UNITED STATES OF AMERICA DEPARTMENT OF LABOR MINE SAFETY AND HEALTH ADMINISTRATION * * * * * * * * * IN RE: SAFETY AND HEALTH MANAGEMENT FOR MINES * * * * * * * * * BEFORE: PATRICIA W. SILVEY, Chair Michael Davis, Member Neal Merrifield, Member Reginald Richards, Member HEARING: Thursday, November 10, 2011 1:00 p.m. LOCATION: Renaissance Birmingham Ross Bridge Golf Resort and Spa 4000 Grand Avenue Hoover, AL 35226 WITNESSES: Jeff Golden, Ed Thierry, Matthew Howard, Joseph Casper, Chris Thynne, Thomas Wilson Reporter: Danielle S. Ohm Any reproduction of this transcript is prohibited without authorization by the certifying agency. I N D E X OPENING REMARKS By Chair 4 - 11 STATEMENT By Jeff Golden 11 - 21 STATEMENT By Ed Thierry 22 - 44 STATEMENT By Matthew Howard 44 - 61 STATEMENT By Joe Casper 62 - 77 STATEMENT By Chris Thynne 78 - 91 STATEMENT By Thomas Wilson 91 - 94 CLOSING REMARKS By Chair 94 - 96 CERTIFICATE 97 E X H I B I T S Page Number Description Offered NONE OFFERED P R O C E E D I N G S ------------------------------------------------------ CHAIR: Good afternoon and thank you all for being here. My name is Patricia W. Silvey and I am the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Operations for the Mine Safety and Health Administration. I will be the moderator of this public meeting to gather information about safety and health management programs. On behalf of Assistant Secretary of Labor for Mine Safety and Health Joseph Main, I would like to welcome you all here. Let me introduce the members of the panel. To my right is Michael Davis. And as you all know, Michael is the District Manager for Metal and Non-metal District in Birmingham. To my left is Neal Merrifield. Neal is the Administrator for Metal and Non-metal. And to his left is Reginald Richards, and Reginald is the Chief of Health of Metal and Non-metal. This meeting is being held in conjunction as you all know with what's considered to be a very successful Sixth Annual Southeastern Mining Safety and Health Conference, which just concluded earlier today, and I'm sure many of you will share with me the --- that we all came away with many benefits from this conference. And I want the record to show that I think the conference was very beneficial both in terms of nonmembers and members of representatives here but also in terms of the productivity of the meeting and the benefits to compliance and the benefits to safety and health for only part of the operators, the mines, manufacturers who were here, contractors who were here and MSHA's own personnel. So I think it was, indeed, a very beneficial meeting and I was happy to be a part of it. MSHA is holding this public meeting, and plans to hold additional public meetings on safety and health management programs to gather more information about effective safety and health management programs to eliminate hazards and prevent injuries and illnesses at mines. This important initiative supports Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis' vision of Good Jobs for Everyone. The Secretary's vision for achieving good jobs is through a strategy of creating workplaces where employers plan, prevent, and protect the safety and health of employees. Plan, prevent, and protect is based on the principle that employers must find and fix threats to health and safety and assure compliance before an inspector arrives at the workplace. The plan, prevent, and protect strategy begins with the premise that Congress directs mine operators, and I know you've heard a lot about this at our conference here, to achieve and sustain compliance with the law, but it doesn't end there. It also embodies a continuing attention to the recognition and control or elimination of threats to safety and health. Year after year, and we know that many of you heard about that at this conference, many mines experience low injury and illness rates and low violation rates. For these mine operators, preventing harm to their miners is more than compliance with safety and health requirements; it reflects an embodiment of a culture of safety from the CEO to the miner to the contractor. This culture of safety derives from a commitment to a systematic, effective, comprehensive management of safety and health at mines with the full participation of the miners. As many of you know, MSHA held three public meetings in October 2010, gathering information and comments from the safety and health community about effective safety and health programs. Presenters included representatives from academia, safety and health professionals, industry and worker organizations, including mining, including non-mining, and government agencies that provided information on best practices for safety and health programs. In addition to the presentations made, MSHA also received many comments, and these are available on our website. The Agency extended invitations to representatives from academia, safety and health professionals, and others to share their perspectives on how mining operations can create effective safety and health management programs. And you will hear from some of these representatives today. MSHA believes that effective safety and health management programs in mining will create a sustained industry-wide effort to eliminate hazards and will result in the prevention of injuries and illnesses, and be able to believe that operators with these types of programs will identify and correct hazards in a quicker manner, resulting in better safety. In the past year, MSHA published two proposed rules that are complementary to this initiative. In December 2010, as many of you know, MSHA published a proposed rule addressing examinations of work areas in underground coal mines and we had a public hearing on that proposal right here in Birmingham. This proposed rule is a critical element in the Secretary's Plan, Prevent, and Protect strategy, and the Agency is currently working on finalizing that proposal. Second, in February 2011, MSHA published a proposed rule addressing pattern of violations. The proposed rule would revise the Agency's existing regulation for pattern of violations. One of the things that I'd like to say at this point about the pattern of violations proposed rule is that we got a lot of comment on the record during the pattern of violations rulemaking that because in the pattern of violation rulemaking, we have a provision in there where an operator could look on our website and determine how close he or she might be to approaching the criteria of giving rise to a pattern of violation and they could submit to the agency a corrective action program to address those types of patterns that would be given rise to the pattern. And we use corrective action for our comprehensive corrective action program. I think it says something like that, but some members of the mine and public confuse that with the safety and health management program rulemaking, but the two are totally different. One doesn't have anything to do with the other, and sometimes I think that people who gave us comments like that sort of fully understood that the two were not connected, that the corrective action program and the pattern of violation rulemaking didn't have --- was completely separate from the safety and health management program rulemaking. But I do want to clarify that so that anybody who may not be here today but is, in fact, reading the transcript they understand that. And if you, obviously, have any questions about it as we get into the public meeting, you can feel free to ask us. Also, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has announced rulemaking on Injury and Illness Prevention Programs, which they refer to as I2P2, which is similar to this regulatory initiative. And in 2010, OSHA held five stakeholder meetings on I2P2 soliciting information about safety and health management programs for the general industry. In addition to the information MSHA received from last year's meetings, MSHA is now interested in receiving information about safety and health programs developed and implemented during the past five years, and particularly those that may have been implemented during the last year, although, obviously, you can provide us information on whatever you choose. We are interested in statistical results, lessons learned, best practices, which I've heard a lot of things about best practices during this conference, and new and innovative approaches from different sectors of the mining industry, and we are particularly interested in hearing from small mines. To supplement the information that we received already, we are interested in safety and health programs that have shown results in reduced injury and illnesses, increased safety and health results, improved conditions in certain areas, for example, haulage, roof and rib, combustible materials, health hazards, or whatever areas that --- particularly where you've had definitive results, improved communication, increased productivity, increased and improved worker and management involvement and increased morale. The agency is interested in statistical results from companies and organizations that have programs that are effective and measurable. We are also interested in safety and health management programs from industries other than mining, and safety and health management programs from other countries. This is the first public meeting that MSHA is holding to gather additional information. At this time the agency plans, however, to hold additional public meetings, and to the extent possible, we will integrate them in conjunction with other safety and health events just like we held this one in conjunction with the Southeast Conference. We will announce those public meetings in the Federal Register and post them on the agency's website. We will hold the date for comments open until the additional meetings are held, at which point we will notify the public of the date on which the comment period will close. After all of the presentations, you will have an opportunity to ask questions or present further views. At this time, we will hear from our first presenter. When you make your presentation, I ask you to please spell your name so that the court reporter can have an accurate record. Our first presenter today will be Jeff Golden with National Cement of Alabama. MR. GOLDEN: Jeff Golden, J-E-F-F, G-O-L-D-E-N. I'm the second manager at National Cement Company. We're located in Ragland, Alabama, approximately 45 minutes from here, east. Manufacturer of Portland cement, masonry cement. And approximately five years ago, I became employed at National Cement Company as the safety manager, which was kind of a unique situation in that there had not been a full-time safety manager previous to my employment. And so I got the opportunity to start a program. And a lot of that program was based on what I was allowed to do by upper management. And the management at National Cement allowed me to put this program in place, and so, as with any large program, you don't want to do it all at one time. You lose the opportunity --- lose the support of management, lose the support of the employees by doing something all at one time. So over time, we built this program one step at a time, putting in certain key elements progressively. At the beginning of the program, obviously, it requires upper management's commitment, and the first commitment there was employing a full-time safety manager in this company, providing money, providing resources, providing labor, the opportunity to start changing some of the things that needed to be changed. Supervisors are extremely important. The front line supervisors were the direct relation to the employees that you're focusing on. And then the union employees that we had had to be trained, had to be the ones that notice their surroundings to provide for their safety. Some of the things that we did by our management commitment involvement was the --- our safety taskforce, which was something that we put in place that not only included our miners' reps --- too often in the mining industry, we have a tendency to focus just as far as on the hourly employees, just on miners' reps, because they are individuals that happen to accompany MSHA during the inspections. And so this is something that we want to do not just including miners reps but all employees to have an opportunity to meet with management, to meet with the safety committee to discuss certain issues, and we found that this was something that was very important. Plant presence of management as far as being interactive in the safety process has been a great practice. When the employees see our upper management out in the plant conducting mock inspections, actually pairing up with the hourly employees and they're writing while the hourly employee is taking pictures of hazards that we need to mitigate, those things show the employees that management is, indeed, concerned about their safety; also, management's willingness to allot the resources that we need to promote the safety and health of the employees. One of the things that I began when I came to National Cement was to get some training. My background was not in mining. My background was in OSHA regulated industries. I was an OSHA trainer prior to coming into the mining industry. And before that I was actually an instructor in junior college, high school. I taught biology at several different