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Key Challenge
Fatality Elimination
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Safety—Approach

 At Alcoa, we strive to work safely in a manner that protects and promotes the health and well-being of our employees, contractors, and the communities in which we operate because it is fundamentally the right thing to do.

Collective and individual commitment to Alcoa’s core environment, health, and safety (EHS) value remains important during extremely difficult economic times. When plants are forced to operate with fewer resources, we recognize that this can translate to less supervision and oversight at a time when distraction, time pressure, and a focus on production may be increasing our risk. Even in difficult times, we remain committed to living our values and managing risks accordingly.

Our safety systems are built on a foundation of values and principles, with the cornerstones being anchored in place by people, trust, and production system stability.

Each day, people at all levels help defend against weaknesses that develop in our safety systems by recognizing risks and error precursors and responding to eliminate or control them or solve their causal factors close in time, place, and occurrence. This drives improvements in equipment, processes, and work methods, as well as individual and group performance.

We believe safety is largely about cultural change, with the ultimate goal of institutionalizing an effective and efficient safety system. This system must first and foremost protect the individual, providing a safe and healthy environment that allows employees to meet customer needs and unlock the business potential of the organization.

Cultural change is a journey, not an event. World-class safety performance requires consistent and unwavering leadership that starts at the top and extends to line leadership, which is accountable for the overall safety system, particularly its effective implementation and continuous improvement. It is our belief that you can’t be a world-class company if your safety performance is weak.

Along with accountability goes the need for reward and recognition. It is important to recognize and celebrate safety accomplishments. Even more important, safety system learnings must be standardized and institutionalized across the organization.

The following are the four main activities undertaken in support of our safety system:
  • Identifying hazards and assessing the risks associated with our products, services, and operations;
  • Developing and implementing operational controls with built-in layers of protection to mitigate effectively the impact of those risks;
  • Monitoring and maintaining our hazard recognition, risk assessment, and operational control activities to ensure they are current and effective; and
  • Reacting to correct gaps in our protective systems and continuously improve system stability.


Identifying Hazards and Assessing the Risks
We expect each business unit to proactively identify potential hazards in the workplace, going beyond regulatory compliance or just looking for ways to reduce injuries. We want them to identify and eliminate exposure to potential hazards.

Exposure to hazards occurs at the working interface—the place where the work environment, including the equipment and in-process materials, interacts with what people do and the work methods they use to do it. Ideally, we want to find solutions and use countermeasures that eliminate potential hazards. When hazard elimination is not technically feasible or is extremely impractical, we need to at least ensure that the hazards are managed so that incidents are prevented by reducing the:
  • Potential effects or severity of a hazard;
  • Likelihood of exposure to the hazard; and
  • Frequency of exposure

We employ various risk assessment methodologies, but one of the most common methodologies in use throughout Alcoa is the operational risk analysis. On complex processes or high-consequence scenarios, a more quantitative risk assessment tool known as fault-tree analysis may also be used to help identify potential causes of system failure before they actually occur.

The single biggest challenge to identifying hazards and assessing risk is in capturing the experiences and capabilities of our personnel to:
  • Analyze past experiences;
  • Identify applicable lessons about hazards/risks; and
  • Recall the right information and share it with the right people at the right time.


Developing and Implementing Operational Controls
Operations and activities that could result in risk or impact are controlled to ensure that our environment, health, and safety (EHS) policy is followed and that management system objectives are achieved. We develop procedures to cover both internal activities, such as control of hazardous energy and fall protection, and external activities like contractor and product safety.

Where appropriate, documented standards or guidance-for-compliance directives support the control of operations and activities that may result in safety impacts. Our business units are encouraged to use Alcoa Business System principles to maintain flexibility and pursue continual improvement of both corporate and their own procedures. Personnel periodically review common Alcoa operations and activities to identify which require operational controls.

Emergency preparedness and response planning and preparedness ensure we establish and maintain procedures to identify the potential for and the responses to emergency situations and to plan for the prevention and mitigation of EHS effects and occupational illnesses and injuries that may be associated with identified emergency situations. Where situations warrant, we have provisions for expedited funding and emergency medical evacuation.

Every business unit is required to ensure that each of its locations develops, implements, and maintains written emergency response plans and training programs consistent with our mandatory procedure for emergency response plans. This procedure requires business units and locations to commit the necessary resources—such as manpower, equipment, materials, and outside contractors—necessary to prevent, control, and respond to emergency situations. Alcoa’s priorities for emergency response are protection of human life and health, mitigation of environmental effects, and the protection of property—in that order.

