Reducing Worker Exposure and Electrical Failure Risk in Brownfield Manufacturing Facilities After COVID-Era Maintenance Delays

Abstract

Every skipped inspection leaves a mark that does not show up until later. When the pandemic forced manufacturers to thin their crews, restrict who could enter a plant, and postpone anything that was not an emergency, the work that got deferred first was often the electrical maintenance that keeps workers safe and equipment running: arc-flash studies left unrenewed, breakers and relays untested, thermographic scans skipped, preventive maintenance on aging switchgear pushed to a later date that kept receding. The result, in brownfield facilities already running on old infrastructure, was an accumulating backlog, a debt of deferred maintenance that quietly raised both the danger to workers and the likelihood of electrical failure. This study treats that debt as the central problem and asks how facilities pay it down: how they surface the backlog, size the risk hidden inside it, and work it off in the order that most reduces harm. It models a combined worker-safety and reliability recovery outcome as a function of six capabilities: maintenance-backlog assessment, deferred-risk quantification, worker-exposure control, electrical-reliability restoration, recovery scheduling and resourcing, and an integrating construct of post-pandemic maintenance recovery maturity. Evidence came from a structured five-point Likert survey completed by 154 valid respondents out of 172 distributed, an 89.5% valid response rate, drawn from maintenance and reliability engineers, electrical and power engineers, EHS and safety managers, plant and facilities managers, and maintenance planners, of whom 70.1% had directly managed electrical maintenance or safety through the pandemic and its aftermath. The data were analyzed with descriptive statistics, Cronbach's alpha, Pearson correlation, multiple regression, a maturity index, and a capability priority matrix. Every capability was rated in the high band, led by the combined safety-reliability recovery outcome at a mean of 4.29 and worker-exposure control at 4.20; reliability was strong, with alpha from 0.83 to 0.94. All correlations were positive and significant, the strongest being r = 0.80 between post-pandemic maintenance recovery maturity and the recovery outcome. The regression model explained 74.9% of the variance in the outcome, R² = 0.749, adjusted R² = 0.739, F(6,147) = 73.15, p < 0.001, with post-pandemic maintenance recovery maturity the leading predictor, β = 0.32, ahead of worker-exposure control, β = 0.25, and electrical-reliability restoration, β = 0.20. The central finding is that safety and reliability recover together, and stay recovered, only when a facility treats its pandemic maintenance backlog as a measured risk debt to be worked down deliberately, recovering the record, assessing the danger, prioritizing by risk, and restoring and retesting, rather than catching up haphazardly as time and budget allow.