levels. And so my background in training as well as in industry was a passion of mine, and I wanted to convey the safety aspects in a different type of way. So often in the mining industry, because of the regulatory eight hours' worth of refresher training every year, so many people get --- take one class eight hours, and the thing I heard from our employees was an eight-hour class is too long. After one hour, I don't remember anything anyway. So one of the things that I emphasized was training, breaking it up over the --- throughout the year, different topics, different instructions and doing things differently to try to get --- to convey the message that we were getting across. We wanted to use topics that were applicable to the employees. There was no reason for us to train our employees that were welders and repairmen on how to safely operate a payload. It was not the same training that they should be included in. So I started to tailor the training by what the employees do. And it became something that was very informative. We had no reason for our haul truck operators to be taking welding safety. So what I started to do was making applicable topics for our employees so that they could best gain the safety knowledge that they needed for their job. Reminding our employees daily of their training as they take the classes that we offer that we would train them, then apply it in their job, reminding the supervisors to remind their employees of things that was brought out in the safety classes and the training. The next phase of our safety and health management plan was the daily workplace exams, very important, by allowing our employees to recognize the hazards. The first part of that is for them to actually look around. One thing that I feel very strongly about in the workplace exams is if an employee will notice their surroundings, they can mitigate many hazards that might be there just from the rain. If it rains the night before, if they don't pay attention when they walk into an area, there's water on the floor that they haven't noticed before, just being observant. And the daily workplace exams that we have each and every one of our employees do. All of our employees have the workplace exam pad. When they go into the area, they fill it out. It's not just about writing it down; it's about noticing what's in the area and that has been a great addition to what we do. The monthly safety teams. We put together teams of hourly, salary employees --- and this is nothing new by any stretch in the industry, doing mock inspections, doing safety inspections. But we take an hourly employee and a company employee, put them together. They go to a particular area --- everyone in the plant --- every area in the plant is inspected by a pair of these employees. They're given a camera, a digital camera, which has been a great addition because now they feel like inspectors. They can look at things and take pictures of what they know to be a hazard, and this has been a great addition. The cameras come back to me. I download the pictures and then we generate work orders or use the pictures for training, which, again, goes back to the training part that I'm so interested in. Just in this year, which is the year 2011, we addressed over 600 safety hazards, and this can be anything from spilled oil or damaged guarding, but we have addressed a number of safety hazards just through the safety inspections and the workplace exams. The last item, benefit to that, we do repair those items quickly and people notice. They're more likely to report more. If you continuously do workplace exams and do not repair the items listed on those exams, people stop reporting and they don't see results. So it's very important to repair those hazards. Training. Like I said before, I'm passionate about training. We use these pictures in our training, the pictures that our employees take. And when you notice things like a ladder leaning against a conduit, okay, and these are things that our employees are taking pictures of and, you know, then they get to point out, hey, why would someone do that? Underneath the raincoat is an electrical box. Why would we hang a raincoat on an electrical box? So these are things that our employees pointed out and they can share with their fellow employees and say this is not what we need to do. Our results didn't get to put specific numbers, but one thing I want to show is general results in year 2008 and 2009. We went over 18 consecutive months without a lost time accident, which was a great thing, not because of the numbers, but because that was 18 months that our employees came to work and worked without an injury, and that was a very --- that's our biggest goal at National Cement. In 2011, over 300 days without a lost time accident. 2009 and 2011, just from a standpoint of our MSHA inspections, our citation levels were significantly lower than the national average cement plants, very highly ranked in the southeastern district as far as the lowest number of citations. The year 2010 we had somewhat of an anomaly between the two good years. Why is that? I'm still trying to determine that. Not just from an injury standpoint. We had a number of minor injuries, things that caused maybe a shoulder surgery here or a knee injury there. And then we also had a significant increase in citations in 2010. The plan, the safety program did not change from 2008, 2009, 2010 even into 2011. We did start focusing in 2011 on more things citation related. But it's very important and something that I feel strongly about is that this safety management plan is the tool. It's a tool that I think everyone should use, but it's not something that I feel is to be strongly regulated. I think it's to be encouraged. I think this is something that industries and regulators can work together and should work together on. When we look at the statistics, look at the numbers and I have numbers to show three consecutive years, and two years are great and one year in between is not, but the plan continues to show the same result, it's not something that from a regulatory standpoint --- I'm not sure how you regulate that. And final comment is we think we have a great plan at National Cement and we enjoy this opportunity to present it. CHAIR: Thank you. I have a few comments, and you actually --- as I was writing down a few questions, you seemed to answer them in your next comment. Because the first one I was going to ask you was, do you have a safety committee? And you said you do have a safety taskforce. And you are a union company. And what union is it? MR. GOLDEN: Steelworkers, United Steelworkers. CHAIR: Okay. United Steelworkers. And many of the --- just by you making your presentation, you emphasized many of the principles involved in the safety and health management program. I was curious. Did you say you started it five years ago about? MR. GOLDEN: Yes. When I came to National Cement it was in early 2007. CHAIR: Right. And so you can see from --- I see from --- I was going to ask you also, did you have measurable results? But seeing from some of the things you said, as you pointed out, except for that anomaly year of 2010 that you're still trying to figure out, you did show positive results in '09 and this year. Let's see what I have. I think you answered most all of the questions as I was going on. I don't think I have any other comments or any questions except to say that we probably will be just taking comments from people, you know, for a while, as I said, through next year. So for those of you who do have this type of program, just to help us before the record closes, is if you would --- because I know you're going to do it for yourself anyway, if you would continue to keep information on your programs and then just let us know, you know, we would appreciate that. Do you have any ---? I think Neal has a question. MR. MERRIFIELD: Mr. Golden, thank you for your presentation. If you had to pick one element in your program that you think you would attribute your successfulness in the program, what element do you think you got the most benefit from? MR. GOLDEN: Training. I feel strongly that training has been one of the primary elements just from the standpoint that employees are more likely to notice hazards by using the materials that are used in the pictures from our facility, things that they would walk by every day because they've been there for so many years. Now they start noticing those things. So I think the training has been a pretty good element. CHAIR: Well, thank you very much, Jeff. And we do appreciate you making a presentation. And as I said, any information, you know, from your company would be most appreciated to us before the record closes. Our next speaker will be Ed Thierry with Mosaic. MR. THIERRY: My name is Ed Thierry and I'm a mining safety manager for Mosaic. I've been with Mosaic for 11 months now. Prior to coming to work for Mosaic, I was in the cement industry for 27 years, so I worked with MSHA for almost 28 years now. Anyway, what I'm going to talk about today is, you know, how do we achieve zero injuries in our workforce? I need some kind of training here, I think. There we go. Anyway, it's a journey to zero. And what are the key drivers of safety? You know, how do we --- it's easy to say that we want to achieve zero injuries in the workforce, but how do we achieve that? You know, we live in an unsafe world and there's a lot of things out there, you know, the road conditions. Each of us drive vehicles and you're five foot away from death at any given time. There's an 18-wheeler in the other lane. If he decides to take your lane, then what choice do you have? But there's controls in place. So there's risks everywhere. How you perceive these risks determines the outcome and whether there's an injury or not. The key drivers for safety, we have our management system already in place. We have our lock out/tag out, confined space. We have our safety committees. We have many management systems out there to direct our workforces. We're investing in our sites. We are investing in our people. We are investing in equipment. We talked earlier in our conference about guarding. You know, we're doing better at our guarding. And we are regulated for compliance. But, you know, why are we still having injuries? With all these controls put in place, we're still having injuries. What are we missing? And as early as 1931, there's a safety engineer, Hendricks, who's come up with a model and it was based on behavioral safety. And this model that he had talked about as industry, we focus on the lagging indicators. It's very important that we look at the injuries that we have and put controls in place and keep from having like injuries, but if we're ever going to achieve that goal of zero, we need to be looking at the leading indicators. We need to look at behavioral and what are our employees out there --- you know, what is their culture? What's the mindset? How many injuries do we have that are related to an unsafe guard? Or maybe it's that piece of equipment that's unsafe. You know, where we need to focus is on the behavioral side, our employees. We need to put some effort in our employees, get them engaged in our program. Because as a safety person at a site, I can't be there all the time with that employee. So we need to engage our employees where they are thinking safety 24/7 and they're involved in it. Ninety (90) percent of injuries are due to personal choice, people taking chances. It's not that guard that's not in place. It's people taking chances. Most companies have a slogan, and I believe with Mosaic, it's the relentless pursuant of an injury free workplace. That's good, but you got to put some things in place to achieve these goals. It's nice to say it, but what do you have there that will help you to achieve these goals? And what we're going to talk about today is behavioral safety, observation programs and also employee engaging and getting involved. You know, I've been on the site and doing observations and asking, you know, why are you doing it this way? And most of the time the answer is, well, this is the way that I've always done it. This is the way that I was trained to do it. But with observation, we're out there looking at these people and we're questioning why are you doing it this way, and we get some feedback and we also --- maybe there's a better way. There's newer equipment out there. There's newer PPE. There's a lot of new technology out there. You know, I've done this job 1,000 times before. It comes naturally to me. I know what I'm doing. You know, I've trained to do this job my whole life and, you know, what could possibly happen? And that's the mindset. That's the things that we got to focus on. And then when people get complacent, that's when we have some type of injury. Observation programs. Many companies have observation programs. And the key to a good observation program is this: peer observation. You have to have management support that's run by hourly employees. There can't be any kind of disciplinary action from it. And what it does is it requires our employees to get out peer-to-peer observation. And we're looking at what are the good things we're doing and what are the things that we can improve on? With Mosaic, our program we have hourly employees, at least one on each site, that is their full-time job, is to