This is a real incident. I was the utility representative on the investigation. I've held back the names, the utility, the district, and the year on purpose, out of respect for the family and for a crew that has carried this a long time. Nothing about what happened has been changed. Read it as the record it is.

Mountains of northern California. A crew replacing a wood transmission pole. Nearest hospital an hour away, which out there is normal and nobody thinks twice about it.

There was no road to that pole. There was a road down in the canyon, and then fifty yards of hillside between that road and the work. Forty degrees. Steep enough that you climb it with your hands, not just your feet.

So the crew did what crews have always done. They rigged a handline on the slope, put their tools on their backs, and went up. That was the access. They'd walked the ground before the job started. They'd been working it that way for a while. It worked fine.

Two men were up the pole on a work platform when it failed.

They fell sixty feet.

One of them had his rope safety attached to the platform. When the platform let go, it took him with it. He swung around the pole to the downhill side and landed in large rocks with the board on top of him.

The other man had just stepped onto the platform. One step. He came straight down off the pole and landed on his feet in the spoil pile, the loose dirt they had pulled out of the new pole hole that morning. Sixty feet onto soft ground. I've read that line more times than I can count and it still doesn't sound possible.

Same fall. Same sixty feet. Same second. One landed in rock and one landed in dirt, and that is the whole difference between those two men.

The crew called 911 immediately. That part of the canyon had cell service. That was luck.

Every man on that crew had first aid and CPR. They had their climbing gear. That was the extent of what was on that hill.

A helicopter arrived. It did not have hoist capability. It landed on the road down in the canyon. The ambulance came to the same road.

And then the paramedics and the flight crew stood at the bottom of a forty-degree slope and looked up at a jobsite they had no way to reach. They were not equipped for that terrain, and they had no reason to be. Nothing in the call they answered told them the only way in was a rope.

It took a long time to get to him.

He died at the top of that hill while the EMS team worked to bring him down the same rope his crew had climbed up that morning.

I'll say this plainly, because it's the most important sentence in this piece. The crew did nothing wrong.

They didn't rush. They walked the ground, rigged good access, briefed the work, and when it went bad they called for help in the first seconds and started doing everything they'd been trained to do. There is no version of this story where somebody on that hill should have known better.

The plan was wrong for the place. That's the miss.

It accounted for a site you can drive an ambulance to. It accounted for a patient you can roll a gurney up to. It accounted for a hospital fifteen minutes out instead of sixty. Then somebody handed that plan to a job that was nothing like average, and nowhere in the chain did anyone stop and ask whether the plan and the place matched.

Here's the part that has stayed with me for years.

That crew named every detail of how they were going to get up that hill. Where the line went. What the anchor was. What order they'd climb in. What they'd carry on their backs. Those were real decisions, made out loud, in advance, by people who knew exactly what they were doing.

Nobody named how a man would come down.

That's not a failure of character. That's the most common gap in our industry, and it's in your plan too. I'd bet on it.

Nothing here requires a budget. All of it requires somebody to ask a question before the day starts instead of after it goes bad.

Plan the way out, not just the way in. Every access decision on a job is also an egress decision, and we only ever treat it as the first one. When you rig a way up, ask the second question in the same breath. How does a person who can't climb come down this? If the honest answer is "I don't know," you don't have an emergency action plan yet. You have a way to work.

Name the terrain to the people who'll come for you. Not during the emergency. Before it. The responders who came to that canyon acted on exactly the information they were given, and gave it everything they had. Nothing in that information said the word hoist. So somebody on the crew carries a card with the GPS coordinates of the actual work location, the road access point, whether a vehicle can reach the patient, whether a helicopter can land and where, and the words "hoist required" when that's the truth. Then call the local EMS agency and the air ambulance service before the job, not during it. They will tell you what they can reach. It's a fifteen minute phone call and it changes what shows up.

Rig the rescue, then run it. If getting a person off that hill needs a litter, a lowering system, and somebody trained to work it, those things go up the hill before anybody else does. Not available. Not somewhere. On site. Then walk it. Time it. Find out on a calm Tuesday morning how long it actually takes to move a packaged patient from the pole to the road, while everybody is standing up and nobody is bleeding. That number will either reassure you or it will change your whole plan, and either way you need it before you need it.

I asked a foreman once what his emergency action plan was. He pulled a laminated card out of his shirt pocket, and on it he'd written the coordinates of the job, the road access point, the hospital, the helicopter LZ, and one line in marker at the bottom: "you cannot drive in."

