Workplace safety is an important issue in any industry. But in the electric power industry, it is often a matter of life and death, as accidents and injuries can lead to severe issues. Dr. Ganesh Narine offers a book that is a must-have for anyone working in this field and who is interested in preventing accidents and injuries for anyone they are working with and themselves. Electric Power Industry Accidents: We Can Learn from Them & We Can Prevent Them does exactly what the title indicates – it offers an in-depth, strong guide for understanding and preventing problems in this field on any level.
This book offers a detailed discussion of workplace accidents, drawing from real experience in the electric power industry. First, the author focuses on the reasons behind these accidents and how they have occurred in different places and times. Then, he explores how the electric power industry operates, the people involved, and the plans and strategies that can work most effectively for this field with its particular details. The depth of the work is important and compiles the main issue to consider, using actual examples from practice. Electric Power Industry Accidents: We Can Learn from Them & We Can Prevent Them can be acquired on Amazon.
The main goal of Dr. Ganesh Narine is to avoid and prevent accidents that might happen in the future, keeping employees safe and healthy. This makes this guide especially significant and offers a must-read for anyone in the electric power industry.
Dr. Ganesh Narine, Ph.D., MPhil, MSc (Eng), BSc (Eng), REng., and more, is an electric industry engineer. He has worked in this field for over 40 years, which gives him a massive amount of hands-on expertise in generation, transmission, distribution, engineering, management, and executive management. This ensures that the book is grounded in actual experience and that it is especially valuable for the people working within it. In addition, Dr. Narine has worked in the Caribbean and Canada with a strong interest in interest prevention and performance improvement, which culminates in this book.
His intention for this writing is to help actual experts, leaders, employers, and employees stay safe, understand the main principles for keeping safe, and learn from experience to prevent negative events that can be rooted in past incidents.
Accidents in the electric power industry are rare but can be very serious when they occur and might happen to even trained professionals under supervision. Unfortunately, this is not easy to understand unless diving deep into the causes, which Dr. Narine attempts to do by describing accidents and explaining how common they can be.
This book is a must-read for anyone in the field, as it empowers workers on all levels to avoid and prevent accidents during the job and preserve life and health. In addition, it is an important read for professionals with a clear, laser focus and a lot of knowledge to bring to their target audience.
You can learn more the book here.
We had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Ganesh Narine. Here are the excerpts from the interview.
Hi Dr. Ganesh, Great to have you with us today! Please share with our readers about what it is that you do.
Hi, I am from Trinidad and Tobago and now live in Canada. Early on, I enjoyed reading West Indian novels, especially those by Nobel Prize Winner V.S. Naipaul. Cricket and soccer (football) were the major sports, and most young boys aimed to master one of these. I preferred cricket because I felt that it allowed for the development and application of good strategy. I love driving long distances and listening to seventies pop and soul, Trinidad and Tobago local music, and Bollywood classics.
My father passed when I was three, and I have no recollection of him. I grew up and was fully influenced by my mother, who never enjoyed the benefit of formal schooling. Today, I enjoy saying that I have a Ph.D. (Leadership), MPhil (Management), MSc (Engineering), and BSc (Engineering) because that would have made my mother so very happy. Sadly, she died about 20 years now. My wife is the only person, other than my mother, to enjoy an enormous influence on me.
My Wife and I have been married for nearly 40 years now. She has a Ph.D. in Education and works at a Canadian University in the Education Faculty. My son is an Electrical Engineer in Trinidad and Tobago with a decade of working experience in the electric power industry. My daughter-in-law, an MBA graduate, also has a budding career in the same industry. My sister is also an MBA graduate from a university in the UK and operated as a manager for an international company in the Caribbean. She is now working in payroll management in Canada. Today I am dazzled by my 2-yr old grandson – my oxygen generator and my grandniece, who is as bright as a 100w bulb.
I am a person who always looks for ways to improve working arrangements for superior results and increased success. I believe that we are here to do the best work that we can while remaining safe and healthy. We must always superimpose that intent with a determination and consistency that enable and bolster organizational success and continuous growth. To achieve this win-win relationship between individuals and organizations that they belong to or work for, my thinking is that we must maintain philosophical moorings as the foundation for thoughtful, serious-minded, and focused intent without distractions and noise. These are the distractions and noise that can and usually act as negative catalysts for impulsive and erratic performance and actions at the workplace.
