Last month, ENR Southeast announced our annual Best Projects Award winners, which included 38 projects for outstanding construction and design. Now we’re announcing one of the most important awards included as part of our Best Projects competition—the Excellence in Safety Award.
Winning this prestigious award this year is the $2.3-billion Salt Waste Processing Facility project. Completed in 2016 after nearly nine years of construction, the SWPF was built to process the salt waste filling 51 underground tanks at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
Over the course of that construction period, the project logged an estimated 12.5 million man hours, according to Parsons, the contractor. According to the Best Projects entry, the project achieved an OSHA Recordable Incident Rate of 0.96, and a lost-time accident rate of 0.24.
ENR Southeast's safety judges—George Guffey, safety director with John Moriarty & Associates Florida; and David Lockhart, director of loss control with Poole & Kent Co. of Florida—were more impressed with the project’s implementation of “people-based safety” observations, which numbered more than a thousand a month during construction’s latter stages.
Among the other factors that impressed our safety judges: all new hires meeting with employee safety committee (ESC) leadership to hear from peers the site expectations for safety performance and employee engagement; and twice-monthly meetings with the ESC leadership and director of construction to review employee feedback and observations.
ENR Southeast will provide readers with more information about the Salt Waste Processing Facility’s safety program in our November print edition.