I asked him when he started doing that. He said after a job where the ambulance drove past them twice.

Nobody died on his job. He just decided he never wanted to find out what that felt like. That card took him four minutes to make.

People assume I built ESCAPE in a classroom. I didn't. I built it out of two incidents. One of them is the story above. The other one is mine.

It's emergency action planning that fits on a tailboard instead of in a binder. Six words. Six questions. Every one of them gets answered out loud before the first boot leaves the truck.

E. EXERCISE. Have you practiced it, or have you only written it? A plan you've never run is a guess with a cover page. Walk the rescue. Time the extraction. Find out where it breaks while it's still a drill. The field script: "Before we go up, let's walk how we'd bring somebody down."

S. SITE CONDITIONS. What about this specific place changes the emergency? Terrain, weather, distance, elevation, ground stability, daylight left. An hour from a hospital is a site condition. A forty-degree slope is a site condition. Cell coverage that works in one part of the canyon and dies in the next is a site condition. The field script: "What's different about this site that would change how help reaches us?"

C. COMMUNICATION. Who calls, what do they say, and what does the other end need to hear? Assign the caller by name at the tailboard so nobody looks around in the first ten seconds. Then decide in advance what that call contains. Coordinates. Access reality. Whether a ship can land and where. The field script: "If it goes bad, Mike calls. Mike, what are you telling them?"

A. ACCESS. How does help physically get to us? Not to the road. To us. If the answer involves a rope, a boat, a locked gate, or a mile of two-track, then help does not have access, it has a starting point. The field script: "Can an ambulance reach the patient, yes or no?"

P. POSITION. Where does everyone and everything stage? Where the ambulance stops. Where the helicopter lands. Where the rally point is. Who meets responders and guides them in, by name. A responder standing in the wrong place is a responder who isn't helping. The field script: "Where do they land, and who's meeting them?"

E. EGRESS. How does the injured person get out? This is the letter that gets skipped, and it's the letter that kills people. It is not the same question as access. Access is how they get in. Egress is how he gets out, on a backboard, unconscious, in the dark, uphill. The field script: "If he can't walk or climb, how does he leave this site?"

Six questions. About four minutes at the tailboard. That's the whole framework.

For Field Leaders (on the crew): Add one question to your tailboard tomorrow and never take it out. "If somebody gets hurt right here, how does he get out?" Ask it out loud, in front of everybody, and don't move on until you have a real answer. If your access is a rope, a ladder, a boat, or a hike, say so, and say it to dispatch before you need dispatch. Assign the 911 caller by name at the brief so it isn't decided in the first panicked ten seconds. And put the coordinates on a card in somebody's pocket, because phones break and people freeze.

For Supervisors (in your programs): Go pull your emergency action plans and read them against your actual jobs, not your average one. If the same template covers a substation in town and a transmission structure up a canyon, you have one plan and two very different worst days. Build a remote-site trigger into your job planning. When a site is more than a set distance from definitive care, or can't be reached by vehicle, that job requires an EAP with named access, named egress, a confirmed air resource with known capability, and a rehearsed extraction. And go make the phone call to your local EMS and air ambulance before you need them. That conversation costs you fifteen minutes and it is the cheapest thing in your program.

For Executives (at the system level): Somewhere in your organization there is a crew working a site your emergency response cannot reach, and the plan on file for that crew says "call 911." That is not their failure. It's a system that never asked the question. Fund the rescue capability that matches the work you send people to do, whether that's litter and lowering equipment on remote crews, high-angle training, or a standing relationship with a hoist-capable air resource. And change the measure. Stop asking whether every job has an emergency action plan. Start asking whether every plan gives an injured worker the best possible chance of survival. Those are different questions, and only one of them brings people home.

Tomorrow morning, at your brief, ask this out loud and wait for a real answer:

"If somebody gets hurt right here, right now, how does he get out?"

Then follow it with the four that matter most. Who calls? What do they say? Where does the helicopter land? Who meets them?

If any of those four answers is a shrug, you found your gap before it found you. Fix it before the first boot leaves the truck.

Every failure in this story is a communication failure wearing work clothes. The terrain was known on that hill and never reached the people driving toward it. The plan was written and never matched to the place. Here's where we've built on that same thread:

Same thread, different angle. Every one of these comes down to a sentence somebody had to say before it mattered.

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Until next time,

Lito Wilkins