Pasadena Water and Power Earns Public Power’s Top-Tier Safety Award for Its Crews

The crews who keep the lights on in Pasadena have earned a national mark of distinction — not for the power they deliver, but for how safely they deliver it.

Pasadena Water and Power received the American Public Power Association’s Safety Award of Excellence for 2025 at the Diamond level, the highest of the program’s three tiers. The award goes each year to public utilities with low incident rates and strong safety programs and culture, and it placed Pasadena among 240 utilities recognized across the country.

The association groups entrants by their annual worker-hours of exposure, then ranks them on incident-free records and the overall state of their safety programs and culture during the year. Pasadena landed in the group covering utilities with 250,000 to 999,999 worker-hours, alongside other California systems including Anaheim and Burbank. According to the association, the 240 honorees were drawn from more than 2,000 municipal electric utilities nationwide.

The 2025 awards were presented at the association’s engineering and operations conference earlier this year. Diamond is the top designation a utility can earn; it reflects standing within a peer group, not a single national ranking.

Pasadena Water and Power highlighted the recognition on its Facebook page during Safe + Sound Week, timing it to OSHA’s national workplace-safety observance held each August, which runs Aug. 10 to 16 this year. “PWP is proud to put the safety of our workers at the forefront of everything we do,” the utility said in the post.

The local stake is direct. Pasadena Water and Power is a community-owned, not-for-profit utility owned and operated by the City of Pasadena. It provides electricity to more than 65,000 customers within the city and delivers water to almost 38,000 households and businesses in Pasadena and neighboring San Gabriel Valley communities. The award recognizes the safety record of the utility’s power operations — the field crews, plant staff and operators who deliver that electricity.

The distinction is not the utility’s first from the association, which has run the safety program for more than six decades. Pasadena Water and Power also holds the association’s Diamond-level Reliable Public Power Provider designation, a separate recognition covering reliability, safety, workforce development and system improvement.

Safety awards are counted one year at a time. For a utility, the measure that matters is whether the next year looks like this one.