Martin Marietta’s Magnesia Specialties achieves 1 year of ZERO

Martin Marietta’s Magnesia Specialties sites in Woodville, Ohio, and Manistee, Michigan, recently celebrated a terrific milestone.

With the start of autumn, it became official: Martin Marietta’s Magnesia Specialties Division has reached one year without a reportable incident.

 

The achievement – driven by successful safety campaigns at both the Lime (Woodville, Ohio) and Magnesia Chemicals (Manistee, Michigan) facilities – marks the first time the division has maintained ZERO for a full year.

“From a safety perspective, Magnesia Specialties’ results have been exceptional. Over the past 12 months, our division has experienced no reportable injuries, demonstrating that ZERO is possible,” said Division President Chris Samborski. “This achievement underscores our commitment to strengthening our world-class safety culture, and I look forward to sustaining this performance moving forward.”

Though the division had been showing steady safety gains for years, efforts truly accelerated in 2023 when the Lime and Magnesia Chemicals teams began approaching safety with a more integrated vision. Quickly, they became united and deepened their commitment to Martin Marietta’s Guardian Angel and Wingman culture, said Bob Gutowski, general manager at Magnesia Chemicals.

“There has been a transformation in the safety culture in Manistee over the past year. The workforce has fully embraced Guardian Angel, and we are seeing much greater engagement, increasingly open communication and individual ownership of the safety process,” he said. “This transformation coincided with our division’s plant reliability initiative. When equipment and facility-related issues impact reliability, they also impact safety.

Our efforts to improve efficiency, get more done with our available resources, and identify and resolve root-cause issues have helped us address safety concerns much more rapidly than we ever have before,” Gutowski continued. “Our safety culture improvements and plant reliability efforts have followed each other in lockstep.”

While agreeing with Gutowski, Magnesia Chemicals Environmental, Health and Safety Manager Shane Surd said employees across the division deserve credit for the safety and operational success.

“I would describe this safety culture as one where each and every employee values the proactive identification and control of workplace hazards - not only for the sake of their own safety, but for the safety of their coworkers as well,” Surd said. “This commitment to our Guardian Angel principles allows this performance to continue. Most importantly, it helps more of our employees go home safely to their families at the end of each workday.”

With both crews working in a 24/7/365 environment that changes daily due to weather conditions and high levels of construction activity, the one-year milestone equates to over 700,000 hours worked.

To guide the division’s efforts over such a wide scale, the Magnesia Specialties team has focused on three key objectives:

1. Creating a hazard-free, safe workplace;

2. Designing improved work practices and relevant training; and

3. Defining and following safe work behaviors.

To do this, the operational teams were pushed to apply commonly used safety tools such as SLAMs, workplace exams and Martin Marietta’s Basic Safety Rules while also incorporating new division-specific tools, including the 3-I’s (Identify, Isolate, Improve) and the Hazard Hunts program.

The 3-I’s and Hazard Hunts are unique initiatives implemented to drive awareness of potential safety risks. For the 3-I’s, leadership has challenged each team member to identify potential dangers, isolate that hazard to minimize or eliminate its potential impact and improve the system that caused the potential hazard in the first place. The 3-I’s go together with Hazard Hunts, which are site-wide searches that aim to discover neglected potential safety risks.

Production Services Director Chris Doremus said a strengthened safety culture combined with improved tools to recognize and prevent hazards has had an enormous impact.

“Bringing a fresh approach to safety is important to our success,” he said. “Through the Hazard Hunt program, we’re encouraging individuals to identify and eliminate hazards, and I look forward to the ways we’ll use it to continue targeting hazards in our plant.”

Wade Weaver, general manager at the Lime operation, said he is excited to see the division’s dedication and commitment continue to grow.

“Our team is like any other good team – they embrace the Wingman philosophy,” he said. “A team approach is important because when you are a team, you can be open, honest, hold your peers accountable, challenge each other, and have a healthy level of fun competition. That’s how you become a collective group working toward a common goal.”

While praising the division’s people for their extraordinary efforts, Vice President of Operations Brad Vernier said the one-year achievement should certainly be celebrated, but that it is only one step of a continuing journey toward improved safety and efficiency.

“I am proud of our team for reaching a full year without a single incident. That said, we must not forget that complacency is the number one enemy,” Vernier said. “Our safety journey will never end. Every single member of this team must be all in, every day. As we apply this level of focus and intensity, we will continue to improve, and the results will follow. ZERO is possible.”