Good afternoon, and thank you AGA for inviting National Grid to share our public safety e learning site for first responders.

Transcription

1 Good afternoon, and thank you AGA for inviting National Grid to share our public safety e learning site for first responders. This website is a key component of our Pipeline Public Awareness Program, and it represents an important step in our broader strategy of expanding and enhancing safety education throughout the National Grid footprint. We are extremely proud that shortly after our launch in the fall of 2014, National Grid was presented with the Best in Class award from the nationally recognized Interactive Media Awards. The Best in Class award is the highest honor bestowed by the IMA. It represents the very best in planning, execution and overall professionalism. 1

2 Our Pipeline Public Awareness Program was initiated in response to the passage of API RP 1162, and it has steadily evolved first focused on making sure that we complied with the requirements of the RP. Once we were confident that our compliance foundation had been firmly established, we began to focus on those activities and tools that would elevate our Pipeline Public Awareness Program beyond compliance and begin to demonstrate continuous improvement to our regulators. What I ll be sharing with you today is the reasons we developed the e learning site, how our local first responders helped us, and an overview of the website. Safety is at the very heart of National Grid s business: It is the core of our mission, vision, and goals it is a part of everything we do and everything that we as a company value. As part of our corporate wide strategic plan, we put Safety at the top this includes employee, public and customer safety. Throughout our company we are focusing on doing the right thing that is, we are living our values and holding ourselves accountable, focusing on working responsibly, stopping if something does not look or feel right, and addressing it. As a result, we made a decision last year to re evaluate our public safety outreach tools. 2

3 We realized we needed to raise the bar for ourselves when it came to public safety education among key stakeholder audiences. Our public safety philosophy is based on a strong commitment to going beyond the word compliance. We realized that we could use Public Safety as a living, breathing example of the services we provide that when customers think National Grid, they also automatically think about Our Commitment to the Safety of the Communities We Serve. This led us to expand our pipeline public awareness program to focus on those improvements that would help increase safety awareness among key customer groups and this website is specifically promoting a culture of gas safety among our first responders. We are moving up the pyramid of prevention shown here, identifying strategies and techniques for increasing customer awareness of gas and electric safety and providing customers with the tools they need to practice safe behaviors. 3

4 As previously mentioned, our pipeline public awareness program is a reflection of our Company s safety commitment. At National Grid, the cornerstone of our safety program is for each employee to become involved in the process of meeting our safety goals. In the customer arena, National Grid has taken a similar approach. Regulators and senior leadership demand a proactive strategy to public safety, and to make sure our safety outreach is effective, we work closely with our key stakeholders including our local first responders. Our goal is to challenge ourselves to do better, and to promote a culture of safety awareness and incident prevention in our service area. 4

5 There are some unique aspects about our company that are compelling us to enhance our outreach to our customers, particularly to the first responder community. National Grid s infrastructure is among the oldest in the country. First responders need to know how to deal with this. We continue to offer in person training programs for first responders in various parts of the service area, but we wanted to expand that commitment through an online training program. We knew we did not have the resources to do that in house, especially given that in many parts of our service area we have volunteer fire departments. So we looked to Culver Company. Culver had already developed several successful websites for us and was handling many aspects of our public safety outreach to contractors, schools, and first responders. We asked them to build a training website for first responders that would offer the same high quality guidance that our in person presentations have offered first responders for many years. 5

6 This slide is the actual home page of our e Learning website. For this site to be truly effective, it had to be designed in such a way that the messages and the learning experience fit the reality of the world that firefighters and other first responders live in. A gas leak could be one of the bigger hazards a first responder faces. But, he or she doesn t necessarily respond to a gas emergency every day thank goodness! So, as a result, first responders don t have regular opportunities to practice response tactics. In service training is essential to keep response protocols top of mind. 6

7 To ensure this site would meet the in service training needs of First Responders in National Grid s service territory, our first step was to conduct an extensive needs assessment with training academies in New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. We worked with Culver Company to analyze first responder training needs and with Culver s help we discovered that in all three states, there is an acute lack of in service training on utility emergencies. This situation is certainly not unique to the National Grid service area. There are some clear reasons many first responders don t get ongoing utility safety training. There is nothing specific to utility emergencies in the National training standards or federal OSHA requirements. State requirements for in service training vary, and in most states, topics and priorities are set at the departmental level. These priorities can be reactive, with training initiatives selected as a result of recent situations that did not go well, or as a function of specific local or regional hazards. In addition, there are just so many required training topics that utility safety gets pushed down pretty low on the list. The analysis clearly outlined a gap between the training that all emergency responders need to protect themselves and the public in gas and electric emergencies, and the training that many of them get We designed our new first responder safety website to help fill this gap. 7

8 As it turns out the timing was right to offer a first responders a comprehensive utility safety training website. Back in 2008, Culver did some research for one of their other utility customers which showed that only 3% of first responders preferred to receive safety training online. But by 2013, that % had changed dramatically nearly half of the first responders surveyed said they prefer online safety training. In the AGA spirit of collaboration, I d like to share with you what we learned about firefighters in the process of building this website, and how we designed this site to ensure that even a volunteer firefighter in Eastern LI would learn and remember key messages about utility safety. 8

