FFPC earns safety award

The Fort Frances Power Corp. was recognized Monday by the Electrical and Utilities Safety Association for achieving the first step—or “bronze level”—in the E&USA’s “Zero Quest” health and safety program.
“Achieving bronze definitely shows our commitment towards safety, and the focus of our employees towards safety programs,” FFPC CAO Jim Kibiuk said Monday.
“In terms of living and breathing it every day that they go out the door, it’s so important that they understand what safety is all about,” he stressed.
“Working in a very unforgiving industry where accidents are usually fatal due to high-voltage, the risks are high,” Kibiuk added. “We want them going home at the end of the day safe to their families, no doubt about it.”
FFPC employees have worked injury-free, without a lost-time accident, since October, 2001, noted Kibiuk.
“Without a doubt, Fort Frances Power Corp. is committed to health and safety,” E&USA field consultant Andy Kerr said in a congratulatory letter to the FFPC.
“Managing health and safety takes strong commitment from every person within the organization,” Kerr continued. “Through your continuous involvement, you propel your health and safety program to success.”
Kerr said the E&USA, through “Zero Quest,” promotes a managed approach to health and safety.
“We strongly promote organizations to manage health and safety as they would financial plans,” he remarked. “Once managed health and safety become part of an organization’s culture, the outcomes get better every day.”
As the bronze status implies, it is the first of three steps towards gold status—with Kibiuk stressing the FFPC will keep working to achieve that highest goal.
“Our commitment, now that we’ve achieved bronze, is to keep up the focus and awareness and work towards silver now,” he noted. “It’s a good program and we’re focused on it.”
E&USA health and safety consultant Bill White, who was in town Monday to present the award to FFPC staff, said “Zero Quest” only has been around for a few years.
So far, only one utility—Crown corporation Ontario Power Generation—has achieved gold status while a handful of others have reached silver.
“The bronze level is the entry-level,” explained White. “It’s a basic commitment to health and safety programs, a managed health and safety system.
“The silver portion is sustainability—to say that ‘Here are our programs in place and they’ve been audited to show that we can maintain this level of health and safety system.’
“Gold is awarded to people that can maintain it for ‘x’ number of years. I think the benchmark was five.
“OPG has the gold and while the program hasn’t been around for five years, we audited them and they were, in fact, at the gold level,” added White, noting it’s hard to measure any other utility against the OPG, though, considering it has 10,000 employees and provincial funding.
In Northwestern Ontario, the FFPC joins Thunder Bay Hydro as the only utilities having achieved bronze, said Kibiuk.
The origins of “Zero Quest” go back to 2000, when the E&USA adopted a vision of zero lost-time injuries and illnesses by 2011. The strategy to make it happen called for a managed approach to safety that would identify potential hazards, categorize risk levels, and maintain controls.
In 2005, E&USA declared its mission to guide its members in building sustainable health and safety systems using the “Zero Quest” framework.
“By becoming involved in the process, through such practices as sharing best practices and joining working groups, individual firms working their way through the program become contributing members of an independent community of companies with similar needs and qualities, all working together to achieve zero injuries,” E&USA said.