IMA-NA announces safety award winners

The Industrial Minerals Association – North America (IMA-NA) announced the winners of its safety recognition awards. IMA-NA Chairman Kevin Porterfield and IMA-NA President Mark Ellis presented the awards at the IMA-NA’s Spring Meeting in Washington, D.C.

The safety recognition awards program works in cooperation with the Mine Safety & Health Administration. A total of 14 companies and 28 individual mining operations were honored. The two classes of awards recognize different levels of safety performance.

The IMA-NA Safety Achievement Award recognizes the best reportable injury rate for an individual IMA-NA member company by size category for the preceding calendar year. This year’s winners include:

• OCI Wyoming L.P.
Green River, Wyo.
(large category)

• Badger Mining Corp.
Berlin, Wis.
(medium category)

• Old Hickory Clay Co.
Mayfield, Ky.
(small category)

“The safety performance of these IMA members is truly inspiring,” Ellis said. “OCI Wyoming had only one injury while working 808,808 employee hours, for an injury rate of 0.25 per 200,000 employee work-hours. This is the third time that OCI Wyoming has earned the large company category award in as many years.”

Badger Mining Corp. also had only one injury while working 287,671 employee hours, for an injury rate of 0.70 per 200,000 employee work-hours. Old Hickory Clay Co. had a zero reportable injury rate, while working 75,625 employee work-hours. To put that in perspective, the preliminary injury rate for all metal and nonmetal mines in 2011 was 2.43.

Eleven additional small category companies tied the winning zero reportable injury rate, but had fewer employee hours. Also recognized were 28 individual IMA-NA-member U.S. mining operations for working 200,000 continuous employee hours during 2011 without a single reportable employee injury.