Safety goes to the heart of our number-one core value: respect for the individual. Etoco is committed to promoting employee and contractor safety in every aspect of our operations by eliminating unsafe practices in the workplace.

Improving Etoco's safety performance is a major objective.  We are pursuing the safety imperative companywide and have the same safety expectations for contractors as for employees. Etoco's representatives on the management teams for our alliances, joint ventures and affiliates are similarly aggressive on this point.

To foster improvements in our safety performance, Etoco's internal Safety Council is championing a "safety culture," which we are integrating into every phase of our business. Everywhere our senior executives travel to Etoco operations, they reinforce the importance of safety to our employees and contractors. 

We audit our production facilities, using a consolidated set of SH&E standards as guidelines. We have adopted several loss-prevention programs, which we are stressing throughout our operations. These include:

• A Leadership Initiative, which integrates safety into Etoco's internal Leadership Development process;
• Behavior-based safety training, which teaches employees and contractors to be more sensitive to the actions impacting safety in the workplace;
• Reliability engineering, which establishes procedures to reduce the risk of incidents based on an analysis of the root cause of failures and to target maintenance in areas where the greatest reliability benefit will be achieved;
• Investigation of incidents, accidents and near misses, which establishes rigorous protocols for determining underlying causes of accidents and near misses so that we can take steps to ensure that such incidents do not recur