Our objective in health and safety is to ensure that all of our employees and contractors return home to their families at the end of every day healthy and well. We do this by putting management systems in place to make sure our employees are well trained, and our workplaces are safe. We also spend considerable time and energy analyzing our safety culture and behaviour to evaluate how these can be improved.

Management systems are designed to help prevent accidents, injuries and occupational diseases. We expect all employees and contractors to think about the risks of their work tasks before they begin work so that accidents and injuries can be anticipated and prevented.

We’re developing training programs to reinforce this behaviour. We believe we’ll realize the benefits in our health and safety performance over time as this approach becomes formalized and it becomes second nature to all employees and contractors.

Our 2007 safety performance was overshadowed by the fatality of one of our contract workers at our Çayeli mine in Turkey. An independent investigation identified the improvements needed in how we and our contractor managed and supervised the worker and how we managed hazards that have a high potential to result in a fatality (high consequence hazards).

During the year, we established a High Consequence Protocol Work Group comprised of operations and safety personnel to establish standards and guidance to ensure better control over eight areas of high hazard. Since the Çayeli fatality we have assessed similar risks at our operations and shared lessons across the organization. We have initiated improvements to safety risk control at all of our sites and senior and site management have committed to make further improvements.

There were 16 contractor injuries at Las Cruces during the first nine months of the year. Most of these were minor in nature. By the fourth quarter, our work to develop a safety culture amongst many small contractors and the efforts of the employees and contractors at this site contributed to achieving zero lost time injuries, a significant improvement in safety performance at this site.

Pyhäsalmi had the best safety performance in its 47 year history. This reflects the commitment and hard work of our Pyhäsalmi team in applying their safety and health management system. Pyhäsalmi also received ISO 9001, ISO 14001and OHSAS 18001 certifications.


Download the PDF of our health and safety performance in 2007.