This presentation provides a detailed look at the safety program of ATK Thiokol Propulsion's solid rocket motor manufacturing plant at Promontory, Utah. This large, semi-remote complex is located on 19,900 acres on the north side of the Great Salt Lake. The plant has over 500 buildings, many of them individually separated due to quantity distance requirements that govern explosives, including solid propellant manufacturing operations. The plant employs nearly 3000 people and is a community complex unto itself as the nearest services are more than 20 miles away.
The presentation covers most aspects of the company's safety program, including the mission of the Industrial Safety organization, which is very clear in stating that the Safety organization assists its customers to achieve maximum safety performance, it does not attain it for them. Exhibit 1.
The Safety staff's organization and responsibilities are broad but consistent with those of other safety staffs in most industries. Exhibit 2.
Some of the plant's safety issues, however, are markedly different from most industries-examples are the safe processing of nearly 16 million pounds of solid propellant in a normal year and numerous moves of super sized, super heavy hardware. The rocket motor factory also has safety issues that are common with many other industries-those being widely varied types of processes and many hazardous chemicals inherent to those processes.
Promontory's safety program has evolved over the past 15 years, growing from a traditional program with expected and easily identifiable components to one that further expanded to include features of what we call our Safety Improvement System (SIS). In 1992, we incorporated federally mandated additional elements from the Process Management Standard (PSM), which is directly applicable to many of our processes that involve solid propellant. Exhibit 3.
The presentation discusses the company's history and maturing experience with a safety management system, which has internally evolved into our Safety Improvement System (SIS). The key principles of SIS are that management is responsible for ensuring that people are not exposed to unacceptable hazards, people must be aware of, and able to control, hazards and safety must be a part of the line organization's responsibility. By clearly establishing that management, not the Safety organization, is responsible for our people's safety, the company's safety program better ensures that all operations are performed to planning and procedure, people have knowledge and skills to perform jobs, people do not perform unsafe acts, unsafe conditions are identified and corrected, incidents and causes are eliminated, management provides leadership by setting example and progressive discipline is administered as required. Some of these proactive functions are accomplished through performance of SIS activities (or tools) such as planning and procedure reviews, job safety analyses, job safety observations, safety inspections, mishap investigations, overlapping safety committees and the ATK Thiokol Propulsion Safety Board. The planned accomplishment of SIS activities results in a staggering number, over 2000 in CY2003, of corrective actions being done to eliminate or mitigate hazards-all of which contribute to better safety performance.
