Last issue I told you ESCAPE didn't come out of a classroom. I said it came out of two incidents, and that one of them was mine.

I gave you the first one. A man died fifty yards from a road in the mountains of northern California because his crew named every step of how they'd get up that hill and nobody named how he'd come down.

This is the other one.

I've told pieces of it from stages for years. I've never written it out in order. I'm going to do that here, and I'm going to spend most of the time on the part nobody asks me about.

People want to hear what the voltage felt like. That's not the part that should scare you.

The part that should scare you is what happened after, on the ground, with a helicopter sitting right there.

October 19, 2015. Northern California. Gray sky, nothing remarkable about the morning. No warning.

My crew and I were replacing hardware and insulators on a high-voltage transmission tower. The circuit was energized at 500,000 volts, with an adjacent 500kV circuit running parallel on the same corridor. A hot corridor. We were using a helicopter to move materials and people to the structure. Complex work, but familiar. We'd done it before.

I was a journeyman lineman with eight years on my card. I was also the safety lead for our crew. Hold onto that.

The briefing went the way they always did. Scope. Hazards. Helicopter operations. Fall protection. Rigging. Everyone nodded. Checklist complete.

We also talked about the emergency action plan that morning. Anytime we had a helicopter on site, the plan was to use that helicopter to fly an injured person to the hospital. Sixteen minutes by air. Everyone agreed.

Write that number down. Sixteen minutes.

The preflight that never happened. On every helicopter operation I'd been part of, the crew flew the structure before anyone went up. Look it over from the air. Identify anything that might change the plan. Routine.

When I got to the landing zone that morning, the helicopter was already shut down. I assumed the preflight had been done, because it always was.

I didn't bite my tongue. I never thought to ask. The assumption was so buried in the routine that it never surfaced as a question at all.

Had that preflight happened, we would have seen the OPGW configuration from the air. We would have called it an unusual condition. Somebody would have opened the grounding manual, where there is a paragraph that reads: "Any vertical run of OPGW, both runs shall be grounded."

Four lines in a manual, written for exactly that situation. Never referenced, because the preflight that would have triggered the lookup never happened.

Up the line. Two crewmates went first, clipped to a sixty-foot long line under the helicopter, set on the steel. Then the ship came back for me and my partner.

This tower had a vertical run of OPGW, optical ground wire, running down to a splice box about fifty feet below the bridge where we were being dropped, then back up to the top and on to the next structure. I hadn't seen that setup anywhere else on the project.

We waved the pilot off. He pulled away and put us down on the bridge of the tower. We paused. New hazard, new conversation. We called the foreman at the landing zone and had him send a ground out to us. When it arrived, we applied it to one of the OPGW runs.

One run. Not both.

We felt good about it. We paused again, reviewed the plan, confirmed we were ready. My crewmate went to work on one side of the structure. I went to the other.

Sit with that for a second. We saw something unfamiliar. We stopped. We called for a ground. We applied it. We talked about it.

By every measure, we did things right. And we were still wrong.

We believed the two vertical runs were a loop. Grounding one, in our heads, meant grounding both. Nobody tested that belief. Nobody opened the manual. We had a real conversation, and it went around the surface of the hazard instead of into it. We were so relieved to have a plan that we never asked whether the plan was complete.

The unhook. At 150 feet you're required to maintain 100% fall protection. Tied off at all times.

When I reached the OPGW I had to get past it. So I unhooked from the tower and free climbed around the wire.

That wasn't a decision I made about that tower. It was residue from an older trade. Years earlier, free climbing was standard. Everybody did it. By 2015 the rule had changed, but the habit was still in my body. A thousand times or more I had free climbed and gotten lucky.

I knew the rule. I taught the rule. I sat in the monthly safety meetings where we went over fall protection statistics in front of our crews. And at 150 feet, alone with a hazard in front of me and a habit older than the rule, I unhooked.

The tap. This is the part I share more than almost anything else.

Before I climbed past what I believed was the ungrounded run, I stopped. I reached out and tapped the OPGW with my hand.

I did that because there was a doubt buried in my head. Doubt that we'd mitigated it right. Something in me wasn't sure.

What I did with that doubt was not silence. Silence would have been ignoring it. What I did was worse. I substituted action for words. Instead of saying out loud, "I've got a doubt and I can't fully explain it," I tested the wire with my hand. I let my body run the experiment my mouth should have run.

