Employee Safety
Roanoke Rapids Power Station employees and retirees celebrated a special milestone in October 2011: 40 years without a lost-time accident. The hydroelectric station and dam in North Carolina began commercial operations in 1955.
Safety is a core value at Dominion and our top priority. Our business requires many of our employees to work around electricity, natural gas and heavy equipment under dangerous conditions. Our goal is clear: return employees home safely at the end of the day, every day.
We believe that strong safety performance is the gateway to sustainable operational and financial excellence. It is the glue that holds everything together. Only when we work safely can we achieve the level of operational and financial success that we need to be a recognized industry leader. That is why our “zero tolerance” for injuries is the only acceptable standard of performance.
2011 Safety Performance
We continued to work toward our goal of zero injuries and ended 2011 with all-time company bests in OSHA recordable incident rate and lost-time/restricted duty incident rate. Some highlights of our 2011 safety performance include the following:
- Corporate recordable incident rate (the number of reported workplace injuries per 100 employees) – 0.92, a 51% decline in the past five years;
- Corporate lost-time/restricted duty incident rate (the number of workplace injuries resulting in lost workdays or reassigned duties per 100 employees) – 0.42, a 55% drop in the past five years;
- Record-setting performance at our natural gas distribution business in Ohio and West Virginia – OSHA recordable cases down 23% and lost-time/restricted duty cases down 47% compared to 2010;
- All-time station outage and operations safety incident rates at our Fossil & Hydro unit of the Generation business;
- Preventable motor vehicle accidents reduced by 17% at our Dominion Energy business unit;
- 164 consecutive days without a recordable incident at our Dominion Virginia Power electric transmission group – despite a massive power restoration effort following Hurricane Irene in August;
- Best ever safety performance in our 2,500-employee Services Company.
Key to success
By putting safety first and by focusing on continuous improvement, we create a strong foundation for personal well-being and superior performance by the company. We attribute our success to a number of factors:
- Relentless safety focus and engagement by senior management and employees;
- Strong emphasis on individual responsibility, performance and accountability;
- Commitment to core safety activities, such as pre-job briefings, safety observations and regular safety meetings; and
- Comprehensive and frequent employee communications about safety, including print and electronic media and face-to-face meetings with company leaders.
In 2012, our Dominion Virginia Power unit will kick off a new safety campaign called ZERO that challenges employees to be personally accountable for working safely and to set the bar high by aiming for zero accidents. We will report on this program in the next edition of our CSR.
Tools
Workplace
ZERO Safety Campaign
Dominion Virginia Power aims high – and 'low' – with a new safety campaign that challenges employees to aim for zero accidents this year.