The Danger of Silence in Electrical Safety
- Paul Decker
- Mar 23
- 2 min read
Years ago, I watched a surveillance video of a young engineer walk toward an electric furnace in critical failure mode. In a stroke of extraordinary fortune, he escaped unharmed from what would typically have been a fatal explosion.
He survived. We were lucky.
As we did an incident report, the issue I kept coming back to wasn't whether he and his coworkers were properly trained to identify, recognize, and handle such incidents. It was about nobody had said anything before it happened.
Someone knew. And they stayed quiet.
In almost every organization I have worked with, there are people who understand the risk.
Supervisors, engineers, and safety professionals who have all tried to elevate the conversation but have been met with polite indifference.
These are not bad actors. They are experienced people who care about their teams. Yet something stops them from speaking plainly to the people with the authority and the budget to act.
It is not apathy. It is fear. Fear of being wrong, of being dismissed, of framing a technical concern in a boardroom where everyone is talking about quarterly numbers. So they wait, and the organization drifts quietly toward a risk it cannot see.
A 250-person company has a 95% chance of going 13 years without a serious electrical incident, even with real exposure. When nothing bad happens for a long time, the brain concludes nothing is wrong. The person who sees a risk hesitates to identify it and speak out about it. The leader who doesn't see it doesn't ask.
The gap between what is known and what gets reported widens.
This is the dynamic I explored in my recent article for NETAWorld Journal: From Luck to Leadership: Why Zero Incidents May Be the Greatest Risk.
In that article, I talk about our new site: RU Lucky Or Safe?. The site features a free tool that generates a short, personalized video to answer three questions executives need answered:
Are we safe, or just lucky?
What would a serious incident cost this business?
What would it mean for my people?
If it helps you open one conversation you have been putting off, it has done its job.