When Accidents Decide For You
- Paul Decker
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
As an executive, you make decisions every day about where to invest limited resources. Most of those decisions likely follow a familiar logic: fix what’s broken, improve what’s visible, and invest where returns are obvious.
Electrical safety doesn't neatly fit that calculation. Although it's no less crucial to overall workplace safety, its real costs often remain invisible until after an incident occurs. And by then, the cost curve has already spiked.
I have a personal reason to say this: years ago, I watched a colleague on surveillance video narrowly escape from a near certain fatal accident. Only luck saved him. That day started my safety journey and helped me understand how often executives inadvertently rely on luck as a safety strategy.
Asymmetrical Risks: Prevention vs. Recovery
There is no linear cost model in electrical safety. Preventive actions are typically planned, predictable, and relatively modest. Post-event response is the opposite: reactive, disruptive, and exponentially more expensive.
The asymmetry of risk looks like this:
Preventive investments are scheduled, scoped, and controllable.
Post-event costs escalate quickly and unpredictably.
OSHA’s Business Case for Safety and Health documents that direct and indirect costs from a single serious workplace injury can easily exceed $1 million, while prevention programs are a just a fraction -- typically in the tens of thousands. Across multiple case studies, OSHA reports benefit-to-cost ratios ranging from 3:1 to 10:1 for safety interventions.
Further, Liberty Mutual’s 2023 Workplace Safety Index estimates that serious non-fatal workplace injuries cost U.S. employers $58 billion annually, with electrical injuries ranking among the most expensive categories for manufacturing and utilities.
What “Post-Event Fix” Really Looks Like
After an electrical incident, costs rarely stop at medical treatment or equipment repair. What follows is often a chain reaction: emergency shutdowns, extended downtime, regulatory scrutiny, legal review, insurance audits, and the difficult work of restoring confidence among employees and stakeholders.
These losses remain invisible only as long as prevention holds.
Electrical Incidents Are Rare. That’s the Trap.
Electrical incidents don’t happen often. That fact is precisely why they are so easy to deprioritize. As humans, we have evolved to deemphasize such infrequent risks.
A facility can operate for a decade or more without a serious electrical incident and still be exposed to the same underlying risk on day one as on day one thousand.
This is where leaders get caught off guard.
The challenge is that the signals are often imperceptible without deliberate effort to surface them. Small system changes rarely raise alarms on their own. Over time, normal workarounds, minor setting changes, and reasonable adjustments become accepted practice.
This phenomenon is known as drift. The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster remains a classic example.
Electrical hazards accumulate quietly over time.
Small system changes rarely trigger alarms on their own.
The first “signal” is often the incident itself.
This is the definition of disproportionate risk: low probability, extremely high impact.
Why Costs Escalate After an Incident
Once an incident occurs, your organization loses strategic leverage. Repairs are rushed. Vendors are selected under pressure. Work is performed at emergency rates. Leadership focus shifts from growth to damage control.
Prevention works differently. It happens on your timeline. It allows prioritization, sequencing, and thoughtful tradeoffs. Instead of reacting under duress, you decide deliberately. It replaces urgency with intent.
As an executive, you don’t avoid risk by reacting faster. You avoid it by acting earlier.
The Quiet Risk of Incremental Change
Electrical risk accumulates through small, reasonable decisions made under operational pressure: settings adjusted to keep production running, protective devices replaced, temporary fixes left in place, loads added as your facility evolves.
Behaviors adapt. Workarounds become normalized. Familiarity breeds confidence, sometimes too much of it. Each decision makes sense in isolation. Together, they quietly shift the system away from its original design assumptions. Each change makes sense in isolation. The cumulative impact often goes unnoticed until an incident exposes it.
Periodic data collection and arc flash updates exist to surface these realities before they turn into consequences. Electrical safety training separates acceptable and unacceptable fixes.
Safety as a Leadership Discipline
Well-run companies don’t wait for incidents to invest in electrical safety. They understand that safety, reliability, and business performance are inseparable.
This isn’t about eliminating hazards entirely. It’s about managing risk deliberately instead of reactively and rejecting overconfidence.
How Guidant Power Helps Leaders Stay Ahead
Guidant's strategy is in our name. We are here to be a trusted guide on your electrical safety and reliability journey. We help you understand where operational reality has drifted and what that means for safety, compliance, and business performance.
We translate technical findings into business-relevant decisions, helping leadership prioritize preventive action before incidents take control.
The Bottom Line
The real question isn’t whether electrical safety programs are affordable. It’s whether your organization can afford the losses that follow a serious incident.
If you want to evaluate electrical risk on your terms and before it becomes an emergency, Guidant Power is here to help. You don't need to be an electrical expert, you only need to care enough to start the conversation. Give us a call today.
