Safety Success at Kasese 

An exemplary safety record was achieved with only one minor disabling injury occurring during the whole Kasese project. A total of 3 012 749 working hours was required to construct the cobalt process plant about 17 km north of the equator in Western Uganda. The disabling injury frequency rate (DIFR) was thus 0,33 per million man-hours.

The client was Kasese Cobalt Company Limited, a subsidiary of Banff Resources of Canada. From the outset of the project the safety of the personnel was given very high priority. BATEMAN has a proud safety record on projects, many of which are in remote and difficult locations. Almost 25 million man-hours have been worked on BATEMAN managed projects over the past few years. The average DIFR recorded for these projects is 1,22 per million man-hours.

Six major and three minor contractors drawn from Denmark, Kenya, Uganda and South Africa were employed on the project, with a peak complement of almost 1 000 personnel on site. The locally recruited workers were inexperienced in construction work and almost all of the contractors’ staff constituted a high safety risk and therefore required on-the-job safety training.

The BATEMAN safety policy, amended to suit conditions in Uganda, was included in the tender enquiry documents and thus became a contractual requirement. This ensured that the contractors had an obligation to comply and on the project it was policy to rigidly enforce a rigorous safety plan. While gentle motivation and awards for compliance were applied, any transgressors were first warned verbally. Repeated or deliberate contraventions of safety regulations were, however, not tolerated.

The strategy, in the first instance, was to ensure that all personnel on site had passed a safety induction course and had undertaken to comply with safety regulations. Even senior head-office staff had to undergo induction before being permitted to enter.

The BATEMAN Safety Manager ensured that contractors held five-minute talks with the workers (called toolbox talks) every morning on selected subjects. It was compulsory for all contractor staff to attend these talks and the quality of the talks was continuously monitored by the BATEMAN Safety Manager.

Joint weekly safety meetings were attended by representatives of all the contractors who were reminded regularly that ultimately they were responsible for the safety of their workers. Safety meetings were also held weekly within the contractors’ organisations.

This recipe obviously worked well! One million man-hours free of disabling injuries were achieved twice and the project was well underway to achieve the two million mark, with 1 704 393 disabling injury-free hours having been recorded since the project’s only lost time incident.

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