THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, December 2, 1995 TAG: 9512020606
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY CHRISTOPHER DINSMORE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 75 lines
Newport News Shipbuilding is the safest workplace of its kind in the nation, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
OSHA awarded the giant Peninsula shipyard, which builds aircraft carriers for the Navy, its top ``STAR'' rating for excellence in workplace health and safety.
The shipyard, which employs nearly 19,000 people, is the largest of the 200 workplaces in the nation to have earned the designation. It is also the only one in Virginia and the only shipyard in the country on the list.
``There's nothing easy about managing health and safety at a shipyard,'' said William P. Fricks, the shipyard's chief executive and president. ``It takes a tremendous amount of dedication.''
Given what they do, any shipyard has an extremely high risk for accidents. There's welding, work in confined spaces, high voltage electric lines, cranes lifting things overhead and lots of heavy lifting.
``Accidents and injuries are unacceptable at this shipyard and in this company,'' said Dana Mead, chairman of Tenneco Inc., the shipyard's parent company. ``Unacceptable in human terms of pain and suffering.''
Mead also added that a safe workplace saves a company millions of dollars on insurance and litigation costs and in lost work time.
For Newport News Shipbuilding, the designation is a far cry from 1979, when 15 OSHA inspectors came to the yard for nearly 60 days looking for health and safety violations.
The yard's STAR designation marks the beginning of a new relationship with OSHA based on a partnership, said Joe Dear, assistant secretary of labor for occupational health and safety, who gave the award to the yard. Because of the strength of its safety program, the yard could go three years without an OSHA inspection.
To earn the STAR, Newport News Shipbuilding had to develop a comprehensive and successful health and safety program. It needed accident and lost-workday averages at or below the national average for its industry for at least the past three years.
In 1994, the shipyard had an accident case rate of 17.8 percent, meaning 17.8 of every 100 employees had a reportable incident of some sort. The industry average case rate is 35 percent. Also, the yard had a lost-time rate of 4.2 percent, compared with 8 percent for the industry.
The road to the STAR designation at the yard began about two years ago as Paul Linton, the senior safety engineer, was completing a safety inspection.
Linton asked an older employee what could be done to improve safety in the area. The man handed him three pages of ideas. Linton was stunned that he'd missed so much. The employee told him: ``Son, you couldn't identify this stuff unless you were here working every day,'' Linton said.
Linton decided to develop labor-management teams throughout the shipyard to help identify safety problems and fix them.
More than 45 ``health and safety task teams'' were established in the yard. Each team was made up of a handful of laborers and a manager or two who met every week or so.
The hardest thing about the teams was convincing workers that they were designed to break down walls between workers and management, Linton said.
Each team got comprehensive safety training and was responsible for safety inspections, analysis of job hazards and accident investigations in their areas.
Theodore R. Hall, a pipefitter in the yard for 17 years and a member of the pipe department's safety team, said he developed a ``near-miss'' program to investigate near-accidents and resolve whatever caused the near-accident.
``About 75 percent of all accidents are forecast by a near-miss,'' Hall said.
Hall said the team concept has changed the shipyard. ``I've seen a big change in workers' attitudes toward safety,'' Hall said. ``It used to be an almost `I-don't-care' attitude, but now there's a genuine concern about safety.'' by CNB