ABB is unwilling to rest on its laurels despite an excellent health & safety record across its businesses, the industries it serves and a very large number of customer sites.
The latest drive in the company’s Power Systems business has focused on employees working at power substations.
People working in substations face a number of Occupational Health & Safety (OHS) risks. These include: working at height, working with electricity and lifting operations, and managing the safety of contractors.
To keep everyone’s eye firmly on the topic, Claudio Facchin, head of ABB Power Systems’ Substation business unit is sponsoring an ‘Energizing Safety’ initiative to increase still further the company’s substation safety performance.
Claudio Facchin says, “By their very nature substations are home to a good many risks. This fact means that we must have a formal process and a culture of safety on every one of our substation projects.
“The Energizing Safety initiative is a pre-emptive, strategic tool to keep our people safe without weakening our ability to successfully meet our customer commitments.”
ABB is developing a formal project management process for all its local businesses. This embraces its expertise in project site management and risk reduction.
Right from the pre-bid stage, through to completion, health and safety should be embedded in each phase of the project. Checklists (including a Contractor Code of Practice for construction site), procedures and audit tools are being introduced.
As a first step, the ABB Group Sustainability Affairs team organized a UK training session in September. Twenty participants, including safety, operational and construction managers from eight different regions took part. Marc Slater, Group OHS advisor, led the workshop together with Bob Narvaez, health and safety manager for Power Systems in North America, and Jim Miller, construction manager from the UK.
After some brief introductory lectures, the training became hands-on: the group visited an ABB construction site and had the opportunity to put the theory into practice. The following days were spent in a construction college, where everyone built their knowledge of vital topics such as the safe handling of ladders, scaffolds and towers. They also learned the specific OHS risks to be considered for excavations, trenching and heavy equipment.
The purpose of this training was to create a number of OHS champions capable of visiting and auditing project sites – identifying potential dangers and unsafe practices, as well as being competent in managing these risks with the project managers responsible for each location.