Worker critically injured in accident at Essen substation causing power cut

What happened

A worker was critically injured in an operational accident at a substation in Essen, Germany, according to a report by the Westdeutsche Zeitung published on 15 September 2020. The accident also caused a large-area power cut. The article is behind a paywall, and the text available for this register consists of the headline and a short summary, so the equipment involved, the operator, the sequence of events and the time taken to restore supply could not be confirmed. The incident date is estimated from the article's publication date and has not been independently confirmed.

Lessons learned

1. Substation work carries high risk, so isolation, earthing and permit-to-work procedures should be verified on site before any task begins.
2. An accident at a substation can cause a wide area outage, so operators should plan emergency response and customer communications in advance.
3. After a substation accident, operators should preserve damaged equipment and operating records so that the cause can be established before any repair or change to the site.

More lessons on worker safety and safe systems of work, outages, backup supply and restoration, from every incident on the register.

Source

wz.de