Safety

Protecting the health and safety of neighboring communities and our workers is our top priority

Our goal is to eliminate all injuries, occupational illnesses, unsafe practices and incidents of environmental harm from our activities. We believe that our work is never so urgent or important that we cannot take the time to do it safely and in an environmentally responsible manner.

Our SPIRIT Values – Safety, People, Integrity, Responsibility, Innovation and Teamwork – inspire all our actions and confirm that safety is core to how we operate.

The 8 Life Saving Rules were introduced in 2013 to reduce the risk of serious incidents while workers perform critical, high-risk activities, and to save lives. They define how we work and communicate expectations to employees, contractors and partners. While minimum requirements have always been associated with each rule, we’ve taken it one step further by implementing a system to ensure that our workforce is working within those requirements.

All operations are required to perform verifications of the Life Saving Rules in the field. This means performing sample checks periodically to verify workers are performing work according to the minimum requirements and appropriate controls are in place. The verification process can take different forms, from a paper checklist to an app or other existing methods, but we’ve learned that an effective field verification system engages workers in meaningful dialogue and results in a better understanding of work and expectations. This process helps create a culture of verification, where controlled work is a habit.
Read more about our focus on safe operations.

Emergency Prevention, Preparedness and Response

Preventing spills or incidents through good project planning, design, implementation and leadership is our primary objective. However, if a spill or other unplanned event occurs, we have plans and processes in place to ensure we can respond effectively. We also conduct thorough investigations of all significant incidents to understand the root cause, share lessons learned and prevent future incidents. We report on our spill performance annually in our Sustainability Report.

We dedicate significant resources to enhancing our emergency preparedness and response capabilities. As part of our Global Incident Management Assist Team (GIMAT), employees receive third-party certified training in the internationally recognized Incident Command System (ICS). We conduct regional emergency response exercises and subscribe to land, on-water and subsea oil spill and emergency response entities. We also participate in mutual aid agreements and collaborate with regulators and external agencies which may further augment and support a response, if needed.

Read more about our commitment to safety.