9 One of our primary drivers in the development of the site was our desire to have extensive input from a cross section of firefighters in our service area. We believed this would help better engage the first responder community as well as influence their behavior. With the help of Culver Company, we formed an advisory panel of a dozen fire chiefs and training officers from career and volunteer departments in National Grid s service area. The advisory board was instrumental in helping us deign the website. They shared their knowledge about local priorities, Standard Operating Procedures for utility incidents and their crews training preferences. Included in the Advisory Pane were some key experts such as the president of the Massachusetts Institute for fire department instructors, as well as an FDNY training officer. 9

10 Our advisory panel helped develop content that would make the site especially useful to their fellow firefighters. We wanted the site to be memorable as well as useful, so we packaged this content using instructional design principles that support the needs of adult learners. We also needed the site to appeal to firefighters of various generations and learning styles from the veteran unaccustomed to YouTube videos, to the new recruit who does everything on his/her tablet or Smartphone. So, the website uses a variety of training resources, which I ll share with you in a moment. 10

11 For those of you in the audience who don t know, National Grid is a dual commodity Company, so the First Responder e Learning site also includes basic response guidance for the most common gas and electric incidents. 11

12 The site includes a wide range of resources for different training needs and learning styles. We ve included material safety data sheets on the natural gas, LNG and gas odorants used in National Grid s system. There are videos on electrical and gas hazards, and on vehicle/power line contacts; as well as handouts that can be downloaded and printed to keep on hand for reference or distributed to the public. 12

13 In addition to these resources, the site provides first responders with a gas safety e Learning certification program on pipeline operations and incident response, which is what really elevates this website beyond compliance. 13

14 Attendance records for in person first responder training tell you how many people showed up, but they don t give you much more than outreach metrics. They do not provide evidence of shifts in knowledge or behavior change, which are key elements of API RP 1162 effectiveness evaluations. An e Learning system provides more useful metrics. In our program, first responders must pass final tests with an 80% score. Mastery is essential for safety. So we require them to revisit the material and retake the test until they get that 80% correct. Once they master the content by achieving 80% on all six modules, they earn a certificate. Users who earn their certificates have improved their knowledge of natural gas and how to respond more safely and effectively to natural gas emergencies. 14

15 First responders who take the training are logged into a secure database. These records document participation and demonstrate National Grid s efforts at promoting hazard awareness among first responders. This database may be used for reporting to management, regulators and insurance providers and may be helpful in the event of litigation. 15

16 We designed this e learning program to meet the needs of adult learners, which are very different from those of young students.. We know that adult learning is most effective when it is self directed based on experience and immediately applicable So we built in as much user control as possible, and many opportunities to apply the learning to incident response situations. We also heard from training officers about the time constraints for first responders. They told us that users should be able to stop in the event they are interrupted for an emergency call, and to pick up where they left off when they return. So you can stop and restart the training at any time. Our advisors also asked us to prevent users from quickly clicking through the slides and skipping over essential safety information, either accidentally or on purpose. So you have to view all the content of every slide. If you try to skip ahead you see this warning message. 16

17 Another key element our advisers wanted maps to help responders locate important gas facilities. So we included maps that show transmission pipelines, gate stations, and LNG facilities by county. The site also includes a link to the National Pipeline Mapping System, which provides first responders an interactive map for locating gas transmission lines in their area. In addition to the link to the National Pipeline Mapping System, we included easy to read / understand instructions on how to use it as first responders are much less familiar with the NPMS than you might expect. Our website is designed to help give first responders more exposure to this critical information. 17

18 With our initial launch of the website in the Fall of 2014, the e Learning program now consists of these first 6 modules. And there s more to come we are currently working on a LNG Transportation Module as well as four Electric Safety modules. I d like to now share a quick 4 minute video with you that will really give you a feel for the training this website provides. 18

19 We are actively promoting this site among first responders in our service area. A few examples of what we have been doing to promote the use of this website are: We developed a brochure and mailed it to every fire house in our service territory. We wrote Press releases We have received coverage in the local press as well as in industry trade journals. We are using social media to attract first responders to the site. We are mailing post cards to local first responders, drawing them to the site. In addition, many of our employees are also Volunteer Firefighters, and they are personally promoting the website within their own departments. To date, we have had more than 23,000 page views and we re averaging about 100 visitors each week. 19

20 This website will always be evolving, in response to the ever changing regulatory environment as well as the changing needs of first responders in our service area. Currently, we are in the process of adding new content to the site. This includes expanding our gas pipeline safety training to include a more robust overview of response tactics needed for incidents that involve transporting LNG. We are collaborating with the Northeast Gas Association to develop this specialized training. In addition, we are expanding the electrical safety component of the website to have more detailed e learning about the National Grid electrical utility system itself, as well as the recommended response tactics for incidents that may involve substations, transmission lines, vaults, downed power lines and the like. These new modules are expected to be launched in the Fall of

21 And as the portal evolves and the rollout continues, Culver and National Grid plan to solicit feedback from our advisors, first responders and regulators as we strive to improve the learning experience. Effectiveness and Continuous Improvement seem to be buzzwords these days, but for us they are a fundamental part of our overall strategy. 21

22 Again, thank you very much for this opportunity to share with you our First Responder e Learning website. Any questions... 22