A significant challenge to developing and implementing operational controls remains our ability to identify the generic or common causes for incidents and be able to predict with some level of confidence when, where, how, and to what extent those causes are likely to surface again in the future.


Monitoring and Maintaining Systems
The monitoring and measurement of our safety systems help us evaluate and improve Alcoa’s performance. This also allows us to identify areas that require corrective action and determine the causal factors contributing to incidents.

Selecting the appropriate performance indicators and monitoring frequency necessary to track performance of the management system can be a challenge. When selecting performance indicators, we seek to identify the critical few performance indicators that are:
  • Predictive and leading;
  • Objective, verifiable, and measurable;
  • Relevant to Alcoa's activities, products, and services;
  • Consistent with the organization's safety policy, objectives, and targets;
  • Practical, cost-effective, and technologically feasible; and
  • Meaningful to internal and external stakeholders.

Each business unit and operating location enters applicable data into the Alcoa EHS Metrics System and the Alcoa Incident Management System. Periodically, we test and calibrate performance indicators against the safety objectives and action plans to determine their effectiveness in measuring and monitoring Alcoa’s overall safety performance.

There are two major challenges to monitoring and maintaining systems. First is selecting the right metrics to monitor. For example, too much emphasis on improving the total recordable injury rate can lead to a focus that seeks to address incidents based predominantly on frequency of occurrence versus the potential severity or a composite of both. At Alcoa, we value human life above all else and, as a result, maintain a focus on addressing those risks accordingly.

Second is the challenge of ensuring the level of protection provided by our safety systems is consistently aligned with the magnitude of the risk. For example, two areas where we are looking to improve upon in the future are:
  • Avoiding the use of low technology solutions where higher technology solutions can provide a much higher degree of reliability and safety at comparable costs; and
  • Moving from manual to automated solutions to distance people from the hazard and address situations where a human response may be too slow to prevent a catastrophic incident.


Reacting to Correct Gaps and Improve System Stability
When a safety or other protective-system nonconformance exists, business units and locations are expected to initiate a corrective action process that, at minimum, involves the following:
  • Investigate the alleged nonconformance and determine its validity;
  • Determine the potential impact of the nonconformance and prioritize work based on the risk;
  • Identify the root cause;
  • Determine necessary corrective and preventive action;
  • Assign a level of urgency and scope to the corrective and preventive action that is commensurate with the magnitude of the nonconformance and its related impacts; and
  • Verify to insure corrective actions are implemented.

The safety systems are reviewed at least annually. Senior management participates in the review process, which is designed to ensure the continued suitability, adequacy, and effectiveness of the organization’s overall safety management system.

The greatest challenge in reacting to correct gaps and improve system stability is directly tied to our fatality exposure. Fortunately, fatalities occur less frequently than less serious injuries. At the same time, this hinders our ability to predict fatalities, as we are limited by our own experiences and the shared experiences of others.

Fatalities often have multiple causes, and those causes tend to surface at different locations—sometimes at locations with outstanding injury performance and health and safety audit results—thus making some of them even harder to predict and foresee.

What we have learned through our investigations is that these catastrophic events often involve many people operating at different levels of knowledge and experience, and the incidents generally involve a breech of human-technical, leadership, and organizational defenses.

We also know our efforts to expand the use of pre-job briefings and pre-job risk assessment tools before non-routine work is having a positive impact. Non-routine work accounted for approximately 68% fatalities and major incidents studied from 2000-2004. Our most recent study showed a 49% decline in fatalities associated with non-routine work during the 2005-2008 time period.

In addition, we’ve learned to expand the use of automated systems to allow for a faster response when a human response to a potential hazard is too slow or effectively places the individual in a high-risk exposure. Automated combustion safety systems are just one example of where we’ve applied this concept to manage day-to-day risk on the plant floor.


2020 Framework Safety Goals
TargetMetricProgress Achieved Through Year-End 2008
Elimination of occupational illnesses and injuries Zero fatalities 5 fatalities
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Zero lost workday rate 0.12 lost workday incident rate
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Zero total recordable injuries 1.34 total recordable incident rate
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From base year 2006, achieve at least a 20% reduction in the number of employees requiring protective measures against unacceptable noise levels by 2008 21%
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From base year 2006, achieve at least a 20% reduction in the number of employees requiring protective measures against unacceptable workplace exposure to chemicals by 2008 35%
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