Our safety culture, programs and initiatives.
Our safety culture is reinforced through policies, management systems and day-to-day practices that hold us all accountable for health and safety. Our safety culture relies on teams and individuals committed to working together to create and maintain a workplace where potential hazards are managed and controlled.
We prioritize a safe work culture in recruiting and hiring new employees, seeking out people who are as committed to safety as we are. We hold our third-party vendors, suppliers, contractors and on-site tenants to the same high safety and health standards that guide our people every day and we work to enable them to adhere to our standards.
The Safety, Health & Environment Committee of our Board of Directors, along with the full Board, has oversight responsibility for our safety and health program and results. Ongoing management responsibility for all safety, health and environmental initiatives is guided by our Safety, Health & Environment Management Committee, which is made up of the senior leadership team along with other key senior personnel from cross-functional operations and staff disciplines.
In striving for a workplace that is free of accidents and injuries, we have continued to build our safety culture through strong leadership, ongoing training and an emphasis on safe workplace behaviors.
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Our key safety programs and initiatives include:
- Actively engaging all employees across the entire company.
- Thoroughly and routinely inspecting our facilities for potential hazards.
- Providing the training, proper tools and equipment to do every job safely.
- Reporting “near misses” to help teams learn from incidents that could have become accidents.
- Pairing tenured employees with newly hired employees to share institutional knowledge and experience involving plant sites, equipment and different workplace situations and scenarios.
- Deploying safety technologies in our mobile equipment and ready-mix truck fleets.
Safety Performance.
Overall, our 2020 safety performance continued at a world-class level, with 0.88 MSHA/OSHA injuries per 200,000 hours worked, compared to 0.99 in 2019 and 0.92 in 2018.
The period 2017-2020 represents four consecutive years of world-class safety performance, measured as less than one reportable/recordable injury for every 200,000 employee-hours worked. Of our 516 facilities in the United States, Mexico and the Bahamas, 92% were accident-free in 2020. In fact, a number of our operations have achieved accident-free records year after year. At the end of 2020, our single largest operation, Sac-Tun, in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, reached a remarkable 5.25 million work hours without a lost-time injury.
Notwithstanding this record, we deeply regret that three Vulcan employees lost their lives on the job in 2020. These tragic deaths are a permanent reminder and challenge for all of us as we work hard throughout our company to meet our goal of zero accidents. That is our goal, and we know it is achievable.
When a fatality occurs, Vulcan cooperates fully with law enforcement and regulatory officials. In every case, we conduct a thorough investigation, make changes to policies and practices if indicated, and train employees to prevent future accidents.
