Jim Willis Shares Three Steps to Better Equip You for the Increasingly Complex Challenges that Utility Security Professionals Face
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” ~ Mark Twain.
Mr. Twain’s statement reflects the understanding of the utility security dynamic of many utility professionals. There has always been a disconnect in recognizing the overlap between the utility and security sectors. This lack of understanding has led to an insular approach, where many believe the two fields have little, if any, connection to one another.
To be clear, the relationship between the sectors is uniquely one-sided. You can be deeply immersed in the security world and have nothing…
There is an old axiom that goes, “When seconds count, the police are just minutes away.” Today, this is an understatement. Law enforcement departments across the nation are understaffed and underfunded at unprecedented levels, leaving responding officers overwhelmed, physically overtaxed and overstressed, and exiting the profession at astonishing rates of attrition. So, what does this have to do with frontline utility employees? Well, everything.
Even in circumstances where violent assaults and active shooter incidents occur at locations with known fixed addresses, the action is usually over before police arrive. Now, think about getting responders to a location without a fixed address or to an address unfamiliar to the requestor. What if…
In utility physical security practice, professionalism comes from knowing what to do, why it needs to be done and how to do it. Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? However, gaining and maintaining true professional competency, or edge, requires continual effort. In our quest for professionalism we have to overcome a plethora of obstacles to success, some self-imposed, some constructed by others. One significant obstacle that we all must conquer is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.
What is the Dunning-Kruger Effect
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias[1] that manifests as excessive self-confidence in abilities that a person does not possess in reality.
It occurs when people with little or no knowledge of a subject or skill overesti…
As storm restoration work becomes more frequent, so do the challenges of verifying that the workers that flock to the disaster areas are qualified to do the work as well as meet background checks and security verifications they need. We talked with Dan Stemp, the chief customer officer at JNCTN, a New Zealand-based company that is hoping to bring a solution to the U.S. market that will not only empower utilities to verify workers but also give the workers ownership of that information. Included in the discussion is Alex Wakeland, a journeyman lineman for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and a JNCTN product champion.
Curtis Marquardt: Storm restoration work in the U.S. typically requires utility workers to descend upon…
As the world and society become increasingly aggressive and complex, it’s important to know how to spot and respond to dangers in public spaces and act in ways that reduce the likelihood of violence
As we see more criminal and aggressive incidents committed against utility workers, it’s important that your frontline workers be equipped with training that helps them act in ways that reduces their risk. Personal attacks on utility employees often happen unexpectedly and are preceded by a variety of customer threats—whether verbal, physical, using animals to intimidate, displaying weapons and so on. These incidents might be caused by customer anger of bills or service outages or could be instances of workplace violence committed by either a…
The names Nathan Baker, Zackary Randalls, Alex Boschert and William Froelich may not be familiar to you, but their stories are tragically important for utility workers. Nathan worked for East Mississippi Electric Power Association in Clarke County, Mississippi. Zackary was employed by Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) in Fresno, California. And Alex and William worked for Laclede Gas Co. (LGC) near St. Louis. Except for Alex and William, who were employed by the same company, there is no evidence that these men knew each other or their paths ever crossed, so what thread binds them together? They were murdered while doing their jobs for their respective companies. In a horrible twist of fate, three of the men were killed within a week…
In this inaugural issue of Utility Security magazine, I felt the best place to start this column was with a foundational understanding from which we can build later. Let’s begin with a discussion of the paradox between safety and security. Many people see safety and security through the same lens and use the words interchangeably, but that’s a mistake. They’re different in concept and application. The terms themselves are paradoxical; they’re both ambiguous in concept and, at the same time, laser-focused in application.
Let’s look closer at safety to see just how ambiguous the two terms are. At the conceptual level, safety is a vague term that means completely different things to different people. It’s perceived differently by an assembly-…
