Under the theme “Safe for you. Safe for Me”, APM Terminals (APMT) celebrated its tenth annual Global Safety Day on April 28, 2016 with an emphasis on raising awareness among employees and contractors on the importance of risk management.
Presentations, workshops and activities were conducted across the APMT Global Terminals Network’s 72 operating port and terminal facilities as well as Inland Services operations in 69 countries around the world.
Kevin Furniss, Vice President of Health, Safety, Security and Environment at APMT, said: “Managing hazards and risks are key to creating and maintaining a safe working environment. The theme of this year’s Global Safety Day was fully in line with our ambition to build an inclusive and collaborative safety culture across all of our business units. It was an exciting day which put the spotlight on our new Global Operating Standard on Risk Management.”
Recognising risks and putting effective controls in place to prevent harm from occurring is a vital part of how APMT operates.
As part of Global Safety Day, Kim Fejfer, CEO of APMT detailed how a fatal accident in 2014 at the Suez Canal Container Terminal, in Port Said East, Egypt involving containers knocked from stacks, led to innovations in operations, through an initiative known as ‘Project Stack’.
Kim Fejfer said: “The objective of project stack was to find a long-term, sustainable solution that fundamentally eliminated the risk of knockdown of containers from the stacks, while at the same time making sure we would not lose productivity.”
Technical Paper: Addressing Container Yard Safety
By altering the container movements from container stacks onto trucks from ‘parabolic’ moves to rectangular configured box-shaped moves, and by keeping trucks from the transfer lane area until containers have cleared the stacks, the risk of containers being knocked off of stacks through RTG movements has been reduced by 70%.
While successful, the effective throughput capacity of a facility is reduced by 15-20% with these measures in place.
Fejfer continues: “The long-term solution is still being pursued in a pilot project at one of our facilities, with the finalized project expected to roll-out in three years, at a cost of USD $40 million.”
Earlier this year, The Aqaba Container Terminal (ACT), the Kingdom of Jordan’s primary port, was named the winner of the Workplace Safety and Health Award by the Jordanian Social Security Corporation, and APMT’s Los Angeles Pier 400, and APMT Tacoma received top industry safety honours for 2016 at the respective Pacific Maritime Association’s (PMA) annual Safety Awards.
APMT Buenos Aires, operator of the ‘Terminal 4’ facility in Argentina’s primary port, was named winner of the first annual ‘Innovation in Safety Award’, bestowed by ICHCA International, an independent organisation dedicated to improving the safety, productivity and efficiency of cargo handling and transportation, at the annual ICHCA conference.
