Health & Safety

Health & Safety

Health & Safety

A successful Kiln Shutdown for Rugby

16th March, 2017

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Congratulations to the team at Rugby for completing the kiln shutdown safely, on time and within budget. Their efforts have been noted by Jaime Elizonda, our Regional President, who was pleased to hear of the successful shutdown. Furthermore, Luis Oropeza, VP Cement Operations for Europe spent a week on site during the outage and was incredibly impressed by the safety controls in place and the level of productivity. Indeed, much of what he saw is to now be standardised across the regional operations. Similar compliments have been received from Jesus Gonzalez, UK President.

Phil Baynes-Clarke, VP for Cement operations, thought it would be useful to share a few interesting facts which are shown below.

  • Safest shutdown on record with only 6 injuries – still 6 too many
  • Over 800 contractors inducted
  • 179 drug tests completed with a 1.7% failure rate compared with 8.1% in 2015
  • 481 alcohol breath tests completed with a 0.4% failure rate compared with 0.8% in 2015
  • 2862 training man hours including Pre-SDK training and TBT’s issued and returned throughout the shutdown
  • 251 Scaffolds erected, using 627 tonnes of scaffold.
  • Planning critical path using SMED (Single Minute Exchange of Dies)
  • More than 6507 journeys in the Alimak lift
  • Shutdown completed in 28 days, 9 days shorter than 2015. Costs on budget

Phil commented, “Our focus now is to stabilise the kiln with high levels of alternative fuels. We also need to conduct a thorough clean up of the site and I am pleased with the progress made so far.

Congratulations everyone – keep up the good work. I am confident we can deliver in full our 2017 budget commitments safely.”

rugby kiln shutdown 2 resized

Photo’s show: rope access to clay hoppers, replacing refractory kiln bricks, wrecking cooler, daily contractor safety meetings and planned safety stand downs on the job.