The National Ready Mixed Concrete Association (NRMCA) Safety Contest for years has been a safety performance and incentive-award program aimed to foster safe practices at ready mixed concrete plants across the nation. THE CONCRETE PRODUCER co-sponsors the contest.
Before 1993, NRMCA annually sponsored a safety contest that gathered industry accident data and recognized member companies that had commendable safety records. The original contest was based on company-wide production criteria, making it difficult for large, multi-plant ready-mixed producers with outstanding safety records to be recognized.
The Safety Task Group of the association's Operations, Environment and Safety Committee redesigned the contest in its current form in 1996. The program has grown to become NRMCA's most popular award recognition program. It is designed to be simple, while providing meaningful and fair criteria to recognize individual plants for their commitment to safety as shown by their records.
The secondary goal of the contest is to gather thorough and accurate industry accident statistics. The data are analyzed and used to establish industry benchmarks for safe operations.
The contest is open to all facilities operated by NRMCA member companies. Entry forms were available starting in March 2006; the deadline was May 31. Producers with more than one division were encouraged to distribute entry blanks to individuals responsible for keeping safety records at each location. NRMCA keeps the data confidential. After verifying the data and calculations are complete, entry forms and specific company information are destroyed.
Categories
To be fair, plants are divided into three categories, each based on the number of ready-mixed concrete trucks that are stationed at each plant. Today, unlike just a few years ago, it is very common, if not the norm, to have trucks that service two, three, and even more plants. In these cases, the producers are instructed to estimate the percentage of their fleets that could be theoretically assigned to a particular plant, or if the number of trucks fluctuates significantly, the average number is used.
Producers are divided into groups with 20 or more trucks, 10 to 19 trucks, and nine or fewer trucks.
Basis for Winning Entries
The following information was requested on the entry form:
A safety score was calculated from these factors. This score, or Accident Frequency Rate (AFR), is the sum of one, plus lost-time accidents (LTA), mixer truck accidents (MTA), and fatalities (F), divided by concrete shipped in 100,000 cubic-yard increments.
An Excellence in Safety is awarded to individual plants that are above the 70th percentile in scoring within each of the three categories in the contest. An Excellence in Safety certificate is awarded to all plants with no accidents recorded during 2005.
The authors of this report are Terry Jones of Irving Materials Inc. and OES Safety Task Group Chairman, and John Carew of Carew Concrete and OES Committee Chairman.
For more on the National Ready Mixed Concrete Association, visitwww.nrmca.org.
