Presentation by Tim Martin, Southern Ohio Coal Company
MR. SELAN: The first presentation is going to be done by Tim Martin. Tim is the Safety and Health Manager, Southern Ohio Coal Company, Meigs Division of AEP. Tim has over 23 years experience as a safety professional in the mining industry. He currently serves as a board member for the Home Safety Association, an officer for the Ohio Safety Congress Mining Division and has served as Executive Board Member for the Meigs Galia Mason County Hazardous Material Response Teams.
Tim is active with the American Society of Safety Engineers and serves as secretary for his local chapter. He has 10 years of experience in fire and heavy rescue and is certified as an emergency medical technician and has logged over 200 hours of air medical rescue. Tim is currently working on an M.S. in Safety Management at Marshall University. He is a certified mine foreman, mine rescue trainer and mine safety trainer. Tim served eight years as Chairman of the Ergonomic Committee and has worked with developing other ergonomic committees within AEP's Mining Operations. Today Tim is going to share with us some of his experiences with AEP's ergonomic efforts. Come up and speak with us, Tim.
MR. MARTIN: I want to tell you a little bit about what we do at American Electric Power. First, I will tell you about our company. AEP Power Corporation operates about 23 major power plants in the U.S. Actually, we have one nuclear plant, the Cook Nuclear Plant. We have over 18,000 employees. We provide service to over 7 million customers for electrical services, and we burn 47 million tons of coal per year. We mine about seven of that, so we purchase quite a bit of coal on the open market.
The AEP Fuel Supply Division is basically made up of six operating companies, Southern Ohio Coal Company, which is located in southeastern Ohio, Windsor Coal Company, which is located up near Wheeling, West Virginia and Central Ohio Coal Company. We have a river transportation division in Laken, West Virginia, Conesville coal preparation plant in central Ohio and our Cook Coal Terminal in Paduca, Kentucky.
The AEP fuel supply system has over 1,900 employees. Again, we produce in house about 7 million clean tons per year. We transport over 22 million tons of coal by river. Our river transportation division has 14 river tow boats and about 500 barges which operate on the Ohio river. Our Cook Coal facility in Paduca, Kentucky transfers over 13 million tons by rail to barge. We operate four major prep plants, one being the largest in North America, three underground coal mines, which one holds two world records for long wall mining production.
Our typical underground operations is on a three shift production basis, five days a week. We use our weekends to do our p.m. and construction work. Our typical operation employs around 200 to 300 employees that work underground. Some facilities have surface operations, and will have up to 230 employees. We operate typically one long wall and two to three continuous miner sections per underground operation, and as Joe mentioned, most challenges in ergonomics you will probably find is due to the simple fact of the restrictions in mining height. It is not as bad as the media has portrayed the height of mining, but our particular mines run approximately 55 inches in height. There are times that some of the miners will have to perform work in conditions as low as 36 inches.
So to kind of relate that in a laymen's sense, try in the next couple days when you get home to get underneath your kitchen table and pick up about 50 pounds and carry that around for a half a mile, you might get some concept at times of what some of these miners go through. When you look at improvements in ergonomics, that is quite a challenge when you have to work in those type of conditions.
Our safety and health programs at AEP really starts with an extremely strong corporate safety culture that starts right from the top. I can't say enough about American Electric Power. Their dedication and concerns for safety is right from the top right down to the bottom. They are very concerned about each employee's safety and health, and making sure that person gets home as safe as possible. There is a very strong belief in employee training and development. Team concepts and bench marking is practiced throughout the entire system. We have extremely proactive accident prevention programs, just too numerous to mention today. We believe in cross operational audits. We do a lot of open audits with all of our operations. We have an extremely effective industrial hygiene program, and include some of this training with our ergonomics committees.
We developed an understanding for our needs for a change in ergonomic improvements back in early 1988. Our typical work force averages around 45 to 48 years of age. We are getting to be an older work force. Considering production goals, to stay in the competitive market, especially with the Clean Air Act, we have to learn new ways to be more productive and efficient. Improve safety and employee relations, that was a very important goal of ours, reduce cost and, obviously, the efficiency is the bottom line of our operations.