Nothing happened. No shock. No sensation.

And the doubt vanished. The tap confirmed exactly what I wanted to believe.

The contact. I kept climbing. My left wrist rested on the conductor while I held the steel. Still nothing. The wire felt dead.

It wasn't until I reached up with my right hand to pull myself past that I got locked up.

Somewhere between 8,000 and 12,000 volts of induced energy entered my body. Every muscle locked at once. I couldn't let go. I couldn't move. My body became the path. In through the left wrist, across my chest, out through my right heel.

The current cycled. Not once. Multiple times. Each cycle a separate assault.

I was 150 feet in the air with nothing between me and the ground but steel and gravity. No fall protection. No harness to catch me. If my hands released, I fall.

Here is what I want every man and woman reading this to understand about that moment. Had I been tied off, I could have just let go. The harness catches me, my body separates from the source, the current stops. Being tied off was the escape route I gave up out of habit, and I gave it up before I ever needed it.

A thousand free climbs of luck finally ran out.

Between the jolts, my mind raced. Why did this happen. What did I miss. Am I going to die up here. My oldest, seven years old. My son. My middle daughter. My baby girl, seven months old at home, who had just learned to sit up on her own. My wife. Their faces moved past me like somebody was shuffling photographs.

I endured multiple cycles before I figured out how to pull myself free. I collapsed onto a cross brace. My arms and hands were constricted, curling in toward my body. My legs were doing the same. I could see my fingers bent inward, locked in positions I wasn't choosing.

Later, at the landing zone, when they helped me get the suit off, we saw the burn holes. In the bare hand suit. In the bare hand sock. Burn marks on my right heel. The path told the story. The suit had absorbed everything it could until it couldn't.

"I'm fine." My first words to my crew were: "I'm fine. Just give me a minute to recover and we'll get back to work."

After being electrocuted. After multiple cycles through my body. After nearly falling 150 feet.

My first instinct was to call it nothing.

I also yelled "Stay away from that!" because the hazard was still live and I didn't want anybody else near it. I could speak the danger to my crew. I could protect them. But I could not speak my own injury. I could not say the four words that mattered most: I'm hurt. I need help.

My crewmates didn't let me get away with it. One of them got on the radio.

"Send the helicopter. Lito got hit. Lito got hit."

I am alive because somebody else told the truth about me when I wouldn't.

The truck. A crewmate clipped into the long line and the helicopter flew him to me, carefully around the hazard. He secured me to the line and together we were lifted off the tower and flown back to the landing zone.

The plan we'd agreed on that morning was to fly an injured person to the hospital. Sixteen minutes. The helicopter was right there, still running at the LZ, the same aircraft that had just pulled me off the steel.

They loaded me into my supervisor's truck.

Fifty-eight minutes on the road.

I've asked myself for years what happened at that landing zone. Did they think I was okay because I said I was? Were they affected by what they'd just watched? Did the stress override the plan they'd agreed on that morning?

I don't have a clean answer. My crew did everything right getting me off that tower. They responded with courage and speed and one of them told the truth about me when I couldn't. I will never say a word against those men.

But here is the lesson, and it is the whole reason this issue exists.

A plan on paper is not a plan in practice until you have exercised it.

We had an emergency action plan. It was real. It was specific. It named the aircraft. It was discussed out loud that morning and everyone agreed to it.

And when the emergency arrived, the plan disappeared.

Stress does not bring out your training. Stress brings out your habits. If saying the plan out loud isn't a habit, the plan is not there when you need it.

That gap cost me forty-two minutes of medical care I didn't get. In an electrical contact, those minutes are not neutral. Heart damage. Nerve damage. Internal complications that can surface hours later. They kept me 24 hours and drew blood every two hours around the clock, watching whether my kidneys could handle what the current had done inside me.

Forty-two minutes.

And the naming failure didn't start on that tower. The formal investigation confirmed our failures, and I own them. We didn't complete a hazard assessment of the towers we'd be working on. We didn't stop the job when we found the unfamiliar OPGW.

But the investigation found something else. There was no signage on that tower warning of the ungrounded OPGW. The structure data sheet didn't mention the vertical OPGW or the splice box at all. The information that would have changed our whole approach was never put in front of us.

