It was day six. We'd been dispatched out of our home area and had been working in temperatures our crews don't see very often. Heat storm. The kind that catches a grid off guard and drops transformers faster than crews can replace them. Transformers were blowing up across the territory. Phones ringing, dispatch pushing, and the work just kept coming.

That day the temps were pushing 120 degrees. No clouds. No wind. Just heat sitting on you like weight. By midday you stopped sweating the way you're supposed to. Your body was working harder than it should just to keep you upright, and your brain was running about a half-step behind everything your hands were doing.

We rolled up on a three-pot bank that had blown. Pulled the old transformers, hung the new ones, and rewired the existing cutouts back into the circuit. The crew was moving, but everyone was quiet. That particular kind of quiet that comes from heat and exhaustion, not focus.

We finished the tie-ins and prepared to re-energize. One man on the fuse stick, ready to close the cutouts in sequence. First one closed. Second one closed. On the third cutout, when he clamped it shut, it broke in half. Clean break. The top half of that cutout, now energized, was hanging from the end of the fuse stick.

Nobody moved.

We had missed a cracked cutout before re-energization. Those cutouts had been in our hands during the rewire. We'd worked around them, handled them, and wired directly to them. The crack was right there in front of us the entire time. Nobody saw it.

The crack wasn't hidden. It wasn't on the back side of the hardware or buried under years of grime. It was visible and we were inches away from it during the rewire. But six days into 115-degree temps, our inspection had become motion without intention. We touched the equipment without actually looking at it. Fatigue didn't make us rushed. It made us blind to what was right in front of us. We were so focused on completing the task that we stopped seeing the components we were working with.

When heat and fatigue stack on top of each other, your brain stops registering what your eyes are passing over. You look without seeing. The fix is simple, but it has to be deliberate. Before you re-energize anything, stop. Name every component you're about to close in on. Look at it, not past it. Say out loud what you're inspecting and what you're checking for. If someone had stopped at that third cutout and said, "inspecting before I close," we catch the crack. That one sentence changes the outcome. Name it before you energize it.

A foreman I worked with used to say, "If you're explaining why it's fine, you already know it's not." He was talking about fatigue. The moment you start justifying why you can push through one more pole, one more splice, one more task, you've already admitted you're not fit for duty. The best crews don't wait until someone makes a mistake. They name it early. "I'm dragging today. Let's double-check this before we move." That's not weakness. That's leadership.

Fatigue isn't something you power through. It's something you manage. Here's how to apply the AAA framework when you or your crew are running on empty:

ASK: Am I fit for duty?

If the answer to any of these is no, you're not fit. Say it out loud.

ADAPT: Adjust task complexity.

Fatigue makes you skip steps. Adapting means building in steps you can't skip.

ACT: Rest or rotate.

Action isn't always doing more. Sometimes it's knowing when to stop.

Fatigue is a leadership problem before it's a worker problem. If your crews are deep into extended shifts without rotation or rest, the risk isn't just out there on the pole. It's in every decision being made at ground level.

Field Leaders: If you're too tired to think clearly, say it. Your crew watches what you do more than what you say. If you push through, they will too.

Supervisors: Your storm response plan needs rotation schedules and clear criteria for stepping crews back. If it doesn't account for performance degradation after back-to-back shifts, build that in now. Before the next storm hits.

Executives: Look at what you reward. If the praise always goes to the crew that worked six straight days, that's the standard you're setting. Fund adequate staffing. Make rest part of the plan. No outage restoration is worth the call you'd have to make to someone's family.

Before you start work tomorrow, ask yourself: Am I fit for duty? Not "Can I do this?" but "Should I?" If the answer isn't a clear yes, name it. Say it out loud. Because tired hands don't just make mistakes. They make deadly ones.

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Until next time,

Lito Wilkins