News

DEC: winner of the IADC Safety Award 2009

The Board of the International Association of Dredging Contractors (IADC) has presented the Safety Award 2009 to DEME Environmental Contractors (DEC), the environmental specialist company of the DEME Group for its exemplary safety performance on the challenging project "Remediation of the Acid Tar Lagoons in Rieme (Ertvelde), Belgium".  The award is a confirmation and a definite result of the fact that all safety issues are given a top priority status within the DEME Group.

Each year IADC seeks to honour one of its member companies that has shown outstanding achievement in the area of safety. The IADC Safety Award is intended to encourage the development of safety skills on the job and to reward those people and companies demonstrating special diligence in safety awareness in the performance of their profession.

The operation that DEC performed in the remediation of the extremely toxic and dangerous acid tar lagoons in Rieme demonstrates that the expertise developed by dredging and maritime construction companies such as DEME is applicable in the most challenging circumstances. For indeed, within the environmental company DEC, the knowledge, technology and years of experience in environmental dredging and sediment treatment, soil and groundwater remediation and landfill technology of the entire DEME Group have been gathered under one roof.

DEME and its environmental subsidiary DEC are both ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 certified companies, which is a convincing indicator of the fact that these companies impose upon themselves a high-level environmental and safety awareness conduct, attitude and operations.

The DEME group has made a commitment to its own personnel and to the outside world to consider safety an absolute top priority in all circumstances and to make DEME an incident and injury-free place to work. As from 2009 a new cultural and behavioural training programme has been launched to create and maintain a culture of zero accidents and zero harm to the environment. DEME, therefore, considers the IADC 2009 Safety Award as an actual reward for its pursued safety approach in all circumstances. It is as well a further motivation to continue unabatedly along the same line.

Safety: a priority issue at DEME

In short, major challenges and safety risk factors involved in this project:

• Very low pH factor, which can be harmful to both man and machine
• Lack of dike stability because in order to increase the capacity of the lagoons, historically the dikes had been raised but not widened
• Potential emissions of SO2, an irritating toxic and even deadly gas that is heavier than air. Any emissions have to be contained to ensure the safety of personnel, public and the prevention of pollution
• Presence of unexploded ordinance (UXO) including bombs of 500 to 1000 lbs (from World War II)
• Pipelines with inflammable and explosive products, both above and below the ground
• Nearby housing and neighbouring companies

Since the start of the full-scale execution of the clean-up operations in February 2006, there has been a total of 178,000 working hours of which 141,000 were carried out by DEC. Only one lost time incident occurred in the 37,000 hours carried out by subcontractors. Since this incident 2.5 years ago, there has been a total of 151,000 working hours without incident.
In addition, emissions of SO2 were kept within the site perimeter and there were only three occasions of dust nuisance which were tackled immediately. As the project nears completion, the aim is to maintain these high standards and to retain lost-time injury score as it is now.

About IADC

IADC stands for “International Association of Dredging Companies” and is the global umbrella organisation for contractors in the private dredging industry. As such IADC is dedicated to not only promoting the skills, integrity and reliability of its members, but also the dredging industry in general. IADC has over hundred main and associated members. Together they represent the forefront of the dredging industry.

IADC’s mission is:

• to inform the world about the fundamental need for dredging and the economic, social, technological and environmental benefits of dredging;
• to promote the high standards which form the basis for all members’ operations as worldwide dredging standards;
• to promote fair contract conditions and fair competition within the dredging markets,
• to improve the international business climate for the private dredging industry;
• to promote new markets for the private dredging industry now exclusively covered by state-owned or protected companies

October 2009