Fluor Hanford

2008 Robert W. Campbell Award Recipient
Category I

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Fluor Hanford, a business unit of Fluor Corporation, has a contract with the United States Department of Energy (DOE) to manage and perform environmental-remediation work at the Hanford Site in southeastern Washington State, near Richland. Fluor Corporation, consistently rated as one of the world´s safest engineering, procurement, and construction contractors, has a global workforce of more than 41,000, spread across offices in 25 countries on six continents. The company´s contract at Hanford is valued at more than $9 billion and represents slightly over a third of the annual budget of $2.1 billion allocated for all work done on the Site, which includes projects managed by other prime contractors.

Safety is the first word in Fluor´s business values: Safety, Integrity, Teamwork and Excellence (SITE). The Corporation operates on the basic premise that work must be done without adversely affecting the safety and health of employees, subcontractors, local communities, and the environment. As Fluor´s Chairman Alan Boeckmann puts it,"We hold sacred the well-being of people-employees, customers, and communities in which we live and work.Global stewardship is a responsibility, our privilege.”

Fluor´s work at Hanford is grounded in the Corporation´s safety culture of Zero Incidents TM that includes ISO 14000 and ISO 9000-validated programs. This case study focuses on Fluor Hanford´s environment, health, and safety (EHS) programs that tailor the corporate programs for practical application in the field at Hanford.

Fluor Hanford´s 3,600 employees and subcontractors have a vested interest in environment, health, and safety as they are working at what is known as the most contaminated place in the Western Hemisphere. For more than 40 years, at Hanford, the government produced two-thirds of the nation´s plutonium for nuclear weapons-helping to win the Cold War but leaving a legacy of chemical and radiological contamination. Our employees work with the depth-and breadth-of the most complex industrial, chemical, and radiological hazards; in and around new and aging facilities.

At 586 square miles, Hanford is roughly half the size of Rhode Island and borders one of the country´s largest rivers, the Columbia. The quarter-of-a-million residents in the four communities flanking Hanford (Richland, Pasco, Kennewick, and West Richland) and the two million people downriver look to us and our employees to be conscientious stewards for their health and safety, and the environment of the Pacific Northwest. We take that responsibility seriously. The OSHA Recordable Rate have improve by over 80% since Fluor signed a contract with the DOE in 1996 to clean up a major portion of the Hanford Site, with the majority of that dramatic improvement occurring during the past five years. This change did not happen overnight, nor was it “by accident.” It was through a focused and collaborative effort by management and workers standing side-by-side, working toward a common goal.

Our safety record at Hanford results from integrating Fluor´s corporate safety programs with extensive planning before starting work, robust safety programs rooted in employee ownership; and comprehensive environment, health, and safety training programs; as well as using leading indicators to track performance and adjust accordingly. Nine Fluor projects at Hanford have earned Star status recognition in the DOE´s Voluntary Protection Program (VPP), modeled after OSHA´s program.

By involving employees and subcontractors at every stage of the cleanup work, actively participating in VPP, building worker trust via our union safety-representative program, and giving employees the responsibility of looking out for one another every day, we have purposefully instilled, and continue to build, a strong safety culture. That culture transcends compliance and aspires to protect the environment and completely eliminate workplace injuries and incidents.

For us, just “showing up” to do the work is not enough. It´s all about performance. Our employees and subcontractors understand that our contract with the DOE stipulates meeting very specific milestones on time and safely. Our collective success, technically and financially, and our viability for other opportunities depends on it.

BUSINESS PROFILE

Fluor Hanford, a business unit of Fluor Corporation (NYSE: FLR), is a special-purpose company set up in 1996 to manage environmental-remediation activities at Hanford as a prime contractor to the Department of Energy (DOE).  The contract is called the Project Hanford Management Contract. Established as part of the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, Hanford produced two-thirds of the country´s plutonium for nuclear weapons through the late 1980s.  The Hanford Site spans 586 square miles in southeastern Washington State and is about half the size of Rhode Island.  The site is bordered by the Columbia River, the largest river by volume flowing into the Pacific from the Western Hemisphere.  Producing plutonium for national defense for 40 years left a huge legacy of chemical and radiological contamination: 270 billion gallons of groundwater contaminated above drinking-water standards covering a swath of 100 square miles; 2,300 tons of used nuclear fuel stored underwater in two massive basins next to the Columbia River; 20 tons of material laced with plutonium; and 500 contaminated facilities.

Fluor Hanford (International Standard Industrial Code - 9000 / North American International Standard Industrial Code - 5629) has 3,600 employees working to remediate and close the site: dismantling former nuclear-processing facilities; cleaning up contaminated groundwater; retrieving and processing radioactive and chemical waste; and maintaining the site’s infrastructure.

The site´s total annual budget is about $2.1 billion, with Fluor Hanford´s work scope commanding between $650 and $800 million each year.  DOE and its contractors are committed to ensuring the public is protected from the potential effects of the hazardous and radioactive material at Hanford and restoring the environment as much as possible.  Removing that material without incident means that every day Fluor Hanford´s workers are protecting communities along 200-plus miles of the Columbia River shoreline and the two million people living downriver.

Fluor Hanford is a business unit of the Fluor Corporation. Fluor has 41,000 employees worldwide who provide services in engineering, procurement, construction, operations, maintenance, and environment, health and safety project management.  The company has a diverse business profile: 50 percent Oil & Gas; 20 percent Industrial & Infrastructure; 15 percent Global Services; 8 percent Government; and 7 percent Power.  Headquartered in Irving, Texas, Fluor is a FORTUNE 500 company with revenues that have doubled in the past five years: growing from $8 billion in 2003 to $16.6 billion in 2007.