East River Electric 2020 Annual Report

to focus completely on each task at hand,” said Safety
and Health Professional Nick Reiff.
The Focus Committee also continued using Worklete
in 2020, which is a program that teaches participants
to work like an athlete and use the strongest
body position through every task. Worklete was
implemented at East River in 2019 to reverse a trend
that the Focus Committee noticed of increasing
musculoskeletal injuries related to weak body position.
Also in 2020, the Focus Committee completed a
review of East River’s safety manual. The committee’s
members split into teams to complete the review
process, which focused on ensuring the manual
was up-to-date and not lacking any crucial safety
information.
External Safety Campaigns
East River’s farm safety public awareness campaign
continued in 2020. The campaign reminds farmers to
remain aware of electrical equipment when working
on the farm and teaches them the steps to take if their
equipment contacts a power line.
Also this year, we released a video as part of the
campaign that tells the story of Grant McCann, a
farmer who was killed in Bon Homme Yankton’s
service territory in an accident involving a sprayer and
power lines. The video has received a lot of traction so
far, with the link on our Vimeo account viewed more
than 2,300 times and posts featuring the video on
Bon Homme Yankton’s Facebook page shared more
than 265 times.
An article featuring Grant’s story that ran in Co-op
Connections magazine also received a lot of attention.
NorthWestern Energy and South Dakota Farmers
Union both contacted East River about the article and
reprinted it in their customer newsletters and other
organizations have printed the article or shared the
video with their members or customers.
“Fostering a culture of workplace safety
leadership is an important part of minimizing
workplace accidents and near misses.
Distraction tends to be a large contributing
factor to workplace accidents and a big part of
this campaign involves reminding employees
to focus completely on each task at hand.”
Nick Reiff
East River Safety and Health Professional
Similar to the uptick in farming accidents that our
cooperative family noticed back in 2016 that spurred
the creation of our farm safety campaign, we noticed a
similar recent trend within the contractor community.
Contractors working near our power lines are more
frequently contacting our infrastructure, aren’t
reaching out to the electric co-op in advance of
working near power lines and also often don’t know
what steps to take after their equipment contacts
a power line. In response to this trend, East River’s
Member Services team developed a contractor safety
awareness campaign in collaboration with the Focus
Committee and our Marketing and Communications
Committee.
“Our external safety campaigns are designed to
ensure that anyone who is working near our power
lines, whether a contractor or a farmer, is taking
the proper steps to stay safe,” said Marketing and
Communications Manager Shayla Ebsen. “We are
working closely with our member systems to release
these important messages to both the contractor and
farming communities.”
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