Safety Stories - BlueScope Steel HSEC Report 2004

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Sharing Safety

BlueScope Steel Visitors Get a Texas Size Welcome at Vistawall

Safety with our Customers

BlueScope Steel hosted Smorgon Steel Tube Mills General Manager Tony Schreiber and Executive Manager Operations, Vic Patterson on a tour of the Port Kembla Steelworks late last year, to share insights and practices around safety.

Like BlueScope Steel, Smorgon Steel is committed to improving its safety performance. After years of improvement, Smorgon Steel Tube Mills had reached a LTIFR of four, and then appeared to have plateaued. Not satisfied with this, they sought to learn how BlueScope Steel had overcome this phenomenon, so they too could continue the journey towards Zero Harm.

BlueScope Steel welcomes the opportunity to share safety practices with our customers and partners. Our relationship with Smorgon Steel will continue as we both work towards the goal of Zero Harm.

Access Self Assessment Kit

BlueScope Steel has made significant progress in reducing the safety risk for employees working routinely in and around high-speed steel processing lines.

An internal working group, the Safe Access Network, was established to look at ways of addressing the risk, culminating in the development of new best practice safety guidelines and the release in late 2003 of a Safe Access Self Assessment kit, including a training video. The self-assessment kit aims to generate high quality discussions amongst manufacturing work teams and to promote self-realisation of the gap between current practices and best practice.

Significantly, the training video has been translated into five languages - English, Malay, Thai, Chinese and Indonesian - for use right across the Company.

Safe Access has been identified as one of the BlueScope Steel's highest Critical Safety Risks.

The particular risk arises from an employee having to put any part of his or her anatomy in the pass line of a steel processing line as part of a routine task. The basic principles of Safe Access are to guard against the hazard and then work out how to safely access the line.

The training video aims to educate all employees to avoid being in a position of risk and to make best practice in Safe Access a fundamental part of the safety culture across the company.

During 2003, the Safe Access Network engaged employees from all steel operational sites in Australia and Asia and introduced best practice guidelines for safe access.

Any new purchases of equipment, or existing equipment upgrades must now be Safe Access compliant. The Company has committed millions of dollars for new and modified equipment to 'engineer out' risks wherever possible.

All BlueScope Steel manufacturing sites are making significant changes to reduce the risks of safe access related accidents.

The biggest challenge is in adopting a different set of behaviours as an interim measure, until the equipment modifications are complete. This has involved significant commitment from operators and tradespeople, who have undertaken major changes to their work practices, striving to keep the outcomes practical and achievable.

BlueScope Steel Visitors Get a Texas Size Welcome at Vistawall

In the week prior to the acquisition of Butler Manufacturing, BlueScope Steel's Vice President Occupational Health and Safety, Mick Cassar and Manager Safety Health and Risk for Industrial Markets, Dr Chris Darling teamed up to visit the main Butler Buildings and Vistawall North American sites and share the BlueScope Steel safety journey.

President Industrial Markets, Lance Hockridge, who has responsibility for BlueScope Steel's North American operations, had asked that priority be given to communicating the Company's safety beliefs across the North American businesses.

To achieve this, Mick Cassar and Chris Darling visited a number of Butler Building and Vistawall sites to assess the status of safety across the operations, identify any opportunities for sharing of Butler 'good practices' back into other parts of BlueScope Steel and recommend any improvement ideas in line with our goal of Zero Harm.

In their travels, Mick and Chris shared the story of BlueScope Steel's safety journey with a large number of site people. Sites visited included Butler Buildings in Illinois, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, Mexico, California, Kansas City and Tennessee, and Vistawall in Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin.

Mick and Chris said they returned from their journey with the overwhelming impression that the Butler Buildings and Vistawall organisations have a couple of noteworthy strengths, including the leadership's genuine desire to learn and improve, and a culture where when an expectation is set, the resulting conformance is generally high.

"This should therefore enable both Butler Buildings and Vistawall to achieve within the next year or so what it took BlueScope Steel the past five years," Mick said.

"As we wandered the sites we received lots of comments about how impressed people were with the fact that the first message they were receiving about BlueScope Steel was the importance we place on safety.

"This in turn made them feel proud to be joining an organisation that held their safety in such high regard," he said.