Safety in the spotlight

APA honors producers for milestones

f, PA-THe Excrxeeneo Wood la.Association recently announced the winners of its 2012 Safety & Health Awards, a program that encourages and recognizes safety and operational excellence in the North American structural panel and engineered wood industry.

Nashville, Tn.-based LP and Canfor-LP OSB Limited Partnership of Fort St. John, B.C., won Safest Company Awards in their respective categories. LP, a leading North American manufacturer of structural wood panels and engineered wood products, earned top honors among companies with four or more mills, with a 2012 average Weighted Incident Rate (WIR) of 2.61. CanforLP, which produces oriented strand board, won its award in the category for companies with three or fewer mills. The company posted a perfect 0.00 WIR for 2012.

RoyOMartin's Oakdale, La., OSB mill earned the coveted Innovation in Safety Award for its "Safety Mentor" program. As part of the program, Safety Mentor Team Leaders are accountable for ensuring that new employees and team members receive proper safety orientation and training. Since implementing the Safety Mentor program last June, the mill has already seen increased awareness of the company's safety culture. Safety audit participation by new team members has increasedby 507o, while safety incidents among that group have decreased by 86Vo.

Begun in 1982, the APA awards program honors the managements and employees of companies and mills with the lowest Weighted Incident Rate (WIR), which is calculated using the number and severity of recordable incidents reported on the mill's annual OSHA report. Since 2008 was the first year that WIR was used, awards and reports for 2009 through 2012 continue to also show Total Incident Rate (TIR), the measure used in pre- vlous years.

Improvement, Annual Safety and Health Honor Roll, Three-Year Safety Average, and Incident Free Honor Society. Seventeen mills achieved a zero incident rate for the year and thus were named to the Incident Free Honor Society. The annual honor roll, three-year average, and safety improvement categories are divided into two divisions based on hours worked annually-more than or fewer than 400000 hours.

While the program awards are limited to APA members, data is collected from both member and non-member mills in order to provide a broadbased industry performance benchmark. A total of 65 mills reported data for 2012. The 2Ol2 industry Total Incident and Weighted Incident Rates were 2.12 and 8.40, respectively, down from 2.31 and 10.37, respectively, in 201l.

Sixty-five APA-member structural wood panel and engineered wood facilities in the U.S., Canada and abroad participated in the 2012 program. A total of 23 facilities representing nine APA member companies-Abitibi-LP Engineered Wood, Ainsworth Lumber, Boise Cascade, Canfor-LP OSB Limited Partnership, LP, Norbord, Potlatch, RoyOMartin, and Weyerhaeuser-earned awards in various competition categories. Some mills were multiple award winners.

In addition to the Safest Company and Innovation awards, other competition categories include Safety

The 2012 Safety and Health Awards program was the fifth year of the program under a revitalized safety effort spearheaded by an APA Safety & Health Advisory Committee, comprised of several APA member company safety professionals. Under the committee's guidance, three main goals were established: make the APA program the premier safety awards program in the industry, encourage the sharing of best practices as a means to improve the industry's safety culture and programs, and most importantly, improve the industry's overall safety performance.

More information on the program can be found at www.apawood.org.