Kennecott Copper: Our safety culture

Our safety culture

Over the past decade Kennecott Utah Copper has placed an added emphasis on health and safety and in maintaining safe operations. Health and Safety program components include continued work by employees and contractors in development of personal health and safety plans, widening involvement in workplace interactions involving health and safety, and the expanded use of management tools like risk assessment and root cause analysis to help identify and eliminate the health and safety concerns associated with both routine and non-routine job tasks.

Kennecott’s approach to safety begins with an effort to engineer hazards out of our operations, so that workers don’t have to encounter them at all. Sometimes this is just not possible so we create work procedures to minimize the danger to our workers. We set up rules and guidelines and train employees so that they know how to stay safe in all situations. We also make sure all employees wear the proper kind of clothing or equipment to protect them from hazards that exist in their work areas. Different jobs require different kinds of protection. Here are some of the main types of protective equipment our employees use:

Hard hats
Steel-toed boots
Safety glasses
Goggles
Gloves
Air-purifying respirator

Finally -- and this is just as important as all the other steps we take to be safe - we keep our attention on safety. We heighten our awareness and keep our focus on working safely in a number of important ways. Each morning, before we go out to work, we take at least five minutes to talk about safety. We hold monthly safety classes and when we discuss how to do a particular job, we talk about how to do it safely. Every supervisor and manager here at Kennecott performs what we call safety audits. That means each one of us goes out to the various plants and we talk to employees on the job. We talk to them about doing their job safely and we ask them to comment on how Kennecott can improve safety in their area.

This gives you a brief glimpse into how we keep our employees safe through a combination of proper training, special procedures, protective equipment, engineering and plenty of good conversations about safety.

Safety is something we think about every day, and it's a big part of everyone's job at Kennecott Utah Copper.