Uncertainty in long term future leads to more accidents at smelter....

The low LME and high electricity prices have forced many plants to either close or cutback on the workforce across the globe. This uncertainty of a plant’s future brings about a level of stress that can have a negative effect on plant safety. We’ve chosen to omit the company name and location in this story because the Aluminium Plant Safety Blog has seen this situation reproduced many times before and we feel that it would serve no purpose to name the company nor location. Here is a recent story.

Uncertainty over the future of an aluminium smelter apparently led to an increase in accidents at the facility in recent months.

“(The smelter) did see far too high a number of incidences in May and June versus their history and versus our expectations,” company CEO told analysts during a conference call recently. The CEO said the higher number of accidents are “evidence to me at the stress of our people in this uncertain situation.”

The smelter had been pegged for closure because of high electricity costs. But, last month a new power agreement will keep the plant open at least through next year, but at reduced capacity that cost hundreds of workers their jobs late last year.

The CEO did not go into detail about the accidents, and the plant’s manager, could not be reached for comment. The safety issues were not present at the aluminium companies other plants the CEO said.

“It’s important to remember that all our plants continued to perform significantly better than industry norms, but as you see we did lose a little bit of momentum in a couple of key places,” The CEO said of the company’s recent safety record. “We remain committed to an environment of zero serious injuries in the company, and, thus, we’re continuing to invest in this most important area.”

Production has improved at the smelter since the first of the year, the CEO said, with workers overcoming some of the instability seen in the months after the layoffs and shutdown of one of the plant’s two pot lines.

“You can see that’s been corrected, so excellent work there,” he said.

We commend the aluminium company management, and plant personnel for acknowledging that the uncertainty of the long term future could be a factor in the increase of incidents this past summer. We cannot underestimate the stress that the workers, plant management, and nearby communities are dealing with at this time. We pray that the market conditions change that will allow this as well as many other smelters to stay open.

We pray that all of the workers concentrate on putting aside those worries while they are performing their tasks. All too often incidents arise when a worker is not concentrating solely on the task at hand. Then the worker either skips steps, makes assumptions or forget to follow their training resulting in an injury or fatality to themselves or worse to a coworker. Why is worse if a coworker is injured or killed? Because the guilt associated with that never ends. Workers have told us about their guilt for either causing an incident or not preventing an incident. Their guilt if not treated with counseling can overtime become unbearable. That is why we tell workers that worse than themselves become injured or killed is if they injure or kill a coworker. Because that guilt never ends. We normally end the presentation then leaving that thought in the worker’s minds.

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