To help those in our operations identify Near Miss / Hazard Alerts (NM/HA) the Operational Excellence team have collected some real-life examples from our sites.

As a reminder:

• A Near Miss is an incident that could have resulted in an injury or illness to people, danger to health, and / or damage to property.
• A Hazard is an object or situation that has the potential to harm a person or cause damage to property.

By reporting the below risks, our colleagues have put safety first, and looked out for themselves and those around.

• In Durham, our teams pulled off of a P J Carey’s site after NM/HAs had been submitted and site visits made but no improvement was made which meant we had no choice other than to stop supply. The issue was around the overhead crane being used close to the discharging of truck mixers.

• At West Deeping, there is a GRS bagging operation on site at which we feed with our loading shovel. A GRS operator was climbing onto the hopper at the ear of mini bagger, and coming out of the back door of the shed while the loading shovel was operating in this area.

• At Wickwar, the bitumen temperature went above the range set by the thermostat and tank controller to the point where it was at the material flash point and could have caused an explosion. The safety equipment on the temperature control side was all working correctly, the cause of the over-temperature was the heater bank contactor had stuck in and was not allowing the heaters to switch off. Because of this Near Miss the team are installing secondary contactors so if one fails the second contactor still works allowing the heaters to switch on and off.
• At Tilbury, the team spotted a third party using our land acting in an unsafe way on several occasions (see photo). Our colleague stepped in and asked them to review the works they were doing, which they did and work on both occasions was stopped and the correct PPE, tools and equipment was then used to complete the works.

Thank you to all those who shared these examples! We hope these help others to feel confident to spot risks and report them.

If you haven’t already, please download this month’s poster which details what a NM/HA is. You can find it here.