manage the observation program. Their tasks are to go out in the field, do observations themselves and recruit observers. It's all volunteer. They take this information --- they have a check sheet. They take this information and they put it in a database. And then without anybody's names on it, we take that information and we share it back with the employees. And it's actually a --- it's a key performance indicator. Where are we lacking? Is it people putting themselves in the line of fire? People's eye is not on the task? Is it frustration? These are the things that we are looking for. And out of this as management, we can determine, do we need to do some more training? Do we need to do some PPE? What are the things that we need to do to help bring our program together? The key to the program is out in the field. It's that one-on-one conversation between the two workers. That's where you get the benefit of this program because they're stopping and they're talking about their jobs. What are they doing? What it does is it motivates our employees to do the right thing. Here's a perfect example. If you look at this worker here, at first --- first thought is he's doing a good job, everything is in order. But our observers are trained to look at every aspect of a task. And you'll see this worker here, he's got his face protection on which is a face shield, eye safety glasses, hearing protection. He's got gloves on. He's got a guard on his grinder. But if you'll look real close, how close he is to a combustible? If you see he's using a forklift as a work table. What if, when he's cutting, he cuts into the forklift? If you'll see, he's grinding. He's grinding towards the boom of the forklift. These sparks could damage the hoses that are on that boom. If you'll look, he's got a safety harness on. You know, should he have a harness on while he's driving? These are the things that the observers are trained to talk to their peers about. Look at your job. Look at what if. These are some of our statistics and if you'll look, our --- if you see, our observations have really grown in the last couple months. And what we've done is --- and it's a new program with us. It's about a year old. What we've done is the key to this is is you got to have your employees where they buy into this and they believe in it. When you first roll this out, they think of it as --- they're picking on each other and they'll take this information and use it against them. So you got to get them to buy into it. And that's all part of the communication process and letting them know the information you get and feed it back to them and it's all for them, to benefit them. And what we did about a month ago, we started having our safety observers go out with a person that has been trained and doing observations with them, and they share this observation and see how they're doing. They compare observations. And another thing they do on a daily basis is they get a person that's not trained to be an observer and go through an observation with them. That way they see the benefit of the program, and it takes away that fear of somebody using it against them. And it's really paid off. So you can see a major increase. If you see our injuries at this site right here, we have 550 employees and up to 400 contractors in any given day. And we do observations on contractors also. One of the things with our observation program is when you go do an observation on an employee, they ask for permission first before they do an observation. So it's all intended to be ---. Okay. On the other side of this, employee engagement, getting our employees involved, getting them to buy into our safety programs. It was triggered by --- our site --- as you see the incident we had --- in the two months of January and February, we had three reported injuries and it's kind of like --- our management group got together, what are we doing? We have all these things in place. What can we do better for our employees to engage them to let them know that, hey, they could be hurt? They could work without getting injured. So we came up with a Believe in Zero program. We started putting signs up on our roadway coming into our site where anybody coming into our site could see them. We had a blitz that all the management group and our safety observers, we went to all of the breakout meetings in the morning and started talking to our employees and we shared the two injuries that we had. And they were behavioral, in other words, people choosing to take chances. And, you know, we urge people to stop, think about what you're doing. You know, don't rush. Don't talk about the job that you're doing. If you have any kind of concern, get somebody involved. And we'll talk about 90 percent of incidents are due to behavior issues. And we also told them that behavior is not just hourly people while they're working. Behavior is also management. What if management had seen that we had three reportable injuries in a short period of time and we done nothing? So we let them know it's not just hourly employees; it's management, too, also trying to do the right things. And so we went around to the different meetings and gave out Zero candy bars and we talked about safety and about the three recent incidents that we had. And then each day we would go out and talk to our employees at these meetings. We put banners up throughout our plant to let people know that we can work without injuries. There's still workers out there that think that, you know, if you work long enough, you're going to have some kind of injury. And we seen during this conference we had this week that we had several 40-year miners. They worked 40 years without getting injured. So we got to get that mindset out there to our workers that we can work without getting injured. So there's a lot of enthusiasm in this Believe in Zero campaign that's still going on. Somebody will come up and say, what about Coke Zero? So we'd go out and buy Coke Zeros. And when we have our breakout meetings, we take Coke Zeros to them. We made a commitment that we would do it for 30 days. We would have --- send out a toolbox meeting every day. Well, after the 30 days was up, the supervisors of the employees, say look, this is great. Can we continue this? So since February of this year every day we send out a toolbox meeting to our employees, although several of them were on behavioral, but it's all different topics. And supervisors call us and ask us for a toolbox subject, and we make sure that it gets sent out the next day. So we're trying to teach our employees that whenever they come up with an idea, to use that idea. We have things like these wristbands. You know, we have meetings with our people and we talk to them and we give them these wristbands that say Believe in Zero. It's Mosaic Four Corners on it. One of our employees came back to me and said, Ed, I was at home last weekend. I was on top of my ladder standing there and I was working on one of my outside lights and I reached up to get that light bulb and I seen the red Believe in Zero. He said, I stopped what I was doing, got off that ladder and went and got a longer ladder. So things like this work, and we try to get employees to take safety home. We gave them Frisbees that says, take safety home with you. Hardhat stickers, bumper stickers, these things were given out. You know, every week we're giving something out, ball caps. We have T-shirts that had --- we wanted it to be around a team concept, so the T-shirt says Believe in Zero and in backside it says Four Corners with a big zero on it. And every Friday still to this day, is when everyone wears their Believe in Zero T-shirt that day to work and everybody working together to prevent injuries and get zero injuries and that's our team spirit. We still do the candy bars, you know. We sent out a letter to all of our employees' families and it was signed by management that we've committed to zero injuries to our employees, and we need their help to encourage their loved ones when they come to work, work safely and when they're at home, to work safely. The site manager made a commitment to every employee, this is 450 employees, that he would sit down and give them face-to-face time and listen to any concerns they have, and he's still doing it. He's not finished. It takes some time to get through 450 employees. And the whole purpose is to let people know that the zero campaign is about their safety. Another thing with zero is we want zero harm and we want zero MSHA citations also because that's an indicator. So when we have MSHA blitzes or MSHA mock inspections, we do training for our employees first. It's a simple thing like a light panel needs to be labeled on a breaker plan. Well, the employees when they go to the lighting panel, they see a label there so they think it's good. But you got to tell them you go to breaker number one see where that feeds, breaker number two. If there's a spare in there, we need to make sure it gets labeled and get an electrician to change it. Make sure you actually get it labeled and it is inspected. So we have started a pre-job folder with our employees. The attachments --- it's all printed on a nice folder and it's a pre-task list. It's the things that we're looking around in our safety observation program. It's are you in the line of fire? Is there any short of energy? You know, is there any frustration in this job? This folder then goes through all the tools that they need, any type of permits they need. All this is planned before the task ever starts. And at the end of it, employees sign off that they have reviewed this and there isn't --- there is a workplace exam included in this too. So at any point --- and it says on this form, you can stop this job at any point if there's something --- any type of conditions, so it's getting employees involved. We take these forms and we look at them and then we do review them to make sure that if there's a risk that's been identified, we make sure that we correct this risk or any type of hazard. That's really worked out well. And part of our employees' creativity is we have --- in our motor control centers, we have painted on the floor this Believe in Zero logo. It's on several of walls in our plant. We actually have a label maker and we made a lot of labels. In fact, my laptop, on the top of it I got a sticker that says Believe in Zero. And you got to have some fun with the safety, too. So for years the field office and the maintenance crew, they had fun days. And they came to the safety group and they said, look, we'd like our fun day to be around zero, zero harm to people. So we had a fun day. One day if you see a dunking booth, we have our employees in the dunking booth. The safety department took turns in there. The one that we had presently --- that's one of our mine managers right there. We had banners. We had lunch. It was a fun day and it's employees getting together. And these are the shirts that we had. One of the employees had brought up crash test dummies. You know, that would be pretty neat to have some crash test dummies, you know. So what we did is we got some suits. We got two employees walk around talking about safety with their crash test dummy uniforms on. One of those sites picked up on this Believe in Zero and they wanted a little twist, to be a little different, so they had a Believe in Zero family day. All the families came to the site. We had the booth. We fed everyone. The children, we did face painting and all kind of games for them. It was like a carnival. It was really nice. It's safety. That's what it's about, going home at the end of the day and taking care of your family and being there for them. Anyway, this is some of the painted faces, so it just shows you that they can be small reasons to work safely and to Believe in Zero. You know, these things you can't just stop there. Our next move --- of course, the first of the year we had another little campaign. It's going to be called --- and this is the back of the T-shirt --- it's Don't Walk By. You know, if you see something --- and this is on the behavioral side and the physical side. If you see some type of risk out on your site or if you see an unsafe act or condition, we need to do something about it, do the right thing. Another thing that we're doing is we have --- at two of our sites, we got ball games. One's football. One's baseball. And around safety, there's competition there, and that's really working well. It's getting employees involved, engaged and where they're thinking of safety on a daily basis. So, you know, our journey --- you know, the relentless pursuit of an injury-free workplace, it's a journey and it's something that, you know, you never get there. You got to continuously work on it every day and come up with different things. And it starts with leadership and you got your resources. You got to continue to invest money and time. Your safety management systems are very important. They're part of your safety programs. You need to continue reviewing them, improving them. And the key to it is, you know, you have to have that passion for safety. Accountability. You know, reward our employees that don't know --- in the end, you've got to have consequences out there also. Do audits. Anything that's going to be sustainable you got to be able to make. So we do audits, and part of the audit is our safety observations. You