Safety

The truest test of any great company is how well it protects the safety and health of its people. At the Savannah River Site (SRS), our record speaks for itself.

Washington Savannah River Company (WSRC) has been recognized by the South Carolina Department of Labor and the Governor of South Carolina for outstanding safety achievement during calendar year 2006. This prestigious Safety Achievement Award was received for 8,743,761 work hours without an occupational lost time injury or illness. This is one of a number of awards received by WSRC for its safety excellence. In addition, WSRC has also been recognized for its safety record by the South Carolina Manufacturers Association Plant Safety. The award is given to those plants that worked all of 2006 with an exemplary safety record.

SRS Construction forces have worked more than 20 million safe hours and counting. That means that the Construction workforce has completed more than nine years without a work-related injury or illness that caused time lost from work. Safety performance such as this is almost unheard of in the construction industry. The last lost-time injury was June 23, 1998.

Since 1989, when WSRC was awarded the SRS contract, the WSRC Team has exceeded ten million hours of work without a lost work day injury on ten separate occasions. Last time this milestone was reached was January 2007. WSRC continues to build on the rich site safety legacy of being one of the safest sites in the DOE complex and one of the safest major industrial sites in the world. Protecting workers, the public, the environment, and national security interest are our highest priorities. We are proud of our strong safety tradition, and will stop work rather than compromise the safety and health of a fellow co-worker. Because we share this strong conviction, our daily work in support of our nation and the world is managed with the highest regards to safety.

Voluntary Protection Program (VPP)
Over the years, WSRC has received many commendations for our safety performance. In 2001, SRS was awarded STAR Status in the Department of Energy Voluntary Protection Program (DOE-VPP). VPP is a joint Department of Energy and Occupational Safety and Health Administration-sponsored program focusing on every aspect of an organization’s safety and health initiatives. WSRC is the largest and most complex organization ever to receive STAR status recognition in the VPP process. Paramount to the awarding of VPP status is a strong management commitment to safety and employee involvement in all phases of the program. We believe we have both.

To complement our Star status recognition in 2000 the DOE bestowed upon our company their most prestigious annual award for safety excellence, the DOE-VPP Star of Excellence Award in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006. This award recognizes DOE-VPP companies that maintain their injury and illness rates at least 75 percent below the industry average and perform outstanding outreach activities. At the 2007 Annual National Voluntary Protection Program Participant's Association (VPPPA) conference in Washington, D.C., in addition to the Star of Excellence, WSRC also received the DOE Outreach Award and the VPP Champions Award for their exemplary work in assisting other organizations in their quest to attain VPP Star status.

In 2003, WSRC's Safety Management Program was again evaluated by DOE-HQ and subsequently recertified as a STAR site with no findings cited. Since recertification, WSRC has been awarded the Star of Excellence for four consecutive years. Also, in 2005, SRS became only the second site within the DOE complex to attain the Legacy of Stars award, which is given to those sites attaining Star of Excellence status for three consecutive years.

Behavior Based Safety (BBS)
Although WSRC has received numerous local and national safety awards and honors and, although our injury frequency rates across the board are among the very best in the world, we will not be content until all injuries and illnesses are eliminated. To that end, we have implemented BBS throughout our company. Our Behavior-Based Safety process was designed to be an integral component of our Integrated Safety Management System (ISMS). It supports the ISMS principles and every one of its core functions. BBS has empowered our national recognition within the VPP as the second site in the nation to achieve the Legacy of Stars award.

BBS addresses the dynamics of injury prevention designed to focus attention on the identification and elimination of behaviors that place us at risk. Each of us, from our weekly salaried associates to our company president, is encouraged to participate in the process as BBS observers and as safety improvement team members. We actively use behavioral checklists to observe one another's work practices and then share the results in one-on-one "actively-caring" conversations. These constructive feedback sessions include a discussion of both the safe and at-risk behaviors observed, as well as at-risk workplace conditions (including management factors) that are real time factors influencing safe performance of work.

We are now in the process of integrating what we have learned from the application of behavioral science, through the BBS process and Human Performance Improvement (HPI) technologies, to take advantage of their synergistic mix. The BBS process enabled our company to reduce our already world class injury frequency rates by almost 70% and we firmly believe that, through continued improvement of the process, BBS will one day help us to reach an injury free workplace a goal shared by all company associates regardless of their role in achieving this success.