Coal mining is somewhat typical with other types of production and material handling industries. We see a large number of back injuries. Knee strains is what we are basically seeing a lot of today, shoulder type injuries, rotator cuff tears and a lot of neck strains. As far as carpal tunnel syndromes, we don't really see a lot of that in the mining industry for the fact that it is not related or equal to a productive line type of a setting of manufacturing where you have a lot of repetitive motion.
Early 1989, AEP Fuel Supply, set standards and objectives to initiate and implement ergonomic committees at each of the six operations. Our basic objectives were to establish a committee at each facility that would make ergonomic improvements in the values of repetitive type strains and injuries, to provide support and direction to each of those committees from a corporate standpoint, to give them whatever they need, whether it be technical or financial support, provide the necessary training for all of our committee members, particularly the chairmen of the committees, provide the necessary funds and technical support from our engineering departments and most importantly, provide some type of a method for follow-up and make sure that the proper feedback gets to the appropriate people.
Basic committee structure within our six operating companies established a charter to give some guidelines and rules of how to function and to give the committee official status. We see anywhere from eight to twelve members per each one of our committees at our sites. A chairman is elected to chair all activities, and then either a secretary or a coordinator is appointed to help document and plan the meetings.
This is a typical line-up of one of our ergonomic committees at an underground facility, you will see members of the senior staff on that committee. This is an example of one committee we have at our Mine 31 operation. The mine superintendent is actually the chairman of the committee. You will see our general mine supervisor, our safety supervisor, general maintenance supervisor, shift supervisors, belt coordinators, long wall maintenance and production supervisors, and most importantly our workers. Our Chairman of the UMWA Safety Committee is heavily involved, along with the local union president. We have just total, full support from all of our union members and officials to participate in these programs.
The official committee meets on a regular basis, we have subcommittees that are designed and broke out from this major committee. Department heads normally chair the subcommittee. It is made up of general underground employees or surface employees, operators, beltmen, mechanics, general inside laborers, just a spread of the work force. Those are the people that know the jobs. Those are the people that know the problems in the mining industry, and to be honest with you, since they are the ones doing the work, they can be the most creative and most innovative with ideas of problems that we need to address and improvements.
Our basic committee starts out with a required monthly meeting. It is planned on a regular basis at a minimum of once each month. The senior committee will meet twice a month or however often it is needed, but at least we meet regularly once a month. We conduct surveys and audits to identify problems. We will break up into teams with one of the subcommittees to do surveys, to do audits, to do observations underground and on the surface to find out the areas that we are having problems in. Then we select projects for improvement that has any type of ergonomic value to it.
Again, I talked about the support from the top. There is a strong safety culture and the direction that the corporation gives. I can honestly say that they have empowered each committee with their support. In my years of experience, we have never been turned down for any financial support for a project. We select a project. We vote on it, and once it is voted on, we assign the project to be completed. Obviously, one of our functions is to make sure that we report back our successes and make sure that feedback is spread to the appropriate people.
One of the things we are charged with is developing action plans for solution improvements and to provide the necessary management and the support to make sure these projects go. As you have seen the list of the senior officials on these ergonomics committees, they are the people that can make these things happen, particularly with the maintenance, engineering and the senior production managers. They have the supervisory abilities to make these projects happen quickly, and make them very successful.
Some of the common projects that we have done in the mines deals with a lot of material handling, lifting devices, and a lot of new tool designs. There is a limited amount of tools that are designed specifically for the mining industry. So we have to be innovative in-house designs of our own.
Equipment modifications, the same thing. However, today most of the mining equipment manufacturers are starting to listen to us. We require, demand a lot more from these people with the specifications of how the machines are designed to fit the operator. In the past, they were very independent and really did not have any interest in helping us out in that area, but with the interest in the mining industry in ergonomics, they are starting to listen.
