The Port industry is considered a high hazard industry with complex work arrangements, overlapping duties and a significant risk profile for both onshore and offshore operations. In 2018, Napier Port identified the need to implement a more robust approach to managing its critical risks.
The program scope covered both onshore and offshore critical risks associated with port operations and aims to enable the Port to:
In addition the program approach included using a trust based approach and a significant emphasis on worker engagement and participation, collective leadership and programme management.
Napier Port’s Health and Safety Foundational Roadmap
In 2022, we completed our three-year health and safety foundational roadmap. Significant progress has been made on critical risk control and assurance activities, mitigating those incidents most likely to cause serious harm; embedding a functional safety management system for reporting; and working towards ISO 45001, aiming for best practice in health and safety management.
We are now entering a new maturity phase, with a continuing focus on critical risk controls management combining with a health and wellbeing focus.
Critical risks are risks that have the potential to cause significant injury, illness or fatality at work. While these risks may occur less frequently than others, they have the potential to cause the greatest harm to workers.
The work environment at Napier Port is made up of a diverse range of work processes, equipment and activities around general cargo, rail, timber, container handling, mooring, and driving. Additional challenges for our operations include visiting cruise ships, visits from international shipping and local seasonal trade. Safety culture is key to enable the safe and efficient transfer of persons and goods between land and sea.
Napier Port is on a health and safety journey, constantly working to effectively embed a safety mindset throughout our business. Our goal is to create a ‘generative’ health and safety culture, which means that we want safety ideas to be raised from within our operational teams, who feel empowered and motivated to report safety concerns and develop appropriate solutions.
During our three-year critical risk programme we have identified 10 critical risks on port.
The illustration below provides detail on a number of Napier Port’s current risk profiles.
Our understanding and mitigation of critical risk in the port environment continues to develop as operations evolve. We undertake bow-tie risk assessments for each critical risk, followed by a rigorous risk controls improvement programme to mitigate critical risk and an inspection and verification programme to check effectiveness of risk controls in action.
As part of our Critical Risk Management Improvement Roadmap, we’ve been focused on implementing a number critical controls including a new barrier management system for our railway crossing, container unlocking and log truck unchaining areas on port – mitigating some of the risks around machine vs machine and people vs machine.
We’ve also invested in new mooring technology including our MoorMaster system and ShoreTension units – reducing risk to our mooring teams, and designing access controls on new infrastructure to keep our people safe, such as the access gates and interlocked access guards for our new log debarker.
The final step in the critical risk roadmap process is assurance and our H&S team work closely with other teams across the port to check the effectiveness and successful embedding of risk controls – new and existing – and report back through our verification and inspection program.
The illustration below shows Napier Port’s Critical Risk Management Improvement Roadmap, which provides a framework to identify where departments should focus their efforts in order to improve risk maturity.
If you would like additional information about Napier Port’s Critical Risk Control Management Programme or have any queries, please contact our Health and Safety team: healthandsafety@napierport.co.nz or +64 (6) 833 4317 .