Safety and Health
How to Save a Life
When long-time Fairmount Minerals family member Joe Dahlhausen participated in CPR training at work, he wanted to learn the proper steps to take in an emergency situation. What he did not realize is that the training would become one critical factor that saved a family member’s life.
Joe and his brother-in-law, David, were working to remodel Joe’s home when David suddenly fell to the floor. Assessing the situation, Joe found that David had no heartbeat or pulse, and he called 911. The operator instructed Joe to give David CPR, so he started performing the steps he learned in the training. Paramedics arrived and rushed David to the hospital, where he sat in an induced coma for four days. After a triple-bypass surgery, David has Joe to thank for saving his life.
Today, Joe appreciates the high priority Fairmount Minerals places on employee health and safety. The time the organization took to train the employee family in the basics of CPR enabled Joe Dahlhausen to become a hero.
Hour by hour, day by day. Looking out for one another and ensuring the safety and health of our employee family is among Fairmount Minerals’ highest priorities. Our ultimate goal is to create a truly safe working environment that enables our employee family to experience safety on the job and at home.
In 2009, our fully implemented Safety and Health Management System (SHMS), which is Occupational Health and Safety Assessment Series (OHSAS) 18001 compliant, allowed Fairmount Minerals to evaluate and prioritize risks while proactively correcting and preventing them.
A major component of our SHMS includes an Observational Based Safety program, which we expanded across a majority of our facilities in 2009. The program encourages peer-to-peer communication as a means of uncovering exceptional safety performance or identifying and correcting risky behavior. The implementation of a new safety software system further supported the information sharing and corrective action planning that is core to this program.
Another element of our employee-driven safety culture involves safety training. On average, all Fairmount family members receive at least eight hours of safety training annually. In 2009, we introduced two new training programs — “Not on My Watch,” and a MSHA/OSHA compliance review. We completed “Not on My Watch” sessions at every Fairmount location, and we continue to stress a commitment to safety leadership in all that we do.
One way we measure our overall safety performance is through incidence rates as well as total safe working hours. In 2009, we improved our corporate incidence rate (calculated by dividing the number of recordable incidents by total work hours and multiplying that figure by 200,000) from 3.84 to 3.58 and reduced our total lost time accidents from six to four. Our longest stretch of safe working hours exceeded 438,000. Even a single accident at Fairmount Minerals is one too many, so we continue to make our goal 100 percent safe working hours.
