Page 8 - Arkansas

The Swiss Cheese
Marcus Bartholomew
TN811 Damage Prevention Liaison
Model
Being new to the utility industry and damage prevention, there is one word I hear more than any other, no matter where I am, who I am talking to, or what we are talking about: “Safety”.
In my prior career in law enforcement, I had the opportunity to work in
an Air Operations Unit as a “flight officer”. Obtaining the position just
a few months after the terror attacks
of September 11, 2001, my job was to assist an officer/pilot in a small, single- engine fixed-wing Cessna 206 airplane. Prior to 9/11, the position involved assisting with navigation to various calls for service, working multiple radio
systems, enforcing traffic violations and performing suspect and missing person searches. The mission had immediately changed to patrolling the state’s
power utility grid and sub-stations for suspicious activity, bridge and highway structure checks and flying over miles of open aqueducts, dams, and other public water sources.
At the time, I was not and had never been a pilot. I knew nothing about aircraft or aviation. One of the most interesting parts of my training revolved around preventing aviation accidents and disasters and issues surrounding “human error”.
In 1998, Galaxy Scientific Corporation
Advanced Information Technology Division out of Atlanta, Georgia,
prepared a paper for the Federal Aviation Commission titled, “Human Factors Guide for Aviation Maintenance” and under a chapter discussing “Human Error”, stated the following:
“Another basic principle of error management is that the best people can sometimes make the worst mistakes. Being trained for the job, being skilled and experienced reduces the absolute rate of errors, but it does not eliminate them entirely... Errors are consequences rather than causes. They are the product of many interacting factors: personal, task- related, situational and systemic.”
6 • Arkansas 811 Magazine 2024, Issue 3