Safety

Our activities involve working with large, heavy equipment and with explosives and chemicals, sometimes at extreme temperatures. We also face normal industrial hazards such as driving vehicles, working at heights and operating machinery with dangerous moving parts.

But, despite all that, we believe that all injuries are preventable, and regard safety as a core value and a major priority. So while we have one of the best records in the industry, we have committed ourselves to creating an injury free workplace. This is one where everyone - employees, contractors and visitors alike -goes home safe and healthy each day.

How we make safety a core value

In 1998, we began a drive to improve our safety management.  Since then, our injury rate has fallen by 77 per cent (end of 2006). This means that, statistically, 5,400 fewer people were injured than in the period ending 1998. This is a major achievement and one of which we should be proud. But while we have made great progress and are still improving, we still have injuries and fatalities at our sites and significant incidents continue to occur that are of great concern.

So in 2006, we asked ourselves the question: 'What else can we do to eliminate all injuries?'

A starting point was to gather our employees' opinions about our safety culture. This revealed that while we were good at developing and implementing systems, safety itself was widely seen as a business imperative rather than as a personal value.

As a result, we have now revised our safety strategy in line with these findings. We have moved from focusing solely on systems and instead, concentrate more on individual intentions and behaviour, while still ensuring our systems remain fit for purpose. 

Our results

Our goal is to have no fatalities at all our operations. Our target is to reduce the number lost time injuries, per 200 000 man hours (LTIFR) between 2003 and 2008 by 50 per cent. An additional, related target is to reduce the number of all injuries, per 200,000 man hours (AIFR) between 2003 and 2008 by 50 per cent.