APM Terminals presents 10th Annual Global Safety Day
Under the theme “Safe for you. Safe for Me.” APM Terminals celebrated its 10th annual Global Safety Day on 28th April with an emphasis on raising awareness among employees and contractors on the importance of risk management. Presentations, workshops and activities were conducted across the APM Terminals Global Terminals Network’s 72 operating port and terminal facilities as well as Inland Services operations in 69 countries around the world.
Recognizing risks and putting effective controls in place to prevent harm from occurring is a vital part of how APM Terminals operates. As part of Global Safety Day, APM Terminals CEO Kim Fejfer detailed how a fatal accident in 2014 at the Suez Canal Container Terminal, in Port Said East, Egypt involving containers knocked from stacks, led to innovations in operations, through an initiative known as Project Stack. “The objective of project stack was to find a long-term, sustainable solution that fundamentally eliminated the risk of knockdown of containers from the stacks, while at the same time making sure we would not lose productivity” stated APM Terminals CEO Kim Fejfer.
By altering the container movements from container stacks onto trucks from “parabolic” moves to rectangular configured “box”-shaped moves, and by keeping trucks from the transfer lane area until containers have cleared the stacks, the risk of containers being knocked off of stacks through RTG movements has been reduced by 70%. While successful, the effective throughput capacity of a facility is reduced by 15-20% with these measures in place. “The long-term solution is still being pursued in a pilot project at one of our facilities, with the finalized project expected to roll-out in three years, at a cost of USD $40 million”, added Fejfer.
Earlier this year, The Aqaba Container Terminal (ACT), the Kingdom of Jordan’s primary port, was named the winner of the Workplace Safety and Health Award by the Jordanian Social Security Corporation, and APM Terminals Los Angeles Pier 400, and APM Terminals Tacoma received top industry safety honors for 2016 at the respective Pacific Maritime Association’s (PMA) annual Safety Awards. APM Terminals Buenos Aires, operator of the Terminal 4 facility in Argentina’s primary port, was named winner of the first annual “Innovation in Safety Award”, bestowed by ICHCA International, an independent organization dedicated to improving the safety, productivity and efficiency of cargo handling and transportation, at the annual ICHCA conference.