have to be consistent with your message, with your communications, looking at your key performance indicators, standardizing your procedures. It's continued improvement and it's all about people and passion and Believe in Zero. All of these things make up your culture, your DNA of your people and, you know, in the past --- we kind of have that ugly past. You know, a lot of sites and --- you know, these are the things that are going to take to make a program sustainable. That's it. Thank you. CHAIR: Thank you. And I should have said this at the beginning. Thank you for the role you played in helping to organize and sponsor the Southeastern Conference. And so I know on behalf of Mike and on behalf of MSHA, we thank you for that. A couple things that I wanted just to note, and I don't know whether you all have had any measurable results or not or any statistical results. Have we seen any of that yet? I don't know whether it's been in place long enough to see that. ****** MR. THIERRY: Our injury rate is down. But it's been less than a year. CHAIR: Okay. MR. THIERRY: I can tell you right now the energy --- and you talk about productivity when you have workers that are more productive. You don't have an injury. We're very fortunate. Did you see our numbers? The highest injury we had in a month is not zero. There's two, and that was early on. This last month we had zero. Last month we had one. The month before that zero. So our goal is zero, and the key to it is people understanding we can work without getting injured if you just stop and think about what you're doing. CHAIR: Well, you know, during the conference, I was listening to your representative of your company talk about your incentive program and all the positive benefits from that. But I'm going to ask you this, and I didn't at that time because I have --- there are some who would say that an incentive program --- I'm sure you may have heard criticisms of incentive programs and say that an incentive program might --- another way to look at it is that it might discourage because of --- the incentive, quote, unquote, it might discourage workers from, in fact, reporting what may be unsafe conditions and hazards. And what are your thoughts on that since you all have such a program? MR. THIERRY: My thoughts are, you know, yes, it could drive something down if an employee, you know, was afraid to report something. And what I look at is what is the positive side of that? It's helping a lot. And we encourage employees to report --- near misses is the biggest thing right now, we're looking at right now --- that's part of that being at the bottom of that pyramid. We're looking at near misses. We want them to report them. So we encourage our employees to report any injuries, and on the other side, accountability. If an employee --- if there's an injury and they don't report it, everyone is trained, you know, there's some type of disciplinary action. So you have to measure the --- there was a question about --- you know, we have these incentives around, like ball game --- CHAIR: Right. Right. MR. THIERRY: --- with MSHA inspections and things like that and the MSHA inspector come in and he writes us up a citation for an area. An employee might say, well, you just hurt me with my chance of getting a prize here, but what is the benefit? How many risks has been identified and we corrected because of that employee trying to achieve that reward? MR. DAVIS: You probably know my peers that was on your property about three weeks ago, so I had a fairly good tour at that time. So it seems some of your information --- and just a question in your data collection. I know it's a little early in the procedure, but do you intend to take a look at that relative to accidents and injuries that you're having? Would that consider age and experience and in the data that you have right now where you see any kind of significance relative to types of accidents you're having, age groups, experience level? MR. THIERRY: Yeah. And we do --- for like a lot of industries, we do have --- our employees --- we have a lot of employees that are 20 to 40-year employees, so we do have an aging workforce. But there is not a correlation between injuries and age at this point. We're very fortunate we have a low number of injuries. It's kind of across the board. MR. DAVIS: And just as a last question, you wanted to drive for zero citations. The training for your inspection team, does that include any kind of training in mandatory compliance? MR. THIERRY: Yes. What we do is actually do some hazard training with our employees that has to do with our, you know, regulatory requirements, too, and what's required by MSHA. We do a lot of training there. Any time that we have an MSHA inspection, we share with all of our employees pictures of what was cited and we give those out. In other words, if I got an MSHA inspection going on and it started today, at the end of the day I hand pictures out to our employees to let them know. You know, it's a training. And we share this with all our sites. We have four active mines in the Florida area and we share this between sites and we have reduced the number of citations. This last inspection that we had we had 14 citations for Mosaic, and four were contractors. We work very closely with contractors. We talked about injuries earlier. If a contractor gets injured on our site, it's the same as if one of our employees gets injured. We keep those numbers --- we have incentives. And these contractor injuries is just like one of our employees because we want our employees to be engaged with contractors. We do audits of contactors. We do observations of contractors. I did a breakout session and it was --- basically would be the same topic that I talked about here, that a contractor actually wanted to work for Mosaic. And we encouraged him to do this behavioral safety program, and his injuries have been reduced more than 25 percent. He was telling me that his Workers' Comp cost was $120,000 or something and now it's reduced by like 40 percent, which is great, and that's how they can tell the management group that these things do work. MR. DAVIS: Thank you. MR. THIERRY: Thank you for having us. MR. RICHARDS: I have one more question for you. Sorry. From what we've already heard is that you're planning to measure injury rates. Are there any other indicators that you're planning to measure in terms of effectiveness of this particular program? MR. THIERRY: Yeah. What we look at actually --- and that's a good question. We do count the number of observations that we have, and it's not just about numbers. Some people that have a behavioral program require that everybody onsite do it. You know, our goal is to get 100 percent of our employees to do an observation, but they do it because they know it's the right thing to do. So we do look at the quality of these observations. And with this program, there is --- we look at, you know, was it the line of fire that a person was? Was it a frustration sort of injury? There's a lot of things that we're looking at and it's the data that we are continuing to look at and take this information and build our program from there. Does that answer it? MR. RICHARDS: Thank you. CHAIR: Just one other. You have a labor representative at your site; right? MR. THIERRY: That's correct. CHAIR: And who is that again? MR. THIERRY: Chemical workers. CHAIR: Chemical workers. And then there's one other thing I was thinking about because you said that the employees have the right to --- can exercise the right to stop work if they see something. Has that ever happened? MR. THIERRY: It has happened. And we also encourage contractors to do that, too. CHAIR: To do that, too. Okay. MR. THIERRY: And with our program, we're very engaged with contractors. We have contractor celebrations and we'll have contractors that we will take and recognize and have dinner with them for milestones that they make. And also with contractors, we have had contractors leave our site because when we were doing audits, they didn't have their program in place. CHAIR: Thank you very much. Our next speaker is Matthew Howard with Rio Tinto. MR. HOWARD: Thanks for inviting me. And you said I have to hold this the right distance away. I don't want to sound too loud or too quiet. So I'm just going to note to you what I'm going to talk about, probably not as long as some of the other presentations, and I don't have any nice pictures of our employees, so sorry about that. Our global operations, we got 11 operations, got them around the world. I'm not sure how familiar you are with our group, International Mining Company based out of London, but listed also on the U.S. Stock Exchange and Australia Stock Exchange. All kinds of materials we mine and refine and produce and we have a management system that covers all of our operations. I'm going to try and take this to a global approach. Not many more can be global. Vision and values. You know, we really --- we do have a management system. We believe that we need world class systems to operate successfully or have consistent thread about how we operate in our mining operations around the world. We have performance standards related to some of the more technical details of safety and health issues. There are a lot of --- some of the other standards MSHA, OSHA and various other things, but we also believe a lot of culture and leadership and things that we need to attack not only the leadership, develop the cultural aspects of our operations as well as the system, so you'll hear me talk a lot about leadership in this presentation. And you'll also notice the ad line from our CEO based in London. If it's not safe, we don't do it that way. And again, I think that goes to the point we made in the last presentation around people having that opportunity to really think about what they're doing and if they're putting themselves or others at risk. And we're going to stop. We're going think about it. We're going to change the way we're approaching this and actually do things differently because we're all in the same boat as some of the other presentations we've seen. We don't think we can get away from the risk-free mining operation. We don't have risk-free operations. We have risks where our employees have to deal with risks, and we want to equip them so they can successfully deal with risk. And I think that's one of our challenges and one of the things we need to come to make sure we can operate in an incident free way. So this is our management system and this is sort of a very high level view. The management system itself is probably comprehensive standards that we have. It's actually available publicly at our website, so that little link at the bottom is actually where you can get the entire standard or the associated requirements that we have for how we operate from an agency standpoint. It's integrated going into the former operation. It's integrated into all of our operational controls. You can see the section operation controls, and that we'll --- but again, it's our foundation. We expect this to be on a good, solid foundation of leadership. One of the cultures which is promoting safe behaviors and really driving that message home for employees, is something that we feel without it, it's really not going to a successful program. Again, we have this in operations but the basis of the foundation is leadership and that commitment culture. Some of the performance --- so this is actually written into our global. So it's all of our operations and quite a lot of operations that I'm seeing there. We introduced the performance standards in about 2000. So that was basically our operation control standards which we have used there. We also have a people-based safety approach. Fundamentally, our philosophy and certainly my philosophy is that you can't not have the same basic approach. It's just a question of whether or not you want to have an operation. So again, we really try to hone in on a people based approach and looking beyond the immediate behavior itself and actually looking towards, what are the things in the background that might be driving people to choose to behave in certain ways? It's not what we want to do. It's how we make sure that we actually motivate them to do things we do want them to do. So again, focus on the behaviors, explaining clearly what behaviors you want and making sure you're providing those consistent --- constant for those behaviors. Then we have revised the management system so that, as you can see at the bottom, we've gone through the process of revising a new management system. This is the one that we now have implementing in all of our operations, and you can see we've had a steady decline in our frequency rate. We have slightly different criteria on how we report globally into London on our injury metric. This would be medical treatment or lost time injuries in that statistic. So obviously, medical treatment is the large method, includes both of those numbers, and it also includes our contractors. We report a contractor out with injuries just the same as we do employees, and that gets rolled up into that number you can see as well. So again, we include contractors, not only in the standards, which they're required to follow when they work in our premises, but also we try to involve them in daily activities as well to make sure that we have them equally