In this episode of The Co-op Heroes Podcast, James Tanneberger, CEO of South Central Indiana REMC, shares the story that permanently changed the way he thinks about safety and how it shaped the leader he is today.

ames opens up about his early career working around substations without fully understanding the risks involved. Safety felt like a formality back then, not because he was reckless, but because nobody had ever shown him how close to danger he actually was. That changed when a colleague with 36 years of experience was killed during a routine switching operation after a breaker closed into a hot bus inside a metal clad unit. What happened next wasn't just a policy change. It was a complete reckoning with what safety culture actually means.

The conversation goes deep on the idea that accidents like this one rarely come down to a single mistake. The real root cause is almost always culture, the invisible message an organization sends its people about what actually matters. James explains how leaders communicate priorities without saying a word, through budget decisions, PPE approvals, and whether they stop to listen when a lineman flags a hazard. At SCI-REMC, that recently meant burying a stretch of line overrun with rattlesnakes because the crew asked and leadership listened.

We also talk about the role of technology in keeping linemen out of harm's way, from remotely operated switching devices to automated outage management systems that can reduce an outage from 600 homes to 60 before a truck ever rolls, removing the need for a lineman to stand underneath a switch that throws sparks on a fireball.

Featured topics

• The incident that made safety James's permanent number one priority

• Why the root cause of most accidents is culture, not individual error

• How budget decisions send louder messages than any safety speech

• Building a culture where every employee owns safety personally

• How fiber optic infrastructure and smart grid technology are keeping co-op linemen safer

• The Checklist Manifesto and why even experienced crews need written procedures

This episode is a reminder that safety is not a program you roll out. It is a culture you build, one decision at a time.