People are our most valuable asset.  Those are not just words to us.   The protection of the health and safety of our team members is a core value and is the key to our strong safety commitment at all levels of the organization.  The fundamental underlying company principle is that the only acceptable company goal for safety is zero accidents. 

Severstal North America’s health and safety policy requires a systematic approach to establishing and monitoring the performance of its safe work procedures and processes.  These procedures and processes preserve and enhance our employees' ability to work effectively and safely.  This approach is built around pro-active efforts to maintain a safe and healthful workplace, assess operations for risks and hazards, establish engineered safety protection and employ well-thought-out safe work practices.  It mandates the continuous monitoring of our safety performance, striving for improvement and taking prompt action to correct unsafe practices and conditions.  The policy extends to the protection of our business partners and visitors.  A visible manifestation of this commitment is the requirement that our business partners and visitors participate in our safety orientation program (before they enter our manufacturing facilities).

The company’s growth across North America has been married to a desire to develop a common safety approach, which is committed to continuous improvement at all North American business units.  To achieve this goal, the company is working to align all its business units within the scope of the company’s Health and Safety Management System (“HSMS”).  Severstal Dearborn’s Safety Management System has been certified to be in compliance with the OHSAS 18001 management standard since 2005.  This standard has provided a homogenous framework for continuing improvement in safety performance by the Dearborn operation. To view Dearborn's OHSAS 18001 certificate, please click here.

With this heralded success and approach to safety performance, all North American operating units are now working toward a multi-site OHSAS 18001 registration.  This registration process encompasses all steelmaking divisions.  This new HSMS system is a template to help ensure that our policies are planned, implemented and managed effectively, and that they comply with all applicable laws and regulations.

The company does and will employ various methods to grow its safety culture -- ranging from guest speakers, to a variety of training modules, to both domestic and global safety benchmarking.  But one of the most valuable drivers for improving the North American safety culture is the use of pre-planning of jobs.  Although different formats for pre-planning are in use, the Job Safety Analysis or Safety Pre-task Analysis, positively impacts our safety culture and behaviors.  This approach has already been demonstrated to lead to significant injury reduction and contributes to the effective implementation of injury prevention programs, like the hand safety program. 

These interactive steps engage all levels of management, supervision and plant workers in identifying and defining the potential and known safety hazards related to a specific activity’s tasks, and aid in determining the required steps and practices to be followed to allow for safely completing the job, including the use of the appropriate mandatory personal protective equipment. 

We strongly believe in the practice of “what gets measured can be managed.” We measure and report our monthly health and safety performance, the incidents that take place and our compliance actions at all Severstal North America locations.
     

2008 Safety Highlights

• Severstal Dearborn – A Union Safety Coordinator program was developed and launched.  For operations and maintenance activities, 16 Safety Coordinators were jointly selected, trained and developed to take ownership and direction of their assigned mill’s safety needs.  Each mill now has, at a minimum, a pair of embedded competent safety coordinators to affect a change of culture, take ownership of safety issues and to be an available resource to the workforce. This program has greatly improved Dearborn’s overall safety performance.

• Severstal Columbus – A facility survey was designed to identify gaps in fall protection safety for those areas above crane rail girders.  Lifelines were engineered and installed to complement the existing fall protection measures in place for the overhead cranes’ access.  

• Severstal Sparrows Point – In addition to its continuing plant safety coordinator program, its weekly senior leadership safety inspections and its ongoing commitment to the Joint Company-USW Safety program, the parties reinvigorated Sparrows Point’s safety excellence recognition program to improve safety morale and team building.  The plant re-implemented the “Unsung Safety Champion” award.  This program is designed to provide annual recognition and acknowledgement to those employees who have exhibited safety activities beyond the day-to-day norm for their host departments. This program has highlighted seven employees throughout the past year for their outstanding efforts.

• Severstal Warren – Anticipating planned outages at the end of the year, there were an extensive number of daily safety discussions that reviewed pre-planning for these labor-intensive activities in the primary operations.  Highlighting safety activities during the pre-planning stage improved the plant’s overall safety performance.  The resulting momentum carried over into the 2009 safety effort.

• Severstal Wheeling – Safety and operations personnel collaborated to implement a weekly newsletter.  The publication highlights safety and production issues, and unit goals and objectives, including safety performance, of the various Wheeling operating area