participating in our safety program and some of the culture initiatives as well. So clearly, it's obviously a big factor in our performance and our contractor's performance. We want to make sure they're performing in a way we would expect our own employees to do as well. So really, some of the lessons learned we've come across in our time integration and implementation of the management system. Again, reflecting on the fact that without foundation of leadership development and culture of safety, it's very difficult, even with an excellent system, to really achieve world class performance. And when we see that in our operations now, the real opportunity still lies with cultural development, leadership development and making sure that that is improved where we can to improve our performance. Ownership. And I think we've got quite a lot of ownership with our systems. Obviously, we've developed our own, so in that sense, we have that ownership and I think that helps create sustainability. The same with the cultural piece. We want to get --- you know, each site has their own unique culture and having them own how they do things and in certain ways it'll seem helpful in that sustainability piece. We have seen that the mechanisms around major events and that involved the bulk of injuries. Lower level of injuries are actually different. So contradicting a little bit of the last presentation in the sense of miner's triangle, we'll obviously look at that as a model. I think that's probably more compelling evidence that suggests that it's not strict ratio. And actually, the mechanism of damage are actually fundamentally different for injuries and low level injuries and also the high level fatalities and the major process that happens that people have to deal with. So I think the key for us is applying the right tool for the right circumstances, and we have a fairly comprehensive risk management process which I'm sure a lot of people do as well. We have the employee --- very similar to the slam risk approach where we equip our employees with a risk tool to help them make conscious and deliberate decisions around risk on a daily basis. But then we have some more comprehensive risk approaches by looking at the major potential capacity we have around fatality when approaching safety issues. So I think it's really a case of looking at the different mechanisms and trying to work out how we can best predict the predictable and working on that and making sure that we actually take appropriate actions. We also found that one size doesn't fit all. We got brand new sites. You can see a lot of sites, some big, some small, and even without a management system. It's fairly comprehensive. Some of our smaller operations struggle from a standpoint, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to all of our operations. So I think it's very difficult to think of a management system approach which isn't scalable in some way, shape or form or at least provides that ability for it to fit to all sites. I think it's sort of a challenge with those management systems. Just looking at a model of other industries. I'm not sure if you seen this. This takes the form of responsible care. Obviously, responsible care is something --- the industry self regulation model framework for a management system and is --- and I don't want anybody to think I've been successful in the chemical industry. So with some of those numbers over --- again, I think it's about two decades' worth of numbers on that. You know, we've been working closely with the National Mining Association and I'm sure they'll be happy to elaborate more on that. But really, a rather coarse safety initiative which is akin to the responsible industry self regulation and providing framework for a management system which is both scalable and also has tools that can assist all the people in the mining sector in the U.S. And I think this is really a compelling model and a great piece off work that I'm very excited about getting involved with. And again, I think the NMA would be delighted to share more information, but in addition to what responsible care does, what I think this does is provides a tool set for folks who may not have the resources or the ability to go out and get information readily available that some of the other industry players have. So it does focus in on culture and it does focus in on the system side and it also recognizes there's a huge piece that's around ancient development and getting that right to make sure that we follow with the performance. So again, more information I think probably mixed with the record and I think very encouraging initiatives, similar models on responsible care on the regulation. Because we didn't invent most of this ourselves. We did reference other people outside the mining industry, people like Colby Daniels, people like Scott Gallo, around the people who face safety aspects and how do we make sure that we can use what's available from science to best tailor our program to make sure we have a world class performance? Again, we are not advocates of we invented the wheel. We just want to make sure that what we have is based on sound rationale and making sure that our process is sort of the line of best practice. I'm not sure if there is any question here on what we've done, our direction. CHAIR: I have a couple questions. And thank you for your presentation. First of all, you mentioned that I think you all introduced that in about 2000. Have you all seen any measurable results, and if so, you know, in what areas, any particular areas over other areas? MR. HOWARD: I mean, unfortunately, with it being such a large range of sites, we got a huge span of one certain --- on one site or another, so it's a broad spectrum. Speaking for my division, yes, we've seen a huge impact for cultural initiatives that people submit safety approach models around which employees involved have an understanding what are the mechanisms that motivate. I would say that has been as transforming in a way as a management system itself. I think from our stance, we're looking for a real breakthrough in terms of where we go from here. We've got some pretty good numbers. Our global division at this stage in the year is .36, so very low numbers. If we truly can break from that and get close to zero tolerance, which is obviously --- we see that as one where we create a culture. We're everyday people looking out for opportunities to help each other. And that's not something you can mandate, so that becomes very difficult from a system standpoint. So really, it operates on a cultural piece of work, more often on the cultural side of getting people accustomed to that's the way we operate. I'm not sure I answered your question. CHAIR: I hear you. And you mentioned your work with the National Mining Association. Either through them or individually on your own, if you all have additional information that you could provide us in terms of results. And I'll say to you here, whether they be quantitative results or qualitative results as you just talked about in terms of culture and sustainability and imbedding the cultural safety and leadership commitment, so even if it's qualitative type things, then we would be interested in that, too. MR. HOWARD: I think we do have cultural --- that's all meaningful in terms of being protective. And that's one of the things that National Mining Association is looking at for us. How do we equip sites? We have the cultural surveys to help them actually understand what perception employees strive for and make sure that we include that. CHAIR: And the other thing was I was interested when you --- and I may not have gotten it right. I was trying to get when you talked about low level injuries and illnesses versus high level fatalities. And I was curious, quite frankly, in terms of how you address those. Do you address having conditions that you would have in one category versus the other differently? MR. HOWARD: Yeah. I mean, a risk approach is trying to understand what are the consequences if that did happen and then how likely it is to occur, and that's really driving --- and the risk assessment approach. What are the things that are really likely to cause a major concern, what we see from an injury standpoint that probably never result in fatality. We see a lot of small finger injuries, hand injuries and other stuff, but for the most part, that's not going to cause a fatality or cause multiple fatalities. The tools we use for the high profile risk is a process assessment that breaks down each phase of that scenario and tries to drill in one of the mechanisms that drive that. I guess it's similar to another analysis versus safety, but it's different from what we see from the lower level injury. CHAIR: And I understand that. And I guess to that I will only say one thing, and this came up at some other point, that in my mind, and I'm sure you all --- you think that, too, that I would suggest to you and I would think that sometimes you may have a situation or a condition or hazard that would generate, and 99 percent of the time, could then rise to a low level injury. But then you may have another condition that's in conjunction with that that if it were separate and apart from that one, would lend rise to a low level injury. But sort of like in tandem, taken together or adding to another, the two out of three together may then rise to a high level, as you put it, high level injury or fatality type situation. Do you all ever --- do you think that that might ---? MR. HOWARD: Yeah. We look at all of the risks and we're always trying to address any potential for injury. It's something to be addressed. The bigger issue, again, I think is one management alluded to, is one --- it causes something as well as an illegal issue or risk we face on a day-to-day basis. Fundamentally having a risk of operating --- and one of the mechanisms is do we get situations where there are multiple risks on a particular scenario? And some of those high level ones are a complex myriad of how can this occur or what --- it's almost like Swiss cheese there. What are the holes in the process that we have to rely on to make that happen and understanding what the issue is? And we see that tool being one that's much better suited to the high level outcome and we can run some tests. One of the things we have in play to make sure that doesn't happen. So that's sort of the process that we apply, really looking at those main areas rather than making one. MR. DAVIS: I just have one question. There was a statement that I was looking at on your presentation that said punishment and penalty does not drive outstanding performance. Does that mean that you all use some type of reward, some compensation for positive behavior, and if so, how do you do that? MR. HOWARD: Well, it's not so much a reward, but we do focus on positive reinforcement. The model essentially is that people respond back to certain consequences. We want to make sure that we encourage them, so along that same line as any behavioral process, we make sure we are reinforcing people to do what we want. If we had employees that do go above and beyond, they do recognize them and see some are working in a way to get --- if they do see an issue that they can correct, do so. They do report, and we want to make sure we can cover that. And that’s what we see as driving beyond minimum expectation. We want to get above that expectation. We can only do that by reinforcing that. Punishment and penalty will only get us so far. Correcting them doesn’t take us to really where we want to go. We are world class people looking out for each other. So that's sort of our methodology. That becomes part of the thing we’re doing, which is why we try to go beyond compliant. Recognizing without driving some of that internally, never going to get to an end reward. So I'm not sure if that answers your question. MR. DAVIS: It sounds like it would be more of a recognition that would recognize that kind of performance. MR. HOWARD: But I mean some of our operations do have recognition programs. So we avoided some of the issues that I think you correctly indentified around --- if you only --- I mean, what's your injury rate? You don’t get little prizes when you see people having injuries because --- and most think to do so, which is why you got to look beyond that. I look for the most of it. You really look for the reason behind it so you can avoid those issues. So again, we do have recognition programs. We do try to --- as best we can --- one of the things we actually want to see is --- okay. I see someone walking in. That’s when I’m going to recognize it rather than looking out for it. MR. DAVIS: Thank you. MR. MERRIFIELD: I noticed in the presentation you had one slide that talked about you really didn’t see an engaged punishment in the penalty. And then when I saw another slide on the course safety, the NMA Program, it had this book --- discipline as one of the cogs of the wheel. But I didn’t know whether those were conflicting statements or how those interplay with each other. MR. HOWARD: The actual slide of the punishment and penalty brings outstanding performance, which I stand on. However, I do agree in punishment and penalty. So it dropped. It dropped. They are undesirable. There needs to be some balance. At least you have to, because the recognition that you’re working