Planned STOs (shutdowns, turnarounds and outages) are scheduled for preventative maintenance and new equipment installation that must be performed to keep a plant running and in regulatory compliance. To minimize production downtime, this work must be completed within a very tight time frame. As such, STOs are often feats of engineering, planning and coordination—work that begins many months, even years, before the event.

At the top of the list during any planned shutdown is safety. To prevent injury or loss of life, reduce liability, and keep insurance rates in check, safety departments must provide the required safety training, products and services that will ensure that all onsite personnel and company assets are protected throughout the scope of the operation.

Managing all that encompasses “safety.” For an STO, however, is often a feat of its own.

Swelling ranks

During an STO, a typical facility can see its ranks swell from 50 employees to perhaps 200-300 additional workers that the safety department must properly equip, train and provide with rescue and standby emergency services. This often requires managing multiple vendors of safety products and services as well as dealing directly with workers that are not familiar with the facility or its processes and are performing challenging, even high-risk, tasks.

Now, in a move designed to eliminate a point of complexity and coordination in an already complicated process, some facility safety departments are outsourcing to a single combined safety service provider that can deliver the entire gamut of safety-related products and services.

The benefit of this one-stop-shop approach for a planned shutdown is the single point of coordination, reduction in facility personnel required to manage the safety effort, access to extensive safety expertise and technical knowledge, potential cost savings on basic and more advanced PPE (personal protective equipment) and the ability to respond quickly to unexpected situations or emergencies.

Safety first

Despite the focus on speedy return to service, those that have participated in planned shutdowns will attest that the primary emphasis is not how fast the work is completed, but rather ensuring the safety of all involved.

“Safety is number one,” said Kevin Nadolski, safety director at Duke & Duke Services. “Well before any of the work starts, the project managers are holding safety meetings and orienting employees on safety. This occurs both before and during the project, with managers reviewing daily reports about how many personnel are working, what they are doing, and if any are hurt they want to know exactly what happened.”

As a safety director, Nadolski has utilized a number of PPE providers and safety service companies over the course of his career. Duke & Duke Services provides installation and maintenance of conveyor systems, bulk handling equipment, presses, cranes, robotics and other automated machinery—often during STOs.

He admitted that the concept of a single, combined safety service provider is a novel concept in an industry where suppliers generally keep to well-defined market segments with minimal overlap. Large PPE providers, for example, offer catalogues with thousands of products, but rarely offer safety services—and vice versa.

Outsourcing safety

Nadolski first began outsourcing to a company that was later acquired by DXP Safety Services while working at a prior job, and has continued to use the company throughout the five years he has been employed as safety director at Duke & Duke.

For example, DXP Safety Services now operates as a single provider of combined safety products and services for plant turnarounds.

In addition to an extensive product catalogue of PPE items, the company maintains a large asset base of equipment including powered air trailers, supplied air trailers, emergency showers, eye wash equipment, MROP (maintenance, repair, operations and production) trailers, fire trucks and ambulances. It also offers a comprehensive list of services, including safety training and supervision, confined space attendants and rescue teams, high angle rescue teams, rope rescue, gas detection, respiratory fit testing, audiometric testing, industrial hygiene, industrial medical services, fall protection and repair services.

Nadolski estimated he had used DXP a dozen times for onsite safety supervision, emergency response, confined space attendants and supplied air trailers. He also utilizes DXP to train employees that must complete annual confined space training.

“What I appreciate most is that when they send their guys out for rescue work, I know they are well-trained,” added Nadolski. “I still spot check them and ask them ‘what do you do if this happens?’ questions, but they know it right off the bat. I don’t always get that with other safety services.”

Given the unique requirements of each facility, there are no one-size-fits-all safety plans so each project is client specific. The scope of involvement can be scaled from a single worker to a complete program for the entire scope of the STO.

Chris McKinnon is with DXP Safety Services.

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