October 18, 2017
Tarong Power Station has won a major award at the 2017 WorkCover Queensland awards, announced on Wednesday morning.
Stanwell Corporation Tarong Power Station took out Category 4 – “Most significant improvement to work health and safety performance” – for their preparation for regular shutdowns at the station.
Tarong Power Station employee Owen Bevan was a runner-up in Category 2 – “Best individual contribution to work health and safety”- for improving the health and safety culture at the power station.
Toowoomba Regional Council was a runner-up in Category 8 – “Best rehabilitation and return to work management system” – for developing a new organisational procedure for workers’ compensation and rehabilitation.
The award winners were announced by Employment Minister Grace Grace and Safety Ambassador Shane Webcke.
This year, 167 organisations and individuals entered the Safe Work and Return to Work Awards.
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The description of Stanwell’s achievement at Tarong:
Maintenance at the Tarong Power Station involves four yearly major outages that require 960 newly inducted workers. High-risk activities include moving hundreds of tonnes of scaffold tube, utilising more than 30,000 grinding consumables, rigging, fitting, pressure welding, work at heights and electrical work.
To increase safety during the outages the project team reviewed data from the previous 30 years of programs to establish hazard areas, and consulted with workers and supervisors to identify priority areas of focus.
Using 30 years of records to review safety, Stanwell introduced a variety of improvements.
These included a working at heights program, a focus on leadership and culture, and a general safe-improvement program.
In particular, the working at heights program addressed key high-risk activities through solutions such as:
- Specialised on-boarding and induction for staff relating to working at heights
- Development of a new concept for aluminium floor around the boiler front, to reduce exposure to dropped objects, slips, trips, falls and other musculo-skeletal injury risks
- Use of six foot high, impenetrable barriers to fully encapsulate the traffic movement for the transition of the 80 tonne of scaffolding going into the boiler
- Introduction of specialised tool lanyards for most items on the job.
