Safety Award for Van Oord Dredging

Achieving a safe working environment is a part of every operation and the responsibility of every employee. After making an inventory of the accidents on site over the last few years, CEO Pieter van Oord remarked upon receiving the award from IADC Secretary General, Mr René Kolman and IADC President, Mr Koos van Oord: "Our company is extremely honoured to be the recipient of the IADC Annual Safety Award. Van Oord prides itself on ingenuity in meeting the challenges inherent to maritime construction and inventiveness to realise innovative and sustainable solutions for worldwide maritime challenges. Our approach to safety issues is the same. This prize was awarded, not for a specific project, but for an overall safety system, a system which has been implemented in our organisation over the last year: Work Safe. This presents employees with a number of safety-related questions to ask themselves in order to achieve a safer working environment. For instance, what should one do - and especially not do - within the framework of safety?

The rules in Work Safe have been created based on their answers and by analysing the most typical types of accidents that occur during dredging projects. This process has enabled many lessons to be learnt. With these lessons learnt from the past, the company is able to work even more safely in the present and future. In the Work Safe system, each individual process - for instance anchor handling, working in and around excavations, working with gas and oxygen or procedures for lifting operations - is addressed separately and a list of instructions have been written describing the safety issues related to that particular operation. These safety guidelines apply to dredging and marine works by Van Oord and its subcontractors. The results have been encouraging. "From 2010 to the present we have already noted a decrease in the number of on-job incidents," Pieter van Oord concludes.

Image: Mr. Pieter van Oord (left) accepts the IADC Safety Award 2011 from Mr. Koos van Oord, IADC president (right) and Mr. René Kolman, IADC secretary general (middle).