The hazard went unnamed at every level. Not just by me. Not just by my crew. By the organization.

That's the thing about naming. It is not one person's job. It's the worker, the crew, the supervisor, and the company. And when it fails at any level, the people closest to the hazard pay for it.

Six failures, six different shapes. A blindness. A knowledge gap. A shared misunderstanding. A habit. A substitute. A reflex. Calling them all one thing would be too easy.

But every one of them lived in the gap between what we knew and what we said.

Here is what I'd tell my 2015 self, and what I'd tell any crew standing at a tailboard tomorrow.

Say the doubt you can't explain. When you have a doubt you can't articulate, the doubt itself is the data. You don't need to know why you're uncomfortable to say so. "Something's off and I can't say what" is a complete sentence. It belongs in the conversation. It gives the crew a chance to slow down and check what your gut already caught. I had that sentence inside me on that steel. I traded it for a tap.

Ask one more question after you already feel done. We were so relieved to have a plan that we forgot to ask whether the plan was complete. The sentence that would have saved me was: "I think we've covered it. What might we still be wrong about?" The trade doesn't teach that sentence. Start teaching it.

Exercise the plan, don't just agree to it. Practice the rescue. Pole-top and tower rescue, first aid, CPR, and the transport itself. Walk it. Time it. Rehearsing removes some of the mystery and apprehension of an incident, and it's the mystery that freezes people. We agreed to our plan that morning and had never once run it. When the moment came, the crew had nothing to fall back on but habit.

Presence is not a plan. A helicopter sitting at the LZ is not a medevac unless somebody has confirmed out loud, that morning, that it is. Presence is not capability. Presence is not weather-cleared. Presence is not a decision anybody has actually made yet.

Tell the truth about your own body. The hardest words on that tower weren't about the wire. They were I'm hurt. Every habit in me said push through. If you lead a crew, the way you handle your own bad day sets the ceiling for what your people will admit about theirs.

The most important thing anyone said that day was six words on a radio.

"Send the helicopter. Lito got hit."

I had already said I was fine. I meant it, in the way a man means it when he doesn't want to be the one who stopped the job. I don't want to be the one who had an incident. That's the sentence underneath "I'm fine," and most of you have said it too.

Somebody keyed a radio and named it anyway.

That's peer accountability. Not a poster. Not a program. A man who cared more about my life than my pride, who took ten seconds of discomfort so I wouldn't take a lifetime of something worse.

Ask yourself who on your crew would do that for you tomorrow. Then ask whether you've ever done it for them.

Last issue I laid out all six letters. This time I'm going to do something harder. I'm going to run the card against October 19, 2015, and show you exactly where it would have caught us.

E — EXERCISE. Have we practiced this, or have we only written it? We had the plan. We said it out loud that morning. We never once walked it. Nobody on that crew had ever moved a hurt man off steel, onto an aircraft, and to a hospital, not even as a drill. Rehearsing removes the mystery and apprehension of an incident. We had all of the mystery and none of the rehearsal. So when it happened, the crew did what people do under stress. They fell back on the thing they knew how to do, which was put a man in a truck. This is the letter that cost me forty-two minutes.

S — SITE CONDITIONS. What can hinder our rescue or evacuation? Run it like a hazard assessment. I was 150 feet up on steel in a hot 500kV corridor with a parallel circuit still energized. The hazard that hit me was still live afterward. I yelled "stay away from that" from a cross brace, which is another way of saying the area was not safe for anyone to enter, including EMS. And there was an OPGW configuration nobody on that crew had seen before. This letter forces the unfamiliar OPGW into the open before anybody leaves the ground.

C — COMMUNICATION. How will we communicate our emergency? This is the one that held. We had radio to the foreman at the landing zone. We used it that morning to call for a ground, and my crewmate used it to call for the helicopter. I want to be straight about that, because a framework that finds six failures out of six is a framework somebody bent to fit. The letter worked. It's the only one that did.

A — ACCESS. How did we get to the job site? Clipped to a sixty-foot long line under a helicopter. That's the honest answer, and writing it down makes something obvious that nobody said out loud that day. No ground responder was reaching me. Not on foot, not with a truck, not ever. Our access route was a specialty aviation operation, and if that ship had been down for any reason, there was no second way to me. This letter names the single point of failure we were all standing on.

