APM Wins Terminal Safety Awards

For the fifth straight year, APM Terminals’ Pier 400 facility at the Port of Los Angeles has won the Pacific Maritime Association’s Category A Southern California Area Container Terminal Safety Award, and the PMA’s Coast Award for the safest terminal on the Pacific Coast.

The awards were announced March 1 at the PMA’s 63rd annual West Coast Safety Southern California Area Awards in Los Angeles.

“It is gratifying that the hard work of our men and women in ensuring the safe operation of our terminals is recognized by our peers in the industry,” APM Terminals’ Americas Region President Eric Sisco said.

The awards, which are based on reported injury rates per man-hours worked, are divided by geographic area and by size and are presented for the Southern California, Washington and Oregon ports.

Facilities are separated into three categories according to size; in Category A are terminals totaling more than one million man hours worked per year. Category B is for terminals with more than 500,000, but less than one million man hours worked, and Category C are those terminal operators with fewer than 500,000 thousand man hours worked per year.

Local area awards are presented in each of the terminal categories based on injury rates. The Coast awards are given in each terminal category for the best safety performance on the West Coast.

Pier 400, the largest container terminal in the US, saw its lost-time injury frequency (LTIF) rate drop 22 percent from 2010 to 6.01 per million man-hours worked for the year. The facility handled 1.91 million TEUs in 2011.

On Feb. 29, the PMA held its State of Washington Area Safety Awards and APM Terminals Tacoma was the winner of the Category C Container Terminal Safety Award and the Coast Award for Category C for the safest terminal on the Pacific Coast.

APM Tacoma, which handled 264,397 TEUs in 2011, improved its LTIF rate by 64 percent to 8.39 per million man-hours worked for the year, also won the award for the “Greatest reduction in injury rates for the Washington Area,” which is given irrespective of terminal size.