IADC 2012 Annual Safety Award for DEME

The IADC Board has awarded the 2012 Safety Award to DEME NV for its implementation of a new company-wide safety awareness programme, CHILD. CHILD (Colleagues, Help Injuries to Leave DEME) is an ambitious safety and prevention project aiming to increase awareness of dangerous situations and safe behaviour in the workplace, to instil personal responsibility, action and initiative, and to radically change the mindset and corporate safety culture.

The idea was to find an acronym that would appeal personally to everyone and to all cultures alike. The name CHILD was also chosen to encourage colleagues to care for one another as they would for their own children.

Area director Africa from Dredging International Lieven Durt accepted the award on behalf of DEME. In acknowledging the award, Mr Durt remarked that the award was earned the hard way: "A tragic incident on one of the project sites was the incentive for the CHILD programme. One of our trainee tugboat deckhands, Simão Macanda, working at Soyo in northern Angola, was injured and died from his injuries. Simão was 53 years old and the father of eight children. This sent shockwaves through the company. Harsh evaluations by outside parties and difficult confrontations with ourselves followed."

DEME felt that a profound change of safety culture was needed, a change in the way one looks toward safety. This new mindset required an increased individual awareness in the first place, from top management to site operator. Nowadays safety is the talk-of-the-day on every project, every day. By creating the right environment for its CHILD, DEME is providing a brighter, long-lasting and safer future for the whole family.

The IADC Board felt that the CHILD programme deserved this year’s award as it answered the age-old question, ‘How to reach over 4,000 individuals of different cultures and backgrounds in a large corporate structure and how do you then get every single person to take responsibility and initiative for his or her own safety and for the safety of their colleagues?’

Image: Mr Lieven Durt, DEME (left) accepts the IADC Safety Award 2012 from Mr Koos van Oord, IADC president (right).