The first time a Behavioral Safety process was undertaken during a Maintenance Shutdown on two LNG trains, lost-time injuries reduced by 100% and first-aid cases fell by 70%, compared to previous Shutdowns on site.

An LNG Producer was shutting down two Trains for an annual maintenance scheduled for 30 days with around 3,600 people. Total Injury rates during previous shutdowns were not high, but still unacceptable to the company. In addition to the normal safety management systems, B-Safe^® was employed on the shutdown to help control safety behavior.

'Buy-In'
B-Safe^® began with one hour ‘buy-in’ sessions with all plant and offshore platform employees, and maintenance personnel from 10 contractor companies to undertake approximately 840 jobs. The idea was to seek their support and inform them about the process. This took 5 days.

Training
Once the workforce agreed to participate, a plant B-Safe^® project team were trained to implement the process over a five day period. This included background information on behavioral principles, incident analysis, checklist development, observer training, goal-setting, feedback, observation data-entry and analysis.

Checklist Development
Unsafe behaviors were obtained from analysis of previous shutdown incident records and from existing checklists. These were developed into ‘Behavioral Observation Checklists’ for 57 shutdown observation areas.

Process
270 volunteer observers were recruited and trained over 9 days, to use the checklists, give feedback and set targets with their workgroups. The observers monitored their colleagues in the plant areas for 10-20 minutes on the first day of the shutdown to find out how safely people worked.

Each workgroup then set an improvement target. Observers continued to monitor daily and gave feedback when observing people and at daily feedback meetings, during ‘tailgate’ talks. The project team followed up any corrective actions, the status of which was reported back to the workgroups.

Activities on the shutdown included major inspections of Turbines, Propane compressor re-wheeling, Replacement of molecular sieve in drier beds, Refractory repair of incinerator furnaces and Seawater line inspections.

Results
Safe behavior improved 35% during the shutdown from 60% on day one to 96% by day 28.

Completed 2 days ahead of schedule, no Lost-time injuries occurred at all, a 100% reduction. First-aid cases also fell by 70%.

The company now uses B-Safe^® on all shutdowns.