The resource sector’s safety record has been brought into doubt after a contractor was crushed while working at a liquefied natural gas plant and hospitalised, but the incident was not recorded as a lost-time injury.
The resource sector’s safety record has been brought into doubt after a contractor was crushed while working at a liquefied natural gas plant and hospitalised, but the incident was not recorded as a lost-time injury.
Last Thursday a UGL worker was crushed while working on an elevated work platform at the Bladin Point site of Inpex’s onshore LNG facility.
Unions NT secretary Paul Kirby told Business News not recording the incident as a lost-time injury (measured by time lost from work of one shift or more) had brought the safety recording system into disrepute.
“I can’t see how they could lie straight in a bed and say this is not a LTI, it absolutely has to be,” Mr Kirby said.
JKC Australia, the lead engineering and construction contractor to Inpex and its joint venture partners on the $US34 billion project, said operations in the area were suspended immediately following the incident and the injured worker was taken to Royal Darwin Hospital.
However, JKC Australia LNG project director John Bramley told Business News on the day of the incident that it was not a lost-time injury and declined to provide more information about why not.
“At all times, the safety and wellbeing of our workforce is our highest value,” Mr Bramley said.
Executive bonuses and company insurance premiums are tied to achieving strict safety statistics and for this reason Mr Kirby told Business News some companies “fudged figures”.
According to Safe Work Australia companies are under no obligation to report lost-time injuries to the relevant safety regulator, essentially leaving monitoring of the oft quoted and highly prized safety statistic to companies.
Mr Kirby said he had heard of companies in some cases going to great lengths to not record lost-time injuries by asking injured manual workers to sign papers or carry out administrative duties which were then counted as a full shift of work.
He slammed the alleged practice, saying he couldn’t see how a lost-time injury was not recorded from last week’s incident.
He said in light of union safety reps recently losing their jobs on the project and lost-time injuries not being reported properly the union was concerned that project targets were more important than people’s safety.
In accordance with the national Work Health and Safety Act, Mr Bramley said NT WorkSafe had been notified of last week’s hospitalisation and the incident was being investigated.
It’s understood on the morning following the incident at Ichthys staff were told that the project had been lost-time injury free for 704 days.
Inpex’s most recent annual report set a goal for its global business that in the year ending March 2015 it would record a lost-time injury frequency rate of 0.29 injuries per million work hours, which would be considered world-best performance.
