Construction Safety Management in High-Voltage Electrical Engineering Projects: Challenges and Practical Solutions
Keywords:
high-voltage construction, electrical safety, transmission lines, power distribution, electrocution, minimum approach distance, lockout/tagout, grounding, critical controls, construction safety managementAbstract
Background: High-voltage transmission, distribution and substation construction combines lethal electrical energy with lifting, mobile plant, work at height, excavation, traffic and rapidly changing system configurations. Although standards describe individual precautions, serious incidents continue to occur when critical controls are not positively established or verified at the point of work.
Objective: To identify recurrent severe-incident pathways in power-line construction and convert them into a practical project-level safety-management framework for high-voltage electrical engineering projects.
Methods: A retrospective archival study coded 31 publicly available U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) accident investigations from 2019–2024 involving NAICS 237130 power and communication line construction and closely related high-voltage line activities. Cases were purposively selected for sufficient narrative detail and severe outcomes. Event mechanism, fatality status and the primary critical-control family implicated by the documented pathway were coded using an a priori hierarchy informed by OSHA, IEEE, NFPA and construction-safety literature. Descriptive analysis was used; no incidence rates or causal risk estimates were calculated because the sample was not denominator-based.
Results: Twenty-two of 31 investigations (71.0%) were fatal. Electrical-exposure pathways accounted for 21 cases (67.7%) and 16 fatalities; direct electrical contact/arc was the most frequent narrow mechanism (14 cases). The two most frequent critical-control families were isolation/de-energization/test-before-touch (8 cases; 7 fatal) and minimum-approach-distance (MAD), insulating cover-up and conductive-object clearance (8 cases; 6 fatal). Mechanical-energy/rigging/equipment-integrity failures accounted for 6 cases, while mobile-plant/traffic exclusion, grounding/bonding, energized-work/arc-flash, and fall/excavation controls accounted for the remainder.
Conclusion: Severe high-voltage construction events were not confined to PPE failures or individual rule violations. They repeatedly involved breakdowns in energy-state control, approach-path control, work-interface management and field verification. The study proposes a High-Voltage Construction Critical-Control Framework (HV-CCF) that links engineering design, switching and permit-to-work governance, point-of-work proof, active supervision, and an independent energization-readiness gate. This provides owners and contractors with a practical mechanism for managing serious-injury-and-fatality risk across the project lifecycle.
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