Meeting Branden Bauer
AO Safe and SPE Group leadership sat down with Branden Bauer and his wife, Katelyn. Branden spends his time now telling line crews what one assumption cost him.
Branden was a journeyman lineman with close to ten years in the trade, working for United Electric Cooperative in western Pennsylvania. In January 2021, during a system improvement project, he made contact with a conductor he believed was neutral. It was energized. The injuries were life-altering.
He could have kept that to himself. Instead he travels to line crews and safety meetings and tells them what happened, usually with Katelyn beside him, because the part crews do not picture is what an incident does to the people waiting at home. They have two daughters, Addilyn and Harper.
We are grateful he spent the evening with our teams. Hearing it from the person it happened to lands differently than hearing it from a slide.
The part that transfers to every crew
Branden was not careless. He was experienced, and he was working from a belief about the conductor in front of him that turned out to be wrong. That is the whole lesson, and it is why the sequence exists:
Test it. Ground it. Never assume a conductor is de-energized or neutral because it should be.
An assumption is not a control. Elimination — open, test, ground, work it de-energized — is the only level of the Hierarchy that would have changed that day.
Branden tells it himself
His story is the subject of an episode of Along Those Lines, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association’s podcast — “In the Blink of an Eye: Devastating Incident Becomes Teaching Tool.”
The publisher notes the episode contains graphic descriptions of electrical contact injuries and recovery.
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