Accident prevention Philip Jenkins, Head of HSE department. New alarm system in place The plant at Seal Sands is six years old. During that time, we have made modifications to the plant, to our human resources, to rules and specific areas, and the alarm system was not working as well as it should. As a result, alarm upgrades were an important target for 2007. We came up with about 20 recommendations for improvements, many of them coming from staff members, Head of HSE Department Philip Jenkins explains. A major improvement target was to create a toxic alarm. We had one already, but it sounded the same way as the fire alarm, so you couldnt tell whether it was a fire or a toxic alarm when it went off. And that is potentially dangerous. We knew about it, but our risk assessment showed us that it repre- sented a very low risk to the plant. Then, in January 2007, something happened. There was an incident at a nearby factory, with about 35 people going into hospital to get checked. The cloud blew away from us, but had the wind been slightly different that day, it could have affected our site. So management resolved to invest in a system upgrade. The site alarm system was already very complex, and putting in place a toxic alarm involved a lot of technical work, but the new system is a great improvement. Now we have quite distinct toxic and fire procedures. There is a higher risk of a gas leak or toxic cloud coming from somewhere else than from our site, but we have a duty to our employees. As soon as they come through the gates, we are responsible for their safety, so obviously the alarm system is of critical importance. The human resource side of the system was changed as well. In the past, our management acted as main site controllers. But Peter Trickett is only here for eight hours a day, while the production supervisor is in charge during the remaining 16 hours. Now the management has taken a back seat and the production supervisor is fully in control of the site from a process point of view. This is a more simple procedure, the workers know their role, and they dont have to worry whether someone from the management is on site if the alarm goes off. I am very pleased we now have a toxic alarm system in place. It makes our emergency planning so much easier there is no confusion. We are planning to conduct our first drill sometime during the first quarter of 2008. Database open to all At Seal Sands all employees can report near misses directly into the Corporate HSE database. We have had our own local database running for a couple of years, but to harmonise the reporting structure, to make it more simplified and visible for everyone, we adjusted our access to the corporate reporting system early in 2007, says Peter Trickett, Operations Director. We have opened the database to all employees, so anyone on site and not just our HSE representatives can report incidents. We felt that it was important that everybody had the opportunity to report things, no matter how small. It is still primarily used by the HSE representatives, and they are the ambassadors for HSE on site, but we have occasionally had others report into it, and that is good. We have focused intensively on near misses. Accidents and incidents 2003 Lost-time accidents Work-related accidents with no time loss Registered work-related near misses Frequency of accidents *) Environmental incidents Environmental near misses *) Number of lost-time accidents per million hours of work 2004 0 11 2005 0 23 52 0 0 17 2006 0 12 97 0 0 9 2007 1 9 61 9.3 0 7 1 24 A lost-time accident occurred for the first time since 2003. An employee hurt his back while performing a manual handling operation. Anyway, the efforts taken to avoid incidents and accidents are visible. This is seen by the fact that the number of work-related accidents without absence fell from twelve in 2006 to nine in 2007. The number of near-miss situations related to environment declined, and so did the number of work-related near misses. Page 6 of 8 Health, Safety & Environment Report 2007, Seal Sands, England www.lundbeck.com/sustainability
Health, Safety & Environment Report 2007 Lundbeck Pharmaceuticals Ltd., Seal Sands, England Lund
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