Alyeska Pipeline Service Company was recognized with a Governor’s Safety Award of Excellence for the second year in a row at the recent Alaska Governor’s Safety & Health Conference in Anchorage.
“This is exciting because these awards aren’t just based on successful safety programs, but also on a company’s culture of safety,” said Brian Beauvais, Alyeska’s Senior Health and Safety Manager, Risk and Technical. “At Alyeska and on TAPS, people are making safety a priority.”
The Governor’s Safety Award of Excellence honors an organization’s safety and health systems that protect their employees in the workplace and promote corporate citizenship. Alyeska has received this award in the past, as well.
The TAPS workforce completed its best safety year ever in 2015. Alyeska staff and TAPS contractors worked a combined 5,827,988 hours and had just four recordable injuries while avoiding any days away from work cases during that time.
The state noted Alyeska’s dedication to flawless operations and maintenance, as well as how Alyeska and TAPS workers embody that safety culture. Alyeska is also known for its “stop work” policy, which allows any employee or contractor to stop a task if they identify something unsafe about the activity.
Beauvais attributed two major factors to the improved safety performance: more and better data is being collected, distributed and communicated by Alyeska’s Safety Department staff and TAPS supervisors and managers; and there is a better use of proactive tools like Safe Performance Self Assessments, Job Loss Analysis and Loss Prevention Observations that empower those performing the work.
Beauvais also pointed to the Safety Department’s forecasting work as an example of a preventative approach to keeping employees safe. A monthly report uses risk and injury data from the past to predict the highest risks for the month ahead. In Valdez, managers and supervisors meet regularly and discuss the forecasted risks, so that employees in the field know what to look out for on their job sites.
“TAPS-wide, there continues to be a significant increase in staff using these proactive tools which has led to a decrease in incidents, especially in the field,” Beauvais added. “People have really upped their game of using safety data and communicating it with one another.”
• Submitted by Alyeska Corporate Communications.