Dealing safely with spills
August 1st 2010 H&SS presents an Environment Agency led roundtable debate designed to help logistics companies create an effective spill prevention culture
Andrew Lawrence: “What have been the major successes you have achieved or hurdles you have faced in creating a spill prevention culture?”
Richard Deeley: “We manage fuel storage facilities around the UK and we manage our own transport fleet. So it’s two separate sets of people.
If you take the storage locations, the culture is very much on safety in all aspects of their work. So all of the people who work in our own company storage locations go through extensive training. They are highly trained individuals, with a pride in safety as well as their own performance. Pre-Buncefield several locations had single person operating terminals that tended to be the norm across industry. Post-Buncefield there was a need for change which has helped industry to focus more on those operations as we all strive for a safer working environment.
In transport, for the driver, it’s part of their job through the law. They are legally responsible to manage spills on a vehicle to a point.What we do, again, is ensure they are highly trained individuals.What you do tend to find, is that they tend to get involved wherever they can, taking a pride in their role. The driver will deal with a spill that is manageable by him in size, but we’ve got an external agency who is our spill contractor. Any reportable spillage, the external contractor is called to respond.”
Chris Lea: “We don’t have similar risks to BP as we’re the end user and are not necessarily handling hazardous substances around the country, but we certainly would receive them.We research into pharmaceuticals so we would receive unknown entities with no hazard data sheets with them. I’m not sure if we have the same risks as the other attendees here, though we do have some significant issues. Like many businesses we’ve been outsourcing our functions. So ownership, or lack of ownership and oversight, is a hard task to manage.”
Neil Lennox: “I think we’re a bit like BP though in a different industry. In our large distribution depots, although we don’t store anything quite as hazardous, we’ve probably been more successful in building positive cultures and responses because we’ve got a fixed workforce on a site with a fence around it where you can identify the problems in quite an easy manner and plan for them.Most of our sites are going through the process of ISO14000.We’ve taken people through the scenarios of what may happen and the risks around diesel or product spillages, things getting into drains on site and so on. They can see where they fit into preventing problems and everyone, from the guy who picks orders and drives forklift trucks to engineers, has a part to play.
At the other end of the spectrum we switch to the drivers who are in a very different camp to the BP drivers. I’d still use words like ‘highly trained professional drivers’, but they’re not carrying hazardous substances, they’re predominantly carrying loads of beans and so on into the store. Probably in a different way they understand that if they’re involved in a road traffic accident or an incident on roads that they’ve got a part to play in stopping something from getting somewhere. They would be far more reliant on the emergency services to respond and I guess in that respect they would understand what they need to do as they haven’t got the kit and the equipment to respond. I think what would be less clear to them is some of the less obvious liquids such as Fairy liquid dripping down into drains. They’ve read about diesel spillages in the paper but wouldn’t think about the other products we have on board that the Environment Agency wouldn’t be too keen about getting in the drains.
I think therefore we do have that split culture.Where it’s worked successfully has been in bringing the guidance to life and stating the part people play in the workforce.Where it’s been more difficult is where you have a transient workforce made up of contractors and agency staff as well as your own core staff, but they’re still driving your vehicles that have your livery.”
Teresa Brown: “I believe we have more of a problem from smaller operators who don’t have a large management infrastructure, like Sainsbury’s and BP. They’ll have fewer people but they’ll be so intent on doing their business that they won’t have time or resources to put in place the sort of infrastructure you need to prevent spillages. They don’t have time to investigate everything, let alone be able to review procedures.” Andrew: “How can front line staff be incentivised to act as the owners of a spill response duty?”
Chris: “In terms of our organisation we don’t particularly incentivise staff just to deal with spills.We would of course train our staff and our teams with most aspects regarding this. For us it’s about our targets and our KPIs, which includes things such as near misses, observations and environmental issues.”
Neil: “I think we’re in a similar place to Chris. At a site level, we’re operating programmes that tend to be driven around performance metrics, but with site safety performance in the round thrown in as well which covers a whole host of measures. We have in the past created ‘Depot of the Year’ competitions which will take all types of different criteria into account, including environmental, safety and performance.We don’t incentivise however on one individual metric, it forms one part of a basket of indicators.”
Richard: “There is a difference in KPIs for blue collar workers as opposed to white collar workers.White collar workers tend to be in a position where they are part of a wider group, so safety performance is not only what happens locally, but is also what happens nationally. For a blue collar worker, the KPIs are quite specifically local. Driver bonus schemes are mostly on his or her own safety performance rather than what the business is doing.” More articles from Handling & Storage Solutions: | 
