We’re committed to keeping people healthy and safe. Whether it’s supporting the field crews who maintain and renew our assets, ensuring a safe network through our asset management plans, supporting our team, or educating the customers who live and work in the communities we serve. 

 

Safety

Explore how to stay safe around our gas and electricity networks.

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  • Promoting health and safety

    Goals and targets

    Here’s what we want to achieve for Pou hauora over the short, medium and long term. 

    Goals and targets FY24

    • Improve the safety culture at Powerco, demonstrated by a 5% year on year improvement in a Safe Plus Assessment.
    • Achieve Workplace Safety Interaction targets at three levels: Directors (15) Executive Leadership (80) and Powerco staff (180).
    • 5% improvement in positive health and safety incident reporting (near misses and push backs) from FY22.
    • Deliver quarterly workshops to all Powerco gas network service providers to improve our safety relationships with our contractors.

  • Promoting health and safety

    What we've done FY23

    We’ve been making progress towards our goals and targets. Here’s what we worked on between 1 April 2022 and 31 March 2023.

    What we’ve done FY23

    • Good progress has been made on Powerco’s safety programme, but this was not reflected in our lagging metrics.  TRIFR was 8% lower than the three-year rolling average (not quite reaching target) and LTIFR exceeded the target. 
    • "Working better together" workshops were undertaken with our largest contractor Downer throughout FY23, with several improvement workstreams set up as a result. 
    • Our target for a 5% improvement in positive incident reporting (near misses and push backs) on FY22 numbers was narrowly missed after being on track nearly all year. This is an onging area of focus for Management in FY24.

  • Promoting health and safety

    What we've done FY22

    We’ve been making progress towards our goals and targets. Here’s what we worked on between 1 April 2021 and 31 March 2022.

    What we’ve done FY22

    •  We saw an almost 70% reduction on our FY21 LTISR figure. This was a result of fewer LTI events and a significant event that had contributed to the higher FY21 frequency rate.
    • Directors and the Executive Management met their workplace safety interactions targets by completing 109 workplace safety interactions.
    • Over 30 employees received Mental Health First Aider training and this support network is now embedded in the business. As well as regular support group meetings, additional resources will continue to be built over time.
    • Three core “learning teams” were established along with a post-storm review for Cyclone Dovi. In line with Safety as Usual principles, a core aspect of these was a drive to understand what went well and why. The learning teams were completed in FY22
    • We moved to an operational ownership / business partnership approach to health and safety, which seeks to embed ownership in all the business units.
    • We developed a framework for diagnosing the cause and nature of lines down events. We are currently developing a data collection tool to get a better understanding of frequency.
    • We made improvements in two critical risks areas – a decrease in driving incidents and an improvement in our health area, with the introduction of the Mental Health First Aid programme. 
     
    • We launched or established three health and safety “learning teams” to deliver insights and improvement in risk management in the areas of lines down, substation batteries and working better together. 
    • The health and safety scorecard approach was halted during FY22 while the business restructured. Work on this target has recommenced in FY23 with a set of draft leading indicators being trialled in the Executive H&S reporting. These will be refined over time.

     

Orchard safety

The first shock killed him. The second brought him back to life. Troy Hall survived two electric shocks after getting too close to overhead lines while working in an orchard. Watch his story.

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