only punishment and penalty are probably not going to get to the kind of performance you want to see. Certainly not an advocate of no consequences. Just have to get to where they are. And I think that’s all. MR. DAVIS: Thank you. MR. RICHARDS: I just have one question. One thing I noticed was you talked about the contractors and you track their injury on this rate as well. Do you require contractors to actually either comply with your system or have their own system? Is that the type of condition that you are awarding that contractor? How do you get to them to buy into what you’re doing? MR. HOWARD: Fundamentally, they're working on our premises, they have to follow our standards. That's clear in the outset. We do encourage them to get involved with some of the management side of the operations. We encourage them to get involved in doing their own behavioral interaction and style of approach, but we will fundamentally observe them perform and we will follow up on what we observe. We have to make sure they continue. It's not so difficult. I don’t understand why. It covers all of our operations. But then how do you do it? It's somewhat a description aside from our business. CHAIR: Thank you very much. Our next speaker will be Joe Casper with the National Stone, Sand and Gravel Association. MR. CASPER: Thank you very much for the opportunity to provide testimony on the importance of safety and health management systems. I want to acknowledge my group to have really great comments the Safety and Health Conference. And Mike, I pledge to you next year --- I said that some of us are starting to help promote these things. I've engaged in some dialogue with operators, the full gamut ---. So thank you. I wanted to talk about the effectiveness of the safety health management systems. We got very full, helpful responses from several companies. So my presentation today is based on those. As I was preparing the presentation, I couldn't help but think of a saying from someone known as Will Rogers, who was credited for having said, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. And when it comes to safety and health today, we need to know what road we need to take to get ahead of the curve on hazards, to make continuing improvements in our operations and our behaviors and management, our workers, so that we can get injury rates to the lowest possible level and hopefully limit them once and for all. The rest of the case work in this area decided to ---. BRIEF INTERRUPTION MR. CASPER: Can you hear me now? The core safety principles performed by MSHA outline, we would contend, outlining the skeleton, mainly for the safety and health management system. Let me go through the individual items because I want to speak to those relative to the two companies that provided a lot of information about what we think is essential in the safety and health management system. First, you need frontline management, leadership and commitment. Without that, nothing else stands a very good chance of success. Two, in the trading and development. Third, in the formal auditing of employee work practices. Fourth, we need employee involvement and participation. Fifth, we need incident investigations performed. We certainly need safety communications. We need a regulatory compliance program. Things have been very busy on that front lately. We need operational safety and health for best practices. There should be a recognition program, accountability system and you have to have in this day and age a substance abuse prevention program. Let me talk first about Old Castle, a very actively involved member company of NSSGA. They represent it very well in our safety health committee and were a past member of the MSHA and NSSGA alliance committee. Old Castle has what it calls employee-driven safety culture. Management and leadership has manifested a number of ways, including the CEO signed the NSSGA safety pledge, which calls for all CEOs to sign it to commit to helping the industry reduce its injury rate by ten percent for each five years. I'm very pleased to report that 70 percent of NSSGA operated company CEOs have signed that pledge. And this represents, we estimate, around 90 percent of the workers in our industry. Also in this way, supervisors get very, very involved in biannual refresher training. Management leadership and commitment is central in the effort to reduce injuries. With regard to training and development, the supervisors manage weekly safety meetings to review tasks and hazards. The supervisors manage topics of those meetings and change those based on risks and organize weekly toolbox talks. The resulting information that comes out of these safety meetings is very, very important to factor into planning for future safety and health work. That kind of assessment of what’s going on in the workplace is critical to future plans and it’s integral to any management of the system. Also with regard to auditing employee work practices, the safety department at Old Castle manages the work of local area risk assessments done by employees to get different sets of items on the conditions. Also, managers have set up MSHA safety committees to manage the work and compliance. Here again, results of both processes are fed into the work and development of safety and health work practices going forward. In terms of employee involvement and participation, employees review all work practices, and it’s important to note that the basic underlying safety and health management system in Old Castle is based on the company’s core safety values, and that’s true with the other companies I will be describing shortly. In terms of incident investigations, employees reviewed near misses to share lessons learned in safety talks. Senior managers are involved to share lessons learned from report of injuries. And the division president, not company president, division president gets directly involved in analysis of lost time incidents. In terms of safety and health communications and safety alerts, particularly after an incident, and best practices are shared at safety meetings. And on the company intranet is also where it goes key, is for workers to obtain critical information on injuries and illness avoidance. The really critical point that concerns operators and I think concerns MSHA is the idea of how do you make sure --- no matter how good your safety and health messages are, how do you make sure they get down to the workforce all the way down to the driver, to the hauler, to a maintenance person. And that’s a continuing problem, challenge for us. And while technology can be our friend, this area is going to necessitate further work to really successfully and persuasively get the safety and health messages down to everybody in the company, no matter where they appear in the organization chart. In terms of regulatory compliance corporate staff, after notification of regulatory changes, gets involved in a past practices committee to devise a suggested approach to amend all operations while as often as possible trying to allow for flexibility from both levels as far as compliance goes. For safety and best practices the company deals very closely with us, NSSGA, as well as NAPA, the Asphalt Paving Association to share ideas on how to move forward on best practices. One interesting thing that came with this was Old Castle's decision to change the terminology relative to its work on lock out/tag out. I know other companies are very interested and also verified that lock out/tag out has occurred. This has been a function of --- really good useful dialogue in safety committee meetings, talking about best practices. As far as the recognition program is concerned, monetary and other awards are available to individual operations for their excellence in either compliance or safety and health. In terms of accountability, there is zero tolerance of violations. So violations need to be either verbal or written warnings and a possible firing for failure to be in compliance with standards or entering of these practices. Also as far as substance abuse is concerned, there is a zero tolerance policy at Old Castle. The data suggests that this program of safety has been working favorably. Just since 2010, there’s been a 25 percent reduction in the reportable rate and a 65 percent reduction in lost time accidents. For the company, a total case incidents rate stands at 1.79 for 2010. That was more than .5 --- more than half a percentage point below the aggregate industries' injury rate of 2.33. I move to another leading company that provided us some very useful information on this issue and that is Knife River. In both cases, these companies do have labor representation involved. Knife River is actually involved in our safety and health committee and is currently a member of the MSHA and NSSGA Alliance committee. As far as management and leadership and commitment is concerned, the CEO did sign the NSSGA safety pledge. And the division president participates in training of the first 170 supervisors, an observational safety program that I will describe in greater detail in a couple of minutes. In terms of training and development, over the course of five states, employees were trained seven and a half hours per person on observational safety. That was over the course of a five-week long period. What comes out of this observational program is factored into the future planning of the work processes in safety and health planning. That constant assessment and evaluation of injury conditions is very, very important to the success of a safety and health management system. When auditing the employee work practices, supervisors review observations recorded by all employees, review certain safety compliance, safety management, and safety culture. Knife River certainly sees this as, really, a three-legged stool for success. In terms of employee involvement, which is not only --- workers themselves conduct observations for practices and develop ideas for solutions by identifying improvements in conditions and practices. One of the great things about this observation program is it seems to give a real tangible sense of ownership to all workers everywhere in the company that they have a stake in safety and health management. In terms of incident investigations, the workers populate what is called the injury review committee, which means the supervisors and the division president should discuss injuries and near misses and to share lessons learned. In terms of safety communications, toolbox talks are held weekly, as well as for pressures and observational safety. The key is for workers to obtain critical information on injury and illness avoidance. The company intranet hosts an online library of guidance and provides best practices to the committee. It’s just a robust amount of information that’s on that company intranet. So there’s no shortage of information that employees can draw from via the internet to get information on best practices. In terms of regulatory compliance, after notification of regulatory changes, the appropriate steps here due to regulatory mandates with operational staff. As far as a substance abuse policy is concerned, Knife River has a zero-tolerance for violation of the substance abuse policy. In terms of recognition, money for compliance as well as safety and health of the workers is afforded through the annual cost awards program, which allows workers to shop at Knife River's expense. Cost focus is the annual program. Different workers have different levels of dollars that they are awarded. And it’s become a very popular program and it’s even gotten to the point where spouses of Knife River employees are told at the end of the year how much money they’re going to get if there’s a difference between what the worker at Knife River is expecting to get and the spouse is trying to get him to spend in time for the holidays. There could be some ambient discussions on the home front about the safety performance or health performance. And compliance may be less than what Knife River thought it should be. As far as accountability goes, supervisors are held responsible for unsafe or unhealthy work practices. One supervisor recently was suspended for three days for failure to successfully manage their safety. Let me speak briefly about the observation program. Knife River implemented a new STOP program, STOP stands for Safety Training and Observation Program, for supervisors in 2006. The goal was training by management to mitigate injuries and incidents through worker observations and discussions. This led to a number of improvements in Knife River’s effort to make everyone involved with safety as opposed to just meting that responsibility just to managers and supervisors. This was initially rolled out to 40 managers through implementation assistance workshops and to 130 supervisors and then finally to 550 employees in the northwest. One of the challenges in introducing the program was that there were isolated pockets of frontline employees who had been inattentive. In other words, they weren’t conducting their observations and training their men. Knife River brought in operations for additional managers to facilitate complying and got a much higher rate of volume in that case. This was mandated through annual maintained --- the success of the program, as initially concerned, has been maintained through