A sign on the wall with digital numbers at Concordia Terminal LLC in Concordia, KS (785-243-1797), spotted in early August 2018, tells the story:
“This plant has worked 1,700 days without an OSHA recordable injury. The best previous record was 1,170 days. Do your part! Help make a new record.”
The 1,700 days equal about 4-1/2 years, and every day that goes by injury-free is its own new record. And it also keeps Concordia Terminal in OSHA’s Safety and Health Achievement Recognition Program (SHARP).
“Frankly, I can’t remember the last time we had a lost-time injury here,” says Elevator Manager Derek Sandmann, who has been at the terminal since 2006 after working at an Archer Daniels Midland facility in Michigan. “It’s a proactive approach to safety, in which OSHA comes in as a partner. They catch things before an incident happens. I’d advise that anyone who can participate do so.”
Concordia Terminal started as a relatively small country elevator in 1985. Then in 1999, a group of four farmer-owned cooperatives formed a joint venture, then called AgMark LLC, to add on to the elevator along the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) Railway and turn it into a shuttle-loading terminal.
Renamed Concordia Terminal in 2015, the facility still is owned by three cooperatives – Central Valley Ag, Cloud County Elevator Coop Association, and Randall Farmers Coop Union.
The terminal, in the meantime, has grown huge – 10 million bushels in upright storage plus another 1.7 million bushels in temporary storage bunkers. The facility ships 20 million-plus bushels a year of hard red winter wheat, corn, soybeans, and sorghum to both domestic and export markets on all commodities. It loads 60 to 70 trains consisting of 110 covered hopper cars a year. “During harvest, we’re loading two trains a week,” says Sandmann.
With that kind of volume, it’s critical that safety not get lost in the shuffle.
That’s part of the reason Concordia Terminal became involved in the SHARP program, an honor relatively few companies achieve. The suggestion came in 2006 from David Edwards, safety manager for then co-owner Farmway Cooperative. (Farmway since then has become part of Central Valley Ag.) Edwards put the terminal in touch with the Kansas Department of Labor (KDOL), which operates OSHA programs in that state.
“OSHA looked at our safety record and our injury rate,” Sandmann explains. “Then there was the walk-around inspection. We fixed anything they found. Once they do a final inspection and give their approval, you’re admitted to SHARP for two years on a probationary basis. The terminal is reinspected at each renewal, and KDOL continues to monitor our safety record.”
Concordia Terminal achieved that honor in 2011. The terminal’s last inspection was three years ago.
A major benefit of being in SHARP, Sandmann says, is that the terminal is exempt from routine, random inspections from OSHA/KDOL during the period in question. The facility still can be inspected in the event of a fatality, major injury, or a complaint to the agency. “And you have a responsibility to keep up on your safety programs,” Sandmann adds.
Of course, Concordia Terminal would never have been accepted into SHARP without some strong safety programs already in place. In this regard, the facility continues to work closely with Edwards, who remains as Kansas regional safety director with Central Valley Ag.
Edwards and Sandmann team up to hold safety workshops once a month that are mandatory for staff to attend. These cover a rotating list of topics that include:
“We have house rules that relate to all of these items,” Sandmann says. “We require all the permits for bin entry, hot work, and confined space entry, including the PPE requirements, depending on the situation.
“Safety depends on continual communication, so all of our outside crew carry two-way radios,” he continues. “We’re a fully automated facility, which means we get alerts from our hazard monitoring systems, and we can look up monitor history at all of our workstations.
“We do some of our own fumigation in-house on our smaller bins and bunkers, and that means taking all of the precautions including informing our neighbors. For the biggest bins, we call in the professionals.”
And there are some incentives for the Concordia staff. “If there are no recordable injuries in a month, we’ll have a barbecue or bring in dinner,” Sandmann says.
Reprinted from Grain Journal September/October 2018 Issue