P — POSITION. Where are we? A remote transmission corridor in northern California. No street address. What we had instead was a structure number and a circuit, which is the language the people coming for us already speak, and GPS coordinates, which is what matters most when a helicopter is part of the plan. This letter is the difference between "he's on a tower" and a set of numbers somebody can fly to.

E — EGRESS. How are we getting out of the job site? The plan said helicopter. Sixteen minutes. What happened was a supervisor's truck for fifty-eight. And here's the question underneath it that I never hear anybody ask: was the way we came in the right way to go out with an injured man? A sixty-foot long line with a healthy lineman on it is not the same operation as a long line with a man who just took multiple cycles of current and can't grip anything. Access is how they get in. Egress is how he leaves. They are not the same question and they were not the same answer.

Five of the six would have changed that day. One of them held.

I'd rather show you that honestly than sell you a framework that catches everything. It doesn't. It just asks the questions nobody was asking.

I've been describing this card from stages for years and never handed anyone one. So I built it.

The front is the six questions with the exact words to say. The back is what you hand dispatch when it goes bad, grouped by the letter it comes from. Position: address or cross street, GPS coordinates, and where you are on the electrical system. Access: your route from the main road, and whether the turn points are flagged. Site conditions: whether it's safe for EMS to enter, and what's still live if it isn't. Communication: cell service here, your backup device, and the nearest spot with confirmed coverage. Egress: whether a vehicle can reach the patient, the LZ, whether weather lets a ship fly today, and time to definitive care by air and by road.

Fill it in at the tailboard, in pen, every job. Not because the paperwork matters. Because a man reading that card out loud on the worst day of his life doesn't have to remember anything.

Print it. Cut it. Fill in the back in pen at the tailboard. It fits a shirt pocket and it's made to get dirty.

For Field Leaders (on the crew): Run the card tomorrow. Don't announce a program, just pull it out at the brief and read the six questions like a switching order. Then do the one thing that takes longer than four minutes and matters more than all of it: walk the rescue. Once. Before you start. And the next time somebody on your crew says "I'm fine," look at them for one extra second before you believe it. I said I was fine while my fingers were curling in on themselves.

For Supervisors (in your programs): Two things. First, go find out whether any crew you're responsible for has ever physically walked their emergency action plan. Not read it. Walked it, timed it, with somebody playing the patient. If the answer is no, you have a paragraph and a hope. Second, look at your structure data sheets and your signage. The investigation into my incident found the vertical OPGW and the splice box weren't on the sheet and weren't on the tower. My crew couldn't name a hazard that nobody had ever written down. That failure was upstream of us, and it's the kind that only a supervisor can fix.

For Executives (at the system level): Somewhere in your organization there is a crew who agreed to an emergency plan this morning that they have never once practiced, and there is a data sheet missing the one detail that would change how they approach a structure. Neither of those is a field failure. Fund the rescue capability that matches the work you send people to do, and then change what you measure. Stop asking whether every job has an emergency action plan. Start asking when each one was last exercised, and whether the hazards on the structure are actually written on the structure. Those are different questions, and only one set of them brings people home.

Tomorrow morning, before the first boot leaves the truck, ask these three out loud and wait for real answers:

"What's on this job that can put current in a man without announcing itself?"

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

"I think we've covered it. What might we still be wrong about?"

Then fill in the back of the card. Address or cross street. Coordinates. Your position on the electrical system. The route in from the main road. Whether EMS can safely enter. Your cell coverage, and what you're using if it dies.

Four minutes.

And one more, for you and nobody else. What sentence is sitting in your mouth right now that you haven't said yet?

Every letter on that card is a sentence somebody has to say before it matters.

I walk crews and leadership teams through this on their own jobsites, with their own terrain and their own worst day on the table. Half a day, a full day, or a keynote at your safety stand-down.

Reply to this email with your next stand-down or safety meeting date and I'll tell you straight whether I'm the right fit for it. Or go to www.leadingsafelineworkers.com to book a keynote, training, or consultation.

Because safety isn't a program. It's a leadership decision.

Share this with someone who needs it. Forward this to a foreman, a safety manager, or a crew member who's trying to lead better. Let's build this together.

Until next time,

Lito Wilkins