The Executive Board and senior management explain the significance of safety during safety inspection visits, with employees at the terminals being addressed on this theme. Line managers also perform regular inspections. Measuring is the basis for being able to make further improvements, even for incidents. This means that an open reporting culture is essential for safety management.

Vopak has a range of programmes to improve this openness. These efforts are now starting to bear fruit in the form of more reports of actual and potential incidents.
As a result of improved reporting both the number of incidents not leading to loss of working time and the number of near-misses rose in 2007. This shows a more realistic relationship between accidents and nearmisses. More importantly, all the information, from which we learn a great deal, is available to all employees.
The number of accidents resulting in absence from work (Lost Time Injury Rate -LTIR) fell in 2007 from 1.9 to 1.4 incidents per million hours worked. The ultimate aim, stated in 2006, is to avoid all incidents with an interim target of 1.0 in 2009. There were 6.2 incidents involving personal injury (Total Injury Rate = TIR) per million hours worked in 2007 (2006: 7.5).

As well as personal safety, the integrity of operations and terminals is determined by process safety at the terminals. A significant measure of process safety is the number of product spills per year. Policy focuses on avoiding product spills but if one occurs there are protocols for reporting it and cleaning up the spillage and any consequences. There has been a great deal of attention in recent years to transparent reporting of product spills of more than 200 litres. These incidents are investigated and proposals for prevention are implemented. There were 97 product spills in the past year (2006: 79). The increase in the number of spills compared with 2006 is probably because of greater management attention, which has led to an increase in reported incidents. Vopak is disappointed by this development and continues to try and avoid spills as far as possible. There was a broadlybased review in 2007 into reducing the number of product spills.
 
Its aim was to identify trends and the underlying causes. Further improvement initiatives to avoid spills based on this review will be implemented in 2008. Introducing improvements arising from audits, staff training and meeting Vopak’s internal standards will improve process safety further.

Terminal Health Assessments
Terminal Health Assessments were introduced in 2005 and they are aimed at continuous improvement of the operating processes, including environmental and safety performance.
This measurement method is based on the Chemical Distribution Institute Terminal Assessment (CDI-T) and is proving to be highly successful. The first cycle of terminal audits was completed in 2007 and Terminal Health Assessment audits have now been performed at 96% of Vopak’s terminals. The new terminals in the network will be assessed in the coming year. A new cycle of assessments starts in 2008 and will also measure improvement plans that have been implemented.
Customers and governments also regularly carry out standard quality, environmental and safety audits.