SAFE TO THE CORE

Safety is a core value at Weyerhaeuser. We believe that all incidents are preventable and that working injury-free is possible.

Because the work we do carries risk, all our facilities and operations use proven tools and systems to identify hazards, mitigate risk, learn from incidents, and inspire our people to always make the safe choice — every task, every time.


OUR SAFETY VISION

From our senior leadership to our front-line supervisors, visible, consistent commitment to safety makes a significant impact. 

Our leaders hold themselves and others accountable for demonstrating caring, safe behaviors and for correcting hazardous situations.

Our employees are fully engaged and share responsibility and accountability for safety.

And everywhere you go, our safety vision hangs on walls as a reminder that injury-free is possible. 


HOW WE MANAGE SAFETY

To ensure our safety system is consistent and effective, we equip leaders and employees with a safety toolkit that includes:

  • Our safety vision
  • A personal safety pledge document
  • Our companywide safety metrics 
  • Our template for annual risk-based safety planning
  • Our Weyerhaeuser-developed risk-assessment tool 
  • Our Health and Safety Policy and safety standards
  • Our audit process for assessing regulatory compliance and driving continuous improvement of our safety management system
  • Our standard process for reporting and investigating incidents
  • Our online incident tracking tool
  • Online training for all employees

We also understand that to prevent injury, we must learn from our safety incidents and near misses. We require that all incidents be reported, recorded, and investigated according to defined processes based on the type and severity of the incident. Causes must be identified and action taken to prevent recurrence. We collect and analyze information about work-related injury and illness, environmental incidents, near misses, hazard observations, property damage, fire/explosion, vehicle incidents, product loss and product damage. And most importantly, we regularly communicate what we’ve learned to all employees.


HOW WE MEASURE SAFETY

For many years we were focused on reducing our recordable incident rate and we are proud to have achieved and maintained industry-leading performance using that metric. But even with a low RIR, some of the injuries we still experience - while very few - are serious and sometimes fatal. For us, this is unacceptable. 
 
To take our safety performance to the next level, we have de-emphasized our focus on tracking all recordable incidents and intensified our focus on eliminating the most serious injuries from our workplace. Every year we set preventive safety targets in several areas, such as hazard identification and correction. And we share the details of serious and potentially serious injuries we experience so we can better learn from those incidents and keep our highest-risk areas top of mind for all employees. 

Of course, our ultimate goal is to operate entirely injury-free. We know this is possible because most of our facilities already operate injury-free on a rolling 12-month basis. In fact, 59 percent of our operations reported no recordable injuries in 2018.

However, we did experience one employee fatality in 2018 when an employee died while traveling for work, and 11 serious employee injuries. Since our goal is zero, we rated ourselves a “below.”  

View our safety data



CONTRACTOR SAFETY

The nature of our business requires that we often use contractors to complete various types of work. 

We have long required the companies we work with to have effective contractor safety programs in place. But in 2016, after experiencing a number of serious contractor injuries, our Timberlands team decided to reexamine our approach to contractor safety. Guided by our new safety vision with an emphasis on encouraging preventative behaviors and managing high-risk areas, the team proposed a collaborative, values-based approach to contractor safety.

We now encourage our contractors to focus on behavior, guidance, strategic direction, and oversight of their safety programs. The new approach includes:

  • Risk-based safety plans developed by the contractors that focus on recognizing and mitigating serious hazards.
  • Paired leadership visits where our leaders join contractors on job sites to observe their crews in action. They talk about shared values, strengths, and opportunities for improvement.

In 2018, our contractors experienced 23 serious injuries. Unfortunately, we also experienced four contractor fatalities in our Oregon Timberlands operations. One contractor was crushed when feed wheels and delimbing arms on a dangle head processor closed and three contractors were struck by logs in separate incidents. Incident investigations were completed and findings were shared with all employees and appropriate contractors.  
 

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