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Over the past 3 years, Gas West has kept safety as a top priority on jobsites resulting in 0 severe recordable injuries from 2022 till now! What an incredible achievement!

This impressive safety performance can be accredited to the leadership, communication, and teamwork skills APM Superintendents have demonstrated for past three years as well as the mentorship and openness to perform to APM standards from the crews. Also aiding the safety effort was their coordinated effort to get ahead on safety before outages started. Gas West ODLs and the APM EHS team had pre-outage season kick-offs where they focused on specific previous safety incidents, trends, and reviewed opportunities for performance improvement. The superintendents showed their dedication to safety by being responsive to the pre-outage season kick-offs and midseason outage focuses and acting on the highlighted safety concerns.

Some specific APM Superintendents who exemplified this commitment to safety were Chester Manymules and Joseph (Joe) Bunce!

Chester Manymules was requested to help with an extremely difficult outage in Texas. Challenges from this outage included foul weather, high heat, extremely long distances between crew trailers for set up and the site where work was being performed. He also faced and overcame numerous challenges with manpower and getting qualified people that meet the work safety requirements.

Joe Bunce led an outage installing a rotor in extreme cold and kept the crew safe while working in low temperatures of 0 degrees and worse. He strategized on how to avoid prolonged exposure to cold when traveling and scheduling work, and he ensured heaters were provided on deck where the crew was exposed to the harsh elements.

Gas West’s safety focus resulted in 9 STOP events in 2023. One such event was at the LA Harbor for possible exposure to lead. Larry Cahill called the STOP moment when superintendents were advised of possible lead present where the crews were working and got safety involved. That allowed for LADWP industrial hygienists to take samples that determined there was small trace amounts of lead present and give the green light to return to work after a 3-day process.

Their commitment to safety also means a commitment to continuous learning. By analyzing past performances and incidents, they’ve discovered the importance of identifying the hours of experience a millwright requires in their position to avoid injuries. Using these findings, they’ve been able to set their focus on tracking the correlation between experience and probability/type of injury to train and improve safety.

How do the Life Saving Rules contribute to Gast West’s outstanding safety performance?

In 2023, Gas West focused on Working at Heights and the proper height and work conditions to provide a harness. Specifically, they concentrated on when to provide 100% tie off and securing materials and tools to prevent dropped objects in El Segundo, CA due to complicated scaffolding processes and numerous dropped objects from a 3rd party.

Also in 2023, Bryan Perry, APM Gas Services EHS Manager, provided a focus instruction on Confined Space for crews at a jobsite in Elk Hills, CA.

In 2022, Gas West focused on Fire and Explosion safety in Apex, Nevada and trained the crews on how to perform fire watch responsibilities, how to set up a fire safe location and what to look for, and prevented ignition by predetermining which individuals act as fire watch in addition to the one working directly with the journeyman.

Overall, the dedication to safety from Gas West APM Superintendents and crews and willingness to learn and continuously improve culminated in 3 years of exemplary safety performance! Keep up the great work!