Assessing (Auditing) the Conformity with Legal and Other Provisions in Terms of Occupational Health and Safety of Critical Power Infrastructures

Abstract

In order to ensure energy, economic and societal security, the State must ensure access to electricity to all domestic, industrial and vital consumers, which are made through critical power infrastructures. This makes power substations strategic objectives of national and European interest, and the role of OHS (personnel and secure workplaces in an ergonomic and healthy working environment) on them becomes a major objective to ensure the smooth functioning of the national economy. In the current situation, and in many unfortunate cases, OHS activity is subordinate to production or service activity and OHS risk assessments and audits are also made formally by non-specialized personnel, leading to undesirable events with an unstable effect, and the need for assessment (auditing) with legal and other provisions is intended to verify compliance with OHS rules and principles and to limit or stop work accidents. This paper addresses the verification of OHS, by “INCDPM Bucharest method” - Assessment of conformity with legal and other provisions (auditing)” - to an European critical infrastructure (power substation), for the purpose of verifying knowledge and conformity with legal and other provisions at the workplace level and assessing the efficiency or failure of the OHS management system of the analyzed economic entity management, and after implementation it will serve as a tool to verify the functioning of the system. The assessment (auditing) of the OHS shows that the critical power infrastructure under consideration has an overall level of safety close to maximum (99,88%) and a low overall risk level, which means that OHS rules are met and the assessment (auditing) has had a positive effect.