I am enjoying a four-decade-long career as an electrical engineer in the electric power industry, where change is occurring at a rapid pace, and that momentum is greater now than at any other time since the early 1980s. The tools and skill sets that practitioners require to work safely today are radically different than before. Individuals at work are required to always be able to recognize the existing and emerging hazards and to factor those into making safe work arrangements to effectively perform the activities that they are tasked to complete. To competently do that, they must practice an ability to maintain situational awareness of their working systems, barrier & protective systems, working rules, procedures, standards, and industry best practices. Additionally, they must ensure open and free communication with working colleagues, maintain relationships that contribute to positive workspace interactions, encourage continuous learning, physical well-being, mental understanding & strength, and most of all, a constant vigilant focus on ensuring that work activities are always understood and carefully planned so that misunderstandings and errors can be mitigated before they become unmanageable.
To top that, individuals must keep abreast with current and new technologies as they are enabling change like never before. Knowledge on and about how these new devices and systems can be installed, operated, and maintained to, first, enable new features and capabilities and, second, to replace older components, devices, and systems are a critical skillset needed by workers in the electric utility industry today. This is a challenge that has never, before now, been as important and can result in failures where individuals may become severely injured or killed.
Working in this industry today is exciting, challenging, full of growth potential, and complex beyond anything that we have seen before. The opportunities for providing superior customer and stakeholder service are also greater today than in previous times.
Please tell us about your book, Electric Power Industry Accidents: We Can Learn from Them & We Can Prevent Them.
I want to prevent workplace accidents and always keep workers injury free. This book (Electric Power Industry Accidents: We Can Learn from Them & We Can Prevent Them) contains a detailed discussion of actual workplace accidents in the electric power industry. I explore the reasons for these accidents and compare similar accidents from different places and times. The work involves an assessment of the electric power industry, the people who work there, and their work strategies, plans, and industry standards. It is a valuable compilation of challenging issues that, if not managed, can lead to future accidents, worker injuries, and possibly deaths.
Please share about your journey.
I just love encouraging people to do their best at whatever they do. That is a strong personal motivator for me. I am a career (over 40 years) electric power industry engineer/manager/executive with experience in Generation, Transmission, Distribution, Engineering, Management, and Executive Management. I practiced in the Caribbean, and that continues in Canada. My research interest is in electric industry performance improvement and accident prevention. I led all major divisions and some of the largest teams in this business, leading and managing major and complex projects and mitigating problems. In my time, I led an investigation into 25 fatal accidents and almost 100 cases where individuals received serious, severe, or permanent injuries. The experience from these accidents changed me and caused me to commit to making the industry one where individuals will not become injured or killed while at work.
What are the strategies that helped you become successful in your journey?
The identification of opportunities to share experiences and to help people to remain safe. To make that my mission. The sober acknowledgment that it is very difficult to ensure that everything that can be done is always done for individuals at work. Making that my vision and encapsulating it as first in line objective and a constant desire to maintain successful work performance.
I have learned to look inward for ways to stay calm. The details of events that I know of and investigated have led me to fear being a failure and not making a positive contribution to society. Many of these details are included in my book. It is an opportunity for each reader to become a leader and an agent for and of positive change.
Any message for our readers.
Keep reading this book with an open mind. It is not a one-day read or a one-year exercise either. Let it be a resource that you will constantly and periodically reread and review the circumstances that existed. It should also allow you to contemplate other instances which you will be familiar of or with. You will appreciate how different individuals deal with similar issues and how different their approaches and actions can be. Connect with me, and let’s continue this dialogue. We can make the workplace safe together.
Fantastic! So tell us, how can people find out more about you?
You can connect with me via LinkedIn. I am available via email narigan@yahoo.com, and ganeshnarine@yahoo.com. You can visit my website also.
Thank you so much, Dr. Ganesh, for giving us your precious time! We wish you all the best for your journey ahead!