Well, there's some cross-over there that in many applications, the 502 can be substituted for the 508 and make an effective connection. The point here was we brought this back to the work force and said, look, there are some things out there that you can do to influence the amount of stress you're putting on yourself.
We also examined the inner jaw and outer jaw of this crimping tool. As you know, most of these tools can be fitted with two different size dies at once, supposedly to help productivity because you don't have to change dies. We found through this study that the force requirement on the outer jaw, again, the graph line is pretty thin, is considerably more. Basically, the conclusion of this was don't use the outer jaw. Change dies. Only use the inner jaw.
So MSU went ahead and developed what was called the stress index, and we kind of carried this theme, as you'll see, through a lot of our ergonomic related research. The red, yellow, green zone -- green being the least stressful, red being the very stressful. What this equates to is at our stress index of 1.0, that is equal to the maximum strength of 20 percent of the male population. Right here is 50 percent strength, max strength of 50 percent of the male population.
So MSU put together a matrix which rated various combinations, squeeze on combinations, and you can see here in this column, they were into the red zone with those types of connection combinations. And again, the message was brought back to the line worker that, look, you can influence this. Fortunately, technology had been cruising along quite nicely and a battery powered crimping tool was developed.
This is a battery powered crimping tool. Fran showed the hydraulic version, which is quite cumbersome. In fact, if you've looked at crimping tools of this type two years ago, look at them again. Within two years, they've shrunk considerably in size. They've made a lot of improvements in battery powered crimping tools. We don't expect ever to get completely rid of manual crimping, however, we just finished a program up in '96 to get battery operated crimping tools in all of our operating divisions. These were purchased with money that was saved from workers' compensation.
I'll go into that in a little more detail, but we returned about $120,000 back to the operating units that we saved in 1995 on workers' comp cost, and we earmarked that money for these types of purchases. In fact, we developed a hit list that they pretty much had to stay within. The hit list was developed from a field survey done in 1995. As I said, I'll elaborate on that a little bit more here in a minute.
Okay. The next effort was our ground rod driver study. We analyzed accident data over a five year period and were very confident that this is a low number. We felt there were more accidents attributed to the use of these manual ground rod drivers, but we couldn't make the connection through the accident reports. But a fairly high severity was involved in these types of accidents, 71 lost days, 119 restricted duty days cost of about $21,000.
For those of you unfamiliar with these devices, they're similar to what Fran showed for driving the lead detection probes. These things have work written all over them. The alternative --- a percussion tool that has an adapter, to drive the ten foot, half inch diameter ground rod. We talked about acceptance. Initially there was quite a bit of resistance to using this tool by the work force.
But fortunately, when we distributed the workers' comp money many of these devices were purchased. Also, there was kind of a domino effect. One of our operating divisions had already gone to electric ground rod drivers, and then word of mouth did the rest on the acceptance side. So now, we've pretty much eliminated manual ground rod drivers in our company. And we've eliminated accidents and injuries from manual ground rod driving. So this is another, what we feel, is a success story.
This is what we call the body map survey. And this is what we hope will be a pretty good assessment tool. Essentially, what happens here is you distribute a form that has the body map on it, and you survey the worker population. It's a self-report tool, and they basically rate their discomfort level by body part. For each body part, they rate the frequency of discomfort on a numeric scale, and they rate the severity of discomfort on a numeric scale. Then that data is input into a software program that we helped fund and develop through MSU.
Here's our color coded, easy to understand, scheme. The initial research effort on this was to determine if this tool could predict who would go to the doctor for MSD treatment. The result was that with an 81.5 percent accuracy, it could predict who would end up going for medical treatment for an MSD. That was the initial effort, and that was actually before I became associated with this product. We did a body map survey in 1993 across the company. We did a follow up in '95. We're in the process now of developing a comparative output from this program.
I don't have slides of the output, because we're still developing it. But essentially what it will do is it will tell you by body part, by department or job classification, however you want to query the thing, who has gone more to the green or who has gone more to the red. On an initial survey basis, we're confident it will show you if you have hot spots and may direct your intervention efforts. We hope to develop this product and put it on the market by the end of '97. So we think this could be another valuable tool in the ergonomics bag of tools.
Other activities: We've got a computer ergonomics program. Consists primarily of workstation evaluations. We have just recently put some alarm clock software onto various computers. We're finding that's a pretty effective item. These are computer programs that pop up an exercise graphic after so many mouse strokes or keyboard strokes. And that in conjunction with a properly designed workstation, is providing some success in that area.
Stretching programs: We have those. We have a fairly good participation rate, but they're not mandatory across the company.
You need an avenue for employee input, to bring issues, ergonomic and otherwise, to management. To accomplish this, we have a safety committee system throughout the company. In fact, Montana's a little unique in that regard, I think. They passed a state law that requires companies to have joint labor management safety committees.
Now, as I said, in 1995, we did do a field study, and we wanted to make sure that we were looking at the right job classifications. So we did a quick analysis.
In fact, in our company, the line worker category over the five year period of '90 to '95, experienced the highest level of MSD's. When turned into an incident rate, linemen are not the highest, but they're second. We excluded the mechanics, because they were in the steam plants, and they were not part of this study. We included the gas trades, because we were in the field anyway.
Okay. Just quickly, I'll run through some of the practical things. We came up with a device similar to a conduit bender. It's a wire bender for bending conductors in the boxes and transformers. It adds a mechanical advantage, rather than just doing it strictly by hand. Again, these are on the market, but this was something that was identified.
Instead of kneeling at a pad mount transformer, this is a tool box stool. This individual made his own, but you can purchase them at K-Mart stores and Wal-Mart stores.
Gas service trucks: We're now attempting to get all of our little platforms back there height adjustable. We felt that would help posture.
Rehandling of material. We're trying to get rid of this scenario and get dedicated cable trailers so we aren't rehandling material.
We have the same meter reader issue.
Quickly, future projects. We've got a pole climbing study is about to start. We want to expand into generation facilities, do more field assessments. We've set up a pole in the lab, Human Factors Lab in MSU, and we're doing some things there starting in '97.
Results: We've reduced lower back injuries 57 percent. However, extremity injuries have increased. We think that's a reporting thing, awareness thing. We're still implementing many items and anticipate that the results will come more over the next few years.
And finally, to wrap it up, problem fixes equal dollars. Be prepared to spend the money before you identify the problem. Otherwise, it's a bomber. It's a morale buster. In our case, tying ergonomics to continuous improvement type of thinking was key to getting it accepted both on the management side and the labor side. In other words, this is improving the company. It's improving working conditions. It's a win/win deal.
Changes are measured better in years. A long and winding road was mentioned this morning, and I think it's going to wind a little further. This stuff takes time.
Keep the program visible but don't overdo it. We were actually told that our work force was tired of hearing that their mean age was 41 years old, and they were falling apart from the work they've done for the last 20 years. It's true. So we had to kind of cool it on certain aspects of that.
I would like to thank Dr. Robert Marley (sic) from MSU. He's our research partner in this effort, and by the way, the body map survey has been published in "International Journal of Ergonomics." If you're interested in the specifics of that, we can provide you with the locations where those studies have been published.
Thank you very much.
