No limits on safety initiatives

At Fortescue, we’re focussed on innovative thinking and setting stretch targets to achieve our goals; none more important than achieving zero harm across our workforce.This focus was recently demonstrated by the Maintenance team at Fortescue’s Cloudbreak operations, who are responsible for repairing and maintaining heavy vehicle equipment and are required to work at heights when accessing certain areas of dump trucks.

When maintaining and replacing parts on 789C and 789D model dump trucks, the team identified the need for a more practical and efficient way to complete the task and have now developed a ‘push in’ handrail, a safe and innovative system which addresses the working at heights risk. 

“Our team worked together to develop an engineering solution to solve an industry wide working at heights exposure,” said Graham Howard, Cloudbreak Maintenance Manager.

“Fortescue encourages a culture to continually challenge the way our teams work, to create change and find practical alternatives to improve safety in every day work tasks.”

Fortescue’s Christmas Creek mine site established a ‘Participate to Eliminate’ challenge which encourages employees to identify risks in the workplace and submit ideas on how to remove the potential for incidents and injuries. Through this initiative, team members recently developed an air tool which removes the potential for injury when replacing ‘teeth’ on ancillary mobile plant buckets.

“The level of involvement we have seen from this program has been exceptional and it demonstrates that our teams are safety focussed. Our work groups have some brilliant ideas to improve safety that are very effective and generally easy to implement,” said Jim Herring, Christmas Creek General Manager.

And the empowerment to develop safe and innovative ideas extends to Fortescue’s contracting partners, who continue to demonstrate their commitment to safety. The Hedland Operations Rema Tip Top team successfully completed 30,000 replacements of conveyor rollers injury free, which historically had a high potential to cause hand injuries.

By working together, we are continuing to progress towards our goal of becoming global leaders in safety.