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Two Bechtel Safety Milestones Celebrated in Trinidad
Prime Minister Panday was joined by officials of the plant's owner, Atlantic LNG, and its builder, Bechtel International, Inc., in marking five million consecutive work-hours without a lost-time injury on the job. Even more impressive, there has been only one lost-time injury in more than ten million hours spent by workers building the state-of-the art facility, which is on track for completion in June 1999.
"This achievement helps build the reputation of Trinidad and Tobago as a preferred destination for investment in energy projects, because investor confidence in the skill and ability of our workforce to implement large, complex, fast-track projects has been enhanced," the Prime Minister told more than 1,000 project workers gathered for the celebration. "You have proven what is achievable with unity, commitment, and discipline. I compliment Bechtel and the workers of the country for this outstanding achievement," he continued.
"We're extremely proud of our team of workers in Point Fortin," said Bill Hill, Bechtel's construction manager for the project. "This achievement is rare on large construction projects anywhere. It demonstrates again that Trinidad workers are world-class. Their continuing attention to safety on the job, plus the 'zero accidents' philosophy Bechtel always follows, means they're going home safely to their families every night."
To put this achievement into perspective, consider it in terms of building homes. A typical house-building crew in Trinidad has about ten workers. If such a crew had started building houses in Trinidad on the day Christopher Columbus first set foot on the island in 1498, and had worked eight hours a day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year, every year since, they would have had to work the entire 500 years with only a single injury to match the record achieved at Atlantic LNG. (They would have completed 2,000 homes over that period.)
The US$1 billion Atlantic LNG facility is the first liquefied natural gas plant to be built in the Western Hemisphere in more than 25 years. When completed next year, the plant will begin supplying markets in the Northeast United States and Spain. It will employ the innovative Phillips Optimized Cascade Process to produce approximately three million metric tons of LNG annually from "rich" natural gas produced by offshore wells off the east coast of Trinidad.
Bechtel International is the lead contractor to provide engineering, procurement, construction, start-up, and initial operating services for the plant. At present, there are more than 50 subcontractors and more than 2900 employees at the Point Fortin site. Bechtel Construction Manager Bill Hill notes that 60 percent of the workforce comes from the Point Fortin area, and the remainder from elsewhere in Trinidad.
To add to its impressive safety record at Atlantic LNG, Bechtel has also recently passed the 1,000,000 hour mark at a smaller concurrent project in Trinidad, the Cercored Direct Reduced Iron Project in Point Lisas.
Stew Burkhammer, Bechtel's global manager of environment, safety, and health, noted during the celebration that the company has achieved one million consecutive job hours without lost time injuries on about 130 projects out of 19,000 total in its 100-year history. "But only a handful anywhere have ever achieved 5 million," Burkhammer told the assembled workers. "I would put this project with any Bechtel is doing worldwide. You have created and sustained a passion for working safely."
The only injury on the Atlantic LNG project so far that has caused a worker to lose time from the job occurred in January of this year, when a worker's fall caused him two broken ankles, ending a record of 4.6 million consecutive hours worked without such an injury. Since then, injury-free hours have begun mounting again, breaking the rarely achieved five-million mark on October 1, and currently standing at 5.4 million consecutive hours and counting.
Bechtel's safety record has consistently been one of the very best in the world. Throughout its century-long history, worker safety has been one of the company's very highest priorities. As one example, Bechtel was the first contractor to mandate the wearing of hard hats on construction projects, starting with Hoover Dam in the early 1930s. In 1996, its lost-workday rate worldwide (excluding subcontractors) was approximately one-seventeenth that of the U.S. construction industry average. In 1997, the company recorded even lower rates.
Bechtel is a global engineering-construction organization. It provides premier technical, management, and directly related services to develop, manage, engineer, build, and operate installations for customers worldwide. Founded in 1898 and headquartered in San Francisco, Bechtel is a privately held company that has been under the leadership of its founding family for four generations. It has built projects in 140 nations in the 100 years since its founding. Its 1997 workoff revenue was US$11.3 billion.