end group pressure training on the basis of STOP as well as requiring formal observation times a month for all workers. The divisions with higher rates of injuries for compliance challenges may require more formal observations a week. As far as the results go, the STOP program has helped drive down injuries by 65 percent and the rate of days away from work injuries down by 85 percent. Observations themselves, assessing whether a condition is safe or not, have gone to --- from 65 percent to 95 percent all safe. So that metric right there illustrates that this observation program, which led to intelligence --- here’s where some of the challenges were, and then recommendation of those challenges and changes in work processes helped achieve a rate of 95 percent all safe by virtue of this program. Also, employees take earnings home. And just by one of the examples given earlier in earlier testimony, we’ve got a great one. One worker who had been recalcitrant about this program was at home climbing a tree in order to cut down a branch, almost all the way up. He did notice that he was not conducting this in a safe manner. And he went down the tree and changed the way in which he was going to elevate himself to the branch so he could cut it. He called his manager at nine o’clock that night and said, I’ve been wrong. I hadn’t been a believer. But I know at work operating safely is important, and I know that it’s no less important here at home. And thanks to the program you instituted at work, my family is now going to be better served because I’m working around the house in a more safe manner. I'm pleased that the company's total case incident rate for 2010 stands at just 1.45. That’s about eight tenths of one point lower than the industry average of 2.33 injuries for 200,000 workers. I thought of a sentiment to express about why this is important and I thought of a quote that’s attributed to the late Bear Bryant. And it’s simply that a failure to prepare really is akin to nothing more than preparing to fail. And in safety and health management, you’ve got to prepare. You’ve got to prepare to what we don’t always see, what workers may not always tend to worry about. In fact, the process is more important. That has to be a function of the company’s overall business process. Also, all operators should prepare for safety and health by implementing safety and health management in the system. Finally, our recommendations at this point are that we ought to promote best practices in this area. NSSGA is very pleased to fully support an effort in sharing best practices in all of the six MSHA districts for metal and non-metal. We offered to do this last year just with regard to 5002 initiatives and didn’t get as much money as we wanted, but we had help everywhere we can on this going forward. Secondly, we would urge that any effort undertaken by MSHA in this regard would allow the flexibility relative to the operator facility size, geography and a number of work factors that impact their businesses and that, by their commission, impact our positions and our pursuit with regard to safety and health. As I said at the beginning, my presentation has been a function of what some of our committee members weren't able to share. This is not exhaustive. I’d be happy to provide further information on these programs and others going forward. Hopefully the record will be kept open. I also want to acknowledge a fabulous member of ours, Kelly Bailey of Vulcan Materials, who did provide testimony on this topic about a year ago. We appreciate the leadership he’s provided on this program, also in the sense of the importance of health. And if we’re looking at injury rates this year, I’m wondering, gosh, why are we seeing some of the spikes that we’re seeing? The thought did occur to me, and I discussed it with Kelly, you know, health can be related to some more injury issues. There are a lot of workers out there who perhaps aren’t living in as healthy a way as they should, and that can and that can adversely affect safety rates. So the idea of health and safety are integral programs, are the key point we need to remember that on our front. That said, that’s my presentation. Thank you for this opportunity to be here. CHAIR: Thank you, Joe. I just have a couple of comments, really. You gave the case studies, and thank you, from Old Castle and Knife River. Both of those companies are represented by labor? MR. CASPER: Yes. CHAIR: And who is the labor rep? MR. CASPER: I don’t know that. CHAIR: Okay. It’s not a major point, but at some point, if you don’t mind, even if it’s just e-mailing it in. MR. CASPER: Yes. CHAIR: I’m sure we can find it out. And then the second point was going to be, what size of --- I know Old Castle is big, I think, if I’m ---. Is Knife River ---? MR. CASPER: Knife River is not as big, but they are big. CHAIR: But they are big? MR. CASPER: They are big. CHAIR: Yeah. So if any of your members have --- if any of them are smaller in size, if you have any information from them, because we are particularly interested from some small companies and anybody else in here who would have that type of information. MR. CASPER: I would be happy to get that. Let me just say that I do know from previous discussions with committee members that the work in a small mine office providing management systems to small operations has been very, very helpful in a proportionate sense that it just makes a very, very big difference. And I’ve seen data that showed that that kind of system has allowed small mine operators to reduce their fatality rates three times faster than the industry. So that’s a fact of this program we would like to see. CHAIR: And it will be continued. I mean, I spoke on that at the conference in the setting of another meeting, but from that standpoint, our goal was to restructure the small mine office, as some of you may know, and particularly those in the metal and non-metal industry, but in no way to eliminate. I think some of the word got out that that was --- but that was never MSHA’s goal at all. And as I said, it’s not really the point during the conference. When you’re operating on a potential resolution or budget continuing resolution, you are constrained by what kind of organizational changes you can make. Okay. Thank you very much. Our next speaker is, and hopefully I’m pronouncing this right, Chris Thynne with Uniman. MR. THYNNE: Good afternoon. My name is Chris Thynne. I’m a safety and health manager with Uniman Corporation. I’m going to give you a very brief overview of the operation of the health program developed by National Industrial Sand Association, or NISA. Just to point out, this is a more specific program, strictly on occupational health. It’s not the broad range programs that everybody else is discussing. It’s a little more specific, so please bear with me. This may be repetitive. You may have read this presentation before. It was given at one of the other public meetings last October. So just a brief overview of the NISA occupational health program. Originally developed some time ago, but it went through significant revision in 2010. It was updated at that time. It very clearly outlines the purpose of the program. Conducting a surveillance program as outlined in the manual is crucial to our industry reaching our goal of preventing the development of new cases of silicosis in employees. So again, it’s very specific as to what we’re targeting throughout this program. There’s four main sections to the program: an introduction, respiratory health effects, exposure to crystalline silica, workplace dust surveys, and respiratory medical surveillance for silicosis. Looking deeper into the introduction part, respiratory health effects of exposures, more information on workplace dust surveys, and respiratory medical surveillance. Breaking down each one of those a little further, respiratory health effects and exposure to crystallized silica, the program basically has a description of the respiratory system. And again, if I may make it a little bit more detailed. We need it here. But it also has descriptions for pneumoconiosis, silicosis, chronic, accelerated, acute. Of course, these vary based on the length of exposure and concentrations. The potential correlation of silica to lung cancer, goes into great detail on this. These are studies based on the American Thoracic Society and the International Agency for Cancer Research --- or Research on Cancer. Sorry. Medical surveillance and epidemiology and exposure limits. It goes into great detail on the exposure limits, how to determine them via the PEL calculations, also on whether or not you’re dealing with cristobalite or silica-formed quartz and how to kind of vary those calculations. Workplace dust surveys, basically why you're doing them, to evaluate workplace exposure to silica dust. When dust sampling, it explains what type of equipment to use, what size selective equipment or cyclings you use, what type of dust pumps to use, the calibration of sampling, how to do it, how to do it properly, different calibration methods, different sampling procedures, whether it’s a personal sample or a varied sample, when to take each one, why you should take each one, why you should collect both. It goes into direct reading instruments and why you should use them. The picture here is a personal dataRAM, PDR. These instruments provide instantaneous results for respirable dust. They’re great for troubleshooting problem areas. They report data. It’s a tool. It’s an excellent tool for tracking the persons for exposure. They’re also great for area sampling. A lot of different applications for this type of device. It also explains different handling procedures for determining the silica analysis or your dust analysis, including the NIOSH proof method. And of course, collecting all this data, it generates a fair amount of paperwork, records. It goes into details on how to or what to do with your calibrated --- your equipment. It explains how to do it. It also explains that you need to keep those records and keep your calibration records, your sample results, and your activity log. The activity log is very important. If you do have an elevated level, elevated results, you go back to your activity log and determine what inflated it, or if it’s an area sample, what was going on in that area, what equipment was running. Were there any outside conditions? Staffing frequency provides general guidelines of how to initiate your program. It’s typically population-based. The more employees you have, the more samples you can take. This can vary. After you start to develop your program, you may find that, you know, you need to concentrate or increase the number of samples that you have with your maintenance department versus a bagging facility or vice-versa. Discussion of results. Basically, you get your results. You give the results back to the miner. The miner may not know what they’re looking at. So you need to explain that to the miner. The NISA program elaborates further on that, what the results mean, how to convey that to the employees. And to develop your sampling strategy. And again, once you start building up history, gather some data, you may increase your focus in certain areas to find --- you may increase your personal samples. You may decrease them based on the history you're developing. Respiratory medical surveillance for silicosis. Why do we do that? Basically to establish baselines. Early detection of any potential problems. Prevent development of silicosis. That's a key one right there. Another reason is to disclose occupational and non-occupational problems that may be detected during chemical surveillance. Identify potential hazards in working conditions. If you see problems generated at one particular area, at one particular industry, a plant, whatever it is, these kind of things could possibly be identified in a program like this. And to develop data on which epidemiological studies can be based. We also gather medical and occupational history to determine if the person, the employee, has predisposition or something hereditary, something genetic that may increase their potential for respiratory illness, like a smoker. It could have a big influence on respiratory issues. Do they have a prior exposure to another chemical, another agent, something that could cause a problem? This could be from, you know, things that they do at home or things that they do --- have done in a previous job. Are there any adverse effects that they’re currently --- currently exhibit? Medical examination. Again, this is part of the program. Medical examination of the thorax, a chest x-ray. The program actually goes into some very specific details on the type of x-ray, the size of the x-ray and to make sure that they’re done correctly, they’re taken correctly, who they're sent to, who they're read by. The NISA program basically states that they need to be qualified Board Certified radiologists, NIOSH approved "B" readers. They provide the list of where to get "B" readers and where to send them to. Another portion of the medical examination is a pulmonary function test. And for long-term employees who have more than 25 years exposure, it’s recommended that they have a TB test as well. With the x-rays, because they are subject to interpretation by whoever the reader is, we’ve actually built in a census program within the