The All-Employee Breakfast’s message centered on how far GUC has come and how far we have to go to achieve the vision of zero work injuries every single day.
Jeff McCauley, Chief Financial Officer, highlighted some of the barriers to safety that were identified and removed throughout the years thanks to employee input and participation. He offered a snapshot of how safety is addressed through Corporate Safety Initiative (CSI) programs, especially Lighthouse and Safe Align.
Anthony Miller, Director of Gas Systems, provided an overview of where GUC was 35 years ago and where we are now, painting the picture of growth and safety improvements through numbers and data.
Anthony said that this exceptional progress required employees to “enhance their skills,” “break down silos to improve collaboration among departments…change business processes to meet the demands of customers and a changing utility industry…and develop better strategies in responding to customers’ requests to exceed their expectations.”
In 1990, GUC had 72,446 active accounts, in 2025 it is 173,859. Annual revenue has grown by $198,791,162 since 1990, along with tremendous growth of our systems, capacity, and number of employees.
GUC did not have a corporate safety program in 1990 and had 30-70 recordable injuries per year in the early 90s with only 273 employees. Now, we have the CSI program which has been largely effective in improving the safety of employees. It has helped us reduce the recordable injuries per year to between 5-13. And that’s with 486 full-time employees.
“We have made tremendous progress over the last 35 years, but we know our work isn’t done, particularly regarding safety,” Anthony said.
John Worrell, Director of Electric, discussed what GUC was like 36 years ago, as a new employee coming into the utility industry.
John told a story about a large outage that occurred downtown about two years after he began. John said he was working on a large power outage with four people who had 20 to 25 plus years of experience, and they were going to replace a fuse while the electric power was still live.
John, who only had two years of experience at GUC at the time, said he told the supervisors and the employees with all this experience that what they were planning to do was dangerous and could cause severe injury or death if the fuse was replaced while the line was still hot.
“I spoke up and said something, and they still didn’t listen” John said. “Fortunately, this story has a happy ending, but 36 years later, I still think about that dangerous situation. These were four experienced leaders who made this decision. I spoke up, and it didn’t make a difference, they were going to do it anyway.”
John said he was glad that things have changed now, and anyone can stop work for any reason if it appears unsafe. Now, those switchgears have been modernized, and those hazards have been engineered out.
“Do you think we are safer today, than we were 30 years ago? Yeah, I think we are. We don’t want to go back to the days of fireballs and bad things happening,” John said.
David Springer, Director of Water Resources, took the stage to highlight where GUC is going for the future. David spent some time engaging with the audience about how they viewed the importance of safety, institutionally and personally.
“We’ve had some accidents recently, and some were very serious accidents, and some could have been much worse,” he said.
David talked about the need to shift our thinking from having safety just as priority to safety being a core value. Priorities change daily, weekly, or monthly. Core values do not. Our commitment to safety must be present in all that we do.
Tony Cannon, General Manager and CEO, concluded the breakfast, driving home the importance of safety and celebrating how far GUC has come.
“Back around the first of the year, back when David was talking about, we had a series of accidents that left me scratching my head,” Tony said.
“How are we doing this and why is this happening? Someone told me one time, when you’re facing a problem, you start by looking in the mirror.
“It got me thinking, we have a lot of young inexperienced folks in our workforce today. In the fabric of our organization there are two common threads, one is safety, and the other is exceptional customer service, we want to be good at both of those – not one -- both of those. Oftentimes, we rush and get hurried, and we think people are able to do jobs that maybe they are not quite able to do yet. It’s OK to say, ‘wait a minute I’m not comfortable with this.’ I would 1,000 times you do that rather than take a chance and take a risk and do something that you don’t know how to do.”
He said that GUC has come a long way in bolstering safety, going from a one in 6 chance of sustaining a work-related injury in 1990 to a one in 60 chance today.
But there is still more work to do to reach zero injuries every day.
“I’m not going to be satisfied until we reach this vision and make zero injuries a reality every single day. You can do that, and I appreciate the fact that you stand up and lead from where you are, regardless of your job title,” Tony said.
