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"All of our core values are vital yet, none are more important than working safely and with integrity."
— Jack Davis APS President and Chief Executive Officer
Safety is the overriding value of all aspects of our business. The first job of all employees at APS is to ensure their safety, that of their co-workers and the public at large. While the growth of our service territory dictates greater efficiency and productivity, these added demands cannot come at the expense of the health and safety of our employees.
With the amount of work necessary to meet our rapidly growing service territory, the challenge to work safely will continue into the future. This challenge is increasingly significant as many experienced employees reach retirement age and new members of our team are trained. In the APS 2005-2010 Business Plan, the management team asks each employee to "Own the Challenge." Until APS employees can achieve zero recordable injuries and sustain that performance, there will always be room for improvement.
Specifically, employees have been asked to focus on six fundamental principles of safety:
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Use the right tool for the job
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Get the necessary training
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Wear appropriate personal protective equipment
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Conduct thorough tailboard (pre-job) briefings
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Stop work if there is a safety concern or question
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Report all close calls
The sustained safety performance of APS employees has resulted in our company being in the top five performers in the past five years (twice listed as number one) as compared to like-sized investor-owned utilities by the Edison Electric Institute. Our management team is responsible and accountable for safety performance. However, leadership recognizes that the expertise in safe work practice design, application and performance resides with frontline employees and their immediate supervision. APS' success in safety is the result of the efforts of labor and management teams. These teams are supported by full-time safety and health professionals working cooperatively, in the various divisions and at each power plant. We believe this approach works best at APS and will continue to drive personal behaviors and safe work practices. The following describes three of the many teams approaches used to drive the safety program at APS:
Safety and Health Advisory Team
The Safety and Health Advisory Team is responsible for providing cross-functional strategic direction and leadership on companywide health and safety issues. The team consists of safety and health professionals and management from each business unit of the company. Each team member represents his or her respective business unit and communicates health and safety issues between the team and the facilities. The team makes recommendations to the EHS vice president on all matters requiring executive oversight.
The Safety and Health Advisory Team is supported by two different issue teams, a Prevention Team and a Compliance Team. The Prevention Team advances programs and practices that promote employee wellness and accident prevention. The Compliance Team addresses regulatory compliance matters and interpretation of best management practices.
Joint Health and Safety Committee
The Accident Prevention Manual (APM) Rules/Revision Committee is comprised of a group of company and Local IBEW employees who meet to review the safety rules and any employee requests for revisions to the manual. The committee, which is indicative of the partnership shared between the company and IBEW, in addition to fielding these requests will take individual sections of the manual and review them to determine if updating is necessary. Once a review is completed and change is deemed necessary, the manual is updated and brought to the committee for final discussion and signature. After the committee has signed off on the rule, it goes to the Safety and Health Advisory Team and the IBEW Executive Board for review, acceptance and implementation.
Craft Observation Teams
The Energy Delivery business unit at APS has established four full-time IBEW positions that conduct field observations of membership work practices and work conditions. These employees conduct on-site interventions to improve work practices and environments on a real-time basis. They are not required to report specifics of the observations to local supervision or management. They simply provide a summary of observations on a periodic basis. This technique enhances trust among union membership and creates an environment that is open to immediate corrective or improvement actions.
This same approach is used at several APS Generation facilities during critical overhauls and outages. Just as with the Energy Delivery personnel, generation employees welcome the intervention by peers and collaborate to achieve improved practices and conditions.
We recognize the need to track and report safety performance in the form of numbers of injured employees. However, we never lose sight of the fact that these statistics are not just numbers; they are our fellow employees, peers and friends. Their injuries may have been the result of a management system failure, or an individual performance error and may have been non-preventable. Regardless of the cause of the accident, we must learn from the incident in order to prevent similar injuries in the future.
As a corporation, we report on safety statistics in order to measure and improve our performance. In its 2005 - 2010 business Plan, "Owning the Challenge," APS has challenged its entire staff to be "the best of the best" as judged against liked-sized investor-owned utilities. APS' goal is to be ranked number one among its peer utilities by 2010 as measured by:
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All Injury Incident Rate - total OSHA Recordable injuries reported;
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Lost Work Incident Rate - total number of OSHA Recordable injuries resulting in lost workdays; and,
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Severity Incident Rate - total number of workdays lost due to OSHA Recordable injuries.
In 2005, after several years of very high safety performance, our overall safety performance declined. Our total recordable injuries, All Injury Incident Rate (AIIR) and Lost Work Incident Rate (LWIR) increased from 2004. The overall severity of the injuries in 2005 was somewhat less than 2004, as evidenced by a decrease in the Severity Incident Rate (SIR).
While our performance decreased in 2005, and we are taking steps to improve that performance in 2006, our safety injury rates continue to be well below the historical electric utility averages, as shown in the chart below. (Note: We anticipate the 2005 Edison Electric Institute utility industry safety statistics will be available in July 2006. We will update this chart when those statistics are available.)
Accidents occur for a variety of reasons, preventable and non-preventable. For a number of years, we have used an internal indicator to help assess safety performance, which we call "Preventable Recordable Accidents." This was used to help employees focus on preventing accidents in the workplace, and to provide incentives for successful performance in reducing accidents in which management and/or the employee have control over the events leading to an accident. We think that this indicator was useful in helping APS establish its industry leading safety record. However, we also believe that the use of this indicator has achieved its purpose, and we will transition in 2006 to the use of industry standard safety statistics (e.g. OSHA Total Recordable) for both external reporting and internal performance indicators and incentives.
The PNW/APS Safety Pyramid shown below helps us visualize the relationship of safety events, as we continue to move our safety efforts to the very front of the accident evaluation process in order to prevent future accidents. We have a formal electronic Event Notification and Tracking System, and strongly encourage reporting of all close-call events so that we can evaluate the circumstances behind the close-call in order to further improve our safety program, whether that be by changing procedures, improved training, equipment changes, etc. By evaluating close calls and making corrections when appropriate, we believe we can identify potential problem areas before they result in an accident. Our close call event numbers have increased over the past several years as we have been successful in improving employee cooperation in this important part of our overall safety effort.
Despite our performance in 2005, the fact remains that when compared to the rest of industry, APS is a leader; a benchmark utility with an exceptional safety performance record. We are confident that we will reverse our downward performance of 2005 as we work toward meeting our 2010 goal of being the top utility in our sector for safety performance.
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