Equipment control redesigns and things as simple as material packaging, are key starting points. One thing that one of our committees have changed that is interesting is a miner that would do out-by work and construction work to pour concrete, would pack 100 pound bags of concrete individually by hand in some of these low conditions. You can imagine being underneath your kitchen table packing 100 pound bags. Our committees have worked with the manufacturers of these products and asked them to design bags that would hold 50 pounds or even 40 pounds of material.
One interesting thing I noticed was one of the committees made one improvement with an administrative approach by designing a logo that would prompt the person picking up this bag to put himself in the proper posture before the bag is lifted. It is a small round logo with a person bending down with his back locked in, his knees in the proper position, making a proper lift, and it has some script on it that describes this. What is most interesting is our manufacturers put the logo on their bags for us, and I was in a local hardware the other day and saw some sack crete laying in the center isle, and our logo was on that bag. So it has gone nationwide. That came from the coal miners. It is quite interesting.
I have got a couple slides of a couple of the projects that we completed. It is fairly simple. In the mining industry, especially underground, we have a lot of power problems with logistics of getting power to certain areas. Some of the simple things we initiated was to place throughout strategic locations on the surface electrical hoists up to five tons to be able to lift some of these parts out of the pick-up trucks and place them onto a wheeled cart where they could be rolled right onto the elevator, taken underground and lifted by another electrical hoist and hoisted onto another piece of equipment. I had a personal experience with this. My grandfather at age 26 spent the rest of his life in a rest home from that very same thing of lifting a heavy item off of a truck.
An example of a stationary lifting device such as this, lifts approximately 2,000 pounds a day and about 260 tons per year. So with this device handling the material electrically instead of by hand, we are saving around 15,060 hours of labor a year which equates to about $54,000 and about 260 tons, which is quite a bit. Another area that we mentioned was man trip seating. We designed seats with head rests, here as you see where the miners wear heavy belts with tool pouches that when they sit in their seats it digs into their back. So we made areas with indentations that would allow the person to sit better. There is a lot of seating improvements in man trips, shuttle cars, scoops, and 100 ton haulage trucks on the surface. We have done quite a bit of work in this area.
Underground shops. Things as simple as logistics. Locating shops under grounds and keeping employees from traveling clear outside to haul heavy parts. It has helped out with the reduction of exposure. As you can see, the average time to travel outside is around one hour. So the situation of traveling underground gets to be quite difficult sometimes.
Track sand for friction on the rails, employees would have to carry 50 pound bags to their vehicles, sometimes up to 1,000 feet. We installed boxes, distribution centers where the employees could pull their vehicle right up to the box, scoop the sand out. This obviously eliminates quite a bit of handling. It equates to a labor cost of over $22,000 a year and a figure of 260,000 pounds not handled.
I have a short video clip that I would like to show you. It is a Project from our Parker Run Facility, and it is titled "The Ergo Bus". This particular project was spearheaded by our shift foreman that was wanting someway to utilize power tools in the mine. I will let this video better describe exactly how this works. Do you want to cue that up for me, please?
(The video was played.)
MR. MARTIN: They did a very good job on that. Just to close, we ask, what exactly have we accomplished with our ergonomic programs at Fuel Supply? We definitely have reduced our accidents, reduced our compensation costs drastically, increased productivity, reduced down time, increased a lot of employee involvement, and our relations with our employees has really grown quite drastically.
A few reductions in our lost time accidents, since we initiated the program in 1989, you can see a nice trend, a downward trend in what we have accomplished. The same in the incident rates. In 1995, we were down to 1.82. This year it is going to be just a little bit higher. So we feel like we have really accomplished a lot. Most importantly, probably one of the biggest achievements that we have made in 1995 under a rating of the U.S. Department of Labor for the area of safety for all underground mines in the United States, we were rated number two in the nation for 1995. We feel that without ergonomics programs, we couldn't have accomplished this. It had a very strong role in accomplishing this in 1995, and we know it is going to take us closer to our goals in 1997. Thank you.
MR. SELAN: Thank you very much, Tim. We do appreciate that, and also our thanks to Mr. Glassco for his assistance on this one.
