The demands of a changing business climate have started to affect internal operations, including attempts to tamp down industrial accidents and strengthen safety protocols within. All of them require adjusting to new risks and power generation facility is no exception.

In a sector where employees work with large, complex equipment and assets, an incident can have disastrous consequences and therefore, safety is of paramount importance. Power plant workers face extreme hazards such as electrical shocks and related injuries, boiler explosions, and chemical hazards. Apart from these, fall from heights, confined spaces, improper lockout tag out practices are other areas of concern and safety challenges that require close attention.

As an example, if we talk about electrical-related injuries, failure to recognize a hazard or its potential intensity is one of the main causes. Take a worker working on a platform at a height – if he/she hits a power line accidentally and receives an electrical shock, and post that falls from a platform, he/she is susceptible to long term injuries. Now this accident can be easily classified as a fall, even though the description above states that the fall was obviously caused from an electrical shock.

The basic requirements here, dictate that workers wear clothing appropriate for the level of hazard to which they are exposed and carry out preventive actions while undertaking a task.

At power generation facilities, special attention is necessary to the workers’ needs during the outage season and in winter months – especially when crews are sent out to make repairs in what often can be terrible weather conditions.

Employees should be trained in the skills and techniques needed to distinguish between hazards and safe conditions – they must be able to perform tasks with equipment energized, de-energized, locked-out and tagged-out.

Communicating safety is a priority in such conditions – solutions that retain interest in safety and absorb learners need to be co-designed with the front line rather than tossed over a fence for them to use. Animation is one such tool whose value is unlocked by reimagining existing processes. It recreates safe and hazardous scenarios and therefore presents videos that truly empower and augment safety.

Shifting to holistic learning via animation

Animated videos can achieve a transformational change in the traditional approach to safety – it helps create new ways of learning that is built on the existing processes. Their visual approach to teaching important safety concepts, hazards and processes provide a unique opportunity to ‘walk the talk’, adapting them to the urgent need of the conditions within.

A visual walkthrough and recreation of a facility is the highlight of animation – different units, their processes and safe working conditions can be replicated via animation.

Inside an animated environment, employees can be trained on EHS and OHS safety procedures in the context of their specific workspaces. It can recreate plant assets, cranes, enclosed spaces, places with hazardous chemicals, or any other part of the plant, bringing staff training to life. While the videos can provide workers with a better understanding of actual fault propagation scenarios, they can also be linked to safety protection layers, thereby expediting to a complete learning environment.

Safety and reliability is the front and center in power generation plants –animation can even assist learners to absorb teachings iteratively through sprints, thereby focusing on the understanding of operators and identifying pain points.

Complying with stringent EHS regulations is an essential requisite to mitigate power plant risks. It’s challenging, for managers to keep up with these regulations while also upgrading infrastructure, minimizing downtime – animation provides an immersive environment for trainings and encourages a safe work environment.