In a recent interview with APPA, Scott Rogers, the Chief Utility Engineer for Illinois public power utility City Water, Light and Power, detailed the steps that the utility has taken to achieve high levels of employee safety.
In January of this year, CWLP announced that its employees achieved a major safety milestone in 2025, recording the lowest accident rate in the utility's history and sending more employees home safely at the end of each workday.
CWLP has also been recognized for its safety efforts by APPA. The utility earned a 2025 Diamond level designation from APPA for safe operating practices.
“We took a deep look into our accident history and we started going out and not just electric industry, we started meeting with different companies and some Fortune 500 companies that have very, very good history of low accidents,” Rogers said in detailing the history of the utility’s steps to strengthen safety in a recent episode of APPA’s Public Power Now podcast.
The utility took that information and started putting a plan together and part of that plan led to the creation of a Safety Leadership Council.
The Safety Leadership Council covers both electric and water operations. “It's all of our division heads and all of our main directors for every department, so we meet once a month and we share information,” Rogers said.
There is also an executive leadership committee, which is comprised of division managers of all the departments.
The Safety Leadership Council shares ideas and talks about accidents “and how other people or other departments manage the personnel and manage the accidents and all the way from daily toolbox talks to monthly safety meetings, offering incentives and just putting different small pieces in place over the years.”
CWLP has dropped incident rates significantly over the years.
When looking at safety trends, “what you'll see is you'll see some significant drops, then you see a plateau. Once we see that plateau,” the utility proactively moves to examine what is causing the plateau. “How are we going to move forward to drive this down again?”
Through the Safety Leadership Council and the executive leadership group “we can have those discussions and we can talk about it openly and be able to figure out what we can do to help provide that information to our field workers and make sure that they're staying safe, not trying to rush a job, make sure safety's first.”
Safety strategies include toolbox talks, daily job briefings and job hazard analysis before personnel go out to every job.
Other topics discussed in the podcast episode were the utility’s effort to develop a new integrated resource plan and strategies it has implemented to maintain affordable electric rates for its customers.