program. If there’s a normal reading and there’s nothing to see, that’s great. If there is an abnormality detected in the chest x-ray but it’s deemed non-occupational, basically the employee is referred for further follow-up with their own physician or, of course, another specialist. If there is an abnormality but it’s deemed occupational in nature, they’re sent to a second "B" reader, again, from the qualified list. If the two readings agree, the first and second reading both come back with the same result, then we move on. If they disagree, one there is an abnormality, one there is not, it’s sent for a third reading, basically a tie breaker. And that’s what the consensus is based on. The program also includes guidelines for storage and retention of the x-rays, how to do it, where to store them, what conditions to store them under. Guidelines for the pulmonary lung function testing. This is a mandatory part of this program. Medical assessment of the ability to wear a respirator. This is another critical component of it. It’s performed by a physician and it’s basically based on whether or not they are physically able to wear a respirator. It’s based on their physical condition, the worker’s health, the type of respirator and the environment they are going to end up working in with a respirator. Record keeping and notification. There are guidelines in the program for that. Records, x-rays, sample results, everything is kept for 30 years past the worker's retirement. And that’s due to the nature of the silicosis and other respiratory illnesses that may be chronic and may develop after a number of years. Workers have to be provided the results from their samples. Frequency of examinations in this --- in the NISA program, medical evaluations, physical examinations are done biannually. As far as the chest x-rays go, it may vary. Initially you take your baseline reading for your physical. Typically the x-rays, again, are every two years unless there is an issue or based on the employee's health, the employee's age, and their duration with their --- their exposure duration over the years. That may be increased. That may be done every year. NISA has also developed a silica prevention --- silicosis prevention program. The seven main parts of this are management commitment, and that’s key --- that’s pretty much for any management system. You have to have a biannual commitment from upper management, management all the way through. Occupational health program, again, medical assessment, dust exposure assessment, dust control, employee involvement and a smoking cessation program. So these programs have been in place for a number of years with NISA with its members. We feel it’s a great program, collectively put together. We know it works in preventing new cases. Unfortunately, we know it works, but that doesn’t mean that everybody is on board. We have just over 50 percent of the members participating in this program, which is up slightly. Last October, it was just under 50 percent participation. So it has improved slightly, but still not enough. If you look at the members that have participated in it and are committed to it, it varies. They may not fully embrace it. They may use select parts within the program. It does vary between the numbers. There are, you know, a number of companies that embrace it and, you know, follow it basically to the letter. Some of the reasons for that, some of the roadblocks, possible roadblocks, one of them is the concern for the creation of enforceable data. And that would be a dust sample. So if a company collects dust samples and they reach or they exceed that PEL, they fear that they could be cited. So rather than, you know, give MSHA the noose, you know, to hang themselves, they just don’t take samples at all. Obviously, it’s not the right thing to do. But there is that fear of --- obviously, one of the other roadblocks is costs. A lot of our small operations feel that it’s not cost effective to do it. Most of the other companies that are participating in this will say that the cost by far outweighs the --- you know, getting out of the issue that would come as a result of a respiratory illness to one of their workers or that the costs really aren’t as high as some other companies perceive them to be. And then of course, you’ve still got a lot of member companies --- a lot of companies, you know, outside of this association that still don’t understand or fully embrace what is going on or what’s involved in the program. Even after, you know, a number of different forum presentations and trying to get the information out there, you still have that reluctance or that non-understanding of what exactly is involved. So just in summary, the occupational health program that NISA had developed, it’s a great program, very, very competent. The silica prevention or silicosis prevention program does prevent the disease. Unfortunately, the last statement, even with no --- the near majority members are hesitant to fully commit to this program. That’s pretty much all I have. CHAIR: Thank you very much. Thank you very much for giving a presentation that is focused on health, which is obviously a very significant part of an effective safety and health program also. A lot of times we think about safety because, you know, safety conditions happen immediately, so to speak, as opposed to health, which has a long, lengthy process. I mean, I’m sure we all here agree that health is very important, too. Do you have ----? MR. DAVIS: I just have one question. When you talked about the sampling frequency, it sounds like population-based samplings; correct? Would you clarify that a bit? Is that random or do you target high risk? MR. THYNNE: Both. Initially it’s based on the population, more employees you have, or if it’s set up by department, the more employees that you have in one --- you know, in the maintenance department versus a packaging or a load-up department, you’d have fewer numbers there, so you’re going to collect fewer samples. But once you identify higher risk areas, then you definitely have to increase your sampling frequency in that area. MR. DAVIS: Okay. Thank you. MR. MERRIFIELD: I don’t have a question, but I would like to remove one of your roadblocks for you. MSHA will only cite on our samples. We have told industry that before, and so if there’s concerns in your operators that we’re going to cite them for their samples, that’s not the case. MR. THYNNE: I think it’s more a perceived fear. MR. RICHARDS: If he didn’t say it, I was going to say it. So yes, we have made that clear. And if we need to keep making that clear, we have no problems doing that. I do have some questions. Of course, as the chief of health I’m going to ask you a couple of things. The first one is, on your exposures, do you actually describe a target exposure that goes beyond the existing MSHA pallet or is the exposure the existing pallet in this program? MR. THYNNE: I can’t speak for all the companies within the association. I can tell you what we do at Uniman. We go one half of what ---. MR. RICHARDS: Okay. And the second one is, do you have any data on the impact that this program has had on exposures? You did talk about it is effective. And I think we would agree we like the fact that you have a list to exposures, if you could provide that to us. MR. THYNNE: I don’t, but I can --- and I knew that you would ask that. Unfortunately, I don’t, but it may be something that NISA can provide collectively. If not, you know, we may be able to get that, target the individual member companies that are participating. MR. RICHARDS: Okay. That’s all I have. Thanks. CHAIR: Thank you very much. MR. THYNNE: Thank you. CHAIR: Is there anybody else in the audience who wishes to make a presentation? Anybody else who didn’t who wishes to do so. Okay. Mr. Wilson. Tom Wilson, United Mine Workers. MR. WILSON: Good afternoon. My name is Thomas Wilson with the UMWA International Union. I have 35 years of experience in working in the mine safety. I have no model to offer today that is currently working, but I do want to address several key elements in the effected program. Number one would be increased frequency and quality of examination. This would apply to all workplaces, surface and underground. Examinations set the stage and must be the foundation of any program. Number two, examination findings must be constantly monitored and responded to. The time between identification of hazards and correction must be charted. Number three, constant and advanced training must be part of the program for all levels of the organization. Simply relying on regulatory training that’s required will not get us to the level we’re seeking. Workers must have stop work authority. Asking a worker to believe that we’re serious about reducing injuries without giving them stop work authority, that’s just not a sellable position. Involvement of everyone, all levels of the organization. It absolutely does not work when you just have one department or one group of people trying to implement it. Everybody has to have an ownership and involvement. The program must be led by the organization's top leaders. Also on that point, I would want to share a precaution. It’s not adequate enough for just the top leaders are to introduce it and then pull away from it. The top leaders must stay involved. The program must identify and share closed costs. Closed costs cannot be ignored, and must be looked at as a second chance. The development of a culture and safety professionals must be woven through the tapestry of the program, including home and family. The time and method of traveling to and from work and, of course, the time at work. Simply arriving at work and putting on their hat as a safety professional has to be a culture. It has to be allowed. It has to be at home, that passion for the family, for his fellow drivers on the highway, also for the fellow workers. The program must include weekly team inspections and weekly inspection is an excellent place to involve different departments of the organization. It should include daily safety shifts, with a goal of involving more and more persons in presenting those safety shifts. Training to approach all jobs in step back. There are different names for it, but we should step back and analyze each and every job situation. For any program to work, it’s important that the safety department has involvement and is viewed with trust. It’s essential for employees to believe and understand that straight and immediate answers can be obtained from their safety personnel and that the safety personnel are involved. The program must include all crews and all shifts. Having good involvement with management or workers on the day shift and not having the same visibility on all shifts, that can cause the program to fail. I didn’t have it down to one point, but the earlier comments --- comments on contracts being covered, I would rise in support of that. Contract workers are on property, they should be held to the same standards. Thank you for this opportunity, and I would be glad to answer any questions. CHAIR: Thank you, Tom. I would just say that many of your principles you stated as you heard from the previous speakers were --- embodied some of their comments. I would say that generally speaking, and we heard this at some of our last meetings, that many of the principles that lead and facilitate and add to and promote safety are common. And you can probably go to any mining operation in any state in the United States and you’ll find some of those facilities and, you know, safety mining people are generally thinking alike. But thank you very much. I don’t have any questions. Does anybody else wish to make any comments? Okay. Any additional comments? If nobody wishes to make any additional comments, then I would like to say again that on behalf of Assistant Secretary Main and us at MSHA, we appreciate very much your being in attendance here today. We appreciate a whole lot those of you who stayed after the Sixth Annual Southeastern Conference was over and stayed to attend this public meeting. For those of you who attended the meeting and did not, in fact, provide testimony, I would say to you we appreciate you, too, because that shows to us that while you may not have provided comments, you have interests in this regulatory action. And for that we thank you. So as I said earlier, we plan to have additional meetings through next year. And they will be --- the notice of those meetings will be placed in the Federal Register to the extent that we can we plan to integrate them with other meetings that we have. All the conferences, much like the one that we had in Birmingham. So we invite you to attend those when you can. And we also invite you to provide any additional information you might have on the program as your mine sites prior to the comment period closing. So at this point, this public meeting is concluded. Thank you. * * * * * * * * * HEARING CONCLUDED AT 3:00 P.M. * * * * * * * * * CERTIFICATE I hereby certify, as the stenographic reporter, that the foregoing proceedings were taken stenographically by me, and thereafter reduced to typewriting by me or under my direction; and that this transcript is a true and accurate record to the best of my ability. 97 Sargent's Court Reporting Service, Inc. (814) 536-8908 Sargent's Court Reporting Service, Inc. (814) 536-8908