Performance
Safety
We are committed to an incident and injury free workplace. Our goal is zero harm. We believe that all injuries are preventable and our aim is for everyone to go home safe and healthy at the end of each day. We strive to create an environment where all employees and contractors have the knowledge, skills and desire to work safely. Our safety performance statistics include both employees and contractors at managed operations.
Regrettably we did not meet our goal of zero fatalities. Eighteen people were fatally injured while working at Rio Tinto managed operations this year, including ten lives that were lost when a helicopter crashed while travelling from our La Granja copper development in Peru, and two at Alcan Engineered Products operations. We have thoroughly investigated each of these incidents, and communicated and are continuing to act upon the lessons learned. We continue to provide support and counselling to the families impacted by these incidents.
Following application of the Rio Tinto safety definitions to the former Alcan statistics, Rio Tinto's combined 2007 all injury frequency rate (AIFR) baseline increased from 0.97 to 1.21 as of December 2007. Our AIFR for the enlarged Rio Tinto Group has improved by 21 per cent this year.
Similarly, as a result of the integration of Rio Tinto and Alcan data in 2007, our lost time injury frequency rate (LTIFR) baseline increased from 0.42 to 0.61. Our LTIFR for the enlarged Group improved by 18 per cent during 2008.
We met our 2003 to 2008 AIFR and LTIFR targets with a 53 per cent and 51 per cent reduction respectively (excluding former Alcan operations), compared to the 50 per cent reduction target. We also set revised AIFR and LTIFR improvement targets for 2007-2008 for the enlarged Group of 1.05 and 0.56 respectively. These were both met with year end rates of 0.95 and 0.50.
We understand that low injury rates do not mean that fatalities will not happen, and that we must actively manage the safety of all those who work on our sites - employees and contractors alike.
We have a number of initiatives to assist us in achieving our goals including:
- The Safety Leadership Development Programme, which aims at ensuring all levels of supervision understand what is expected of them while in a leadership role and why it is so important.
- The Semi Quantitative Risk Assessment (SQRA) process which identifies critical risks at a business by utilising historical data and input from a cross section of key personnel. All businesses are required to carry out an SQRA and action plans are in place for mitigating the critical risks.
- Our rigorous approach to process safety management, through our health, safety environment and quality management system, application of the SQRA approach for process safety hazard risk and control analysis, a process safety risk review programme, and the adoption of leading indicators for process safety management.
A gap analysis against Rio Tinto safety standards has been conducted at the former Alcan sites and the identified gaps are being addressed according to the level of risk.
In 2009 we will continue the focus on contractor management. A complete review will be conducted with internal and external benchmarking of best practice. The results will be used to formulate a strategy for creating a consistently high standard of contractor safety performance.
