On the Chemical Safety at Work™ podcast, Mel and Pat chat with Adam Rosevear, Work Health Safety Partner at Hydro Tasmania, about renewable energy, onsite safety management, and changing attitudes towards safety.
Firstly, for those who don’t know - what is Hydro Tasmania?
Well, Hydro Tasmania is a state-owned energy company focusing on generation. So, from a Tasmanian perspective, we're made up of 30 power stations and 54 major dams and lots of assets, sort of feeding in and out of those assets.
We also look after a distribution network on King Island and Flinders Island. We've got the Tamar Valley gas-fired power station in addition to our hydro fleet, and there's a couple of major wind farms in Tasmania that we've, or three major wind farms in Tasmania that we've got an interest in as well.
Hydro Tasmania are a leader in renewable energy with hydro energy operations across the state.
How many staff are there? How many people do you look after in your division?
The work health and safety function in our business is a corporate function. There's 1,400-ish employees, so that varies a little bit across the business. Our team's made up of 12 and we cover the entire business.
Can you tell us a little bit about the specifics of your role as WHS partner?
So, the work health and safety partner's role is to partner — or sit beside — business leaders and help them with excellent safety management. So, rather than old-fashioned safety officer-type roles, we'd much rather sort of be in from the beginning on a decision and help business leaders do a good job of managing safety.
What are some of the specific risks that you're dealing with?
High-voltage electricity is definitely on top of the list, but you know it's a big, broad business and that's what keeps me interested. But there's lots of different risks that present themselves in our line of work.
If you think about the power stations, there's water, confined spaces, high pressure, large plant, Hazchem of course — which is why we're here today — and other hazardous substances. So, hazardous wastes as well, and then you can sort of move on into sort of psychosocial risk and the risk with travelling interstate and into different countries as well.
What does chemical safety mean to you?
It's an important part of our business and keeping our people safe. Although in the world of hydroelectricity generation, we don't have lots and lots of super hazardous chemicals. We do have lots of small amounts, a wide variety of hazardous chemicals and lots of oils and lubricants and those sorts of things. So, as an important part of how our business works, it's definitely a focus for our team and for our company.
Your staff are handling oils & lubricants daily. What kind of risk does that pose?
Well, lubricants in particular. So, hydraulic oils and other sorts of oils would be handled on a day-to-day basis. Skin contact spills, definitely. The environment is a big focus for our company, of course, being a clean green energy producer. It's something that we want to do well — take pride in.
Do you have a process in place to identify and assess risks regarding chemicals dangerous goods?
We do. We've got a number of work, health and safety system-based processes. We've got a procedure that sort of sits above the management of chemicals. It explains how we want to go about doing that and what excellent looks like.
We use ChemAlert as a product to access safety data sheets and do risk assessments and keep track of our quantities and those sorts of things.
We've also got internal audit check mechanisms so we can make sure that we're doing things well, and we've got a maintenance management system that helps the areas do their own checks on chemicals as well.
Tell us about the strategies you implement for minimising risks.
From an employee and contractor's perspective, we rely on task risk assessment tools. In Hydro, we use a take five process for a quick risk assessment and safe work method statements, or SWMS (safe work method statement) for a more detailed written risk assessment.
We also have a number of other higher level risk assessment tools, site-based risk assessment tools as well, and we use ChemAlert for large quantities or higher risk assessments on individual products.
How do you keep people engaged with safety?
In Hydro, we work really hard on culture. So, pretty much the whole time I've been at Hydro Tasmania, there's been a push on culture. We've done a range of things to help work on that and, to be totally honest, once the culture is good and people value safety along with quality of work, really a quality job is a safe job, isn't it?
"Once we build our people into that (safety) mindset, everything else follows along quite nicely."
Adam Rosevear, Hydro Tasmania
What are some of the emerging health and safety risks you're monitoring for the future?
Well, I guess the safety risk of the moment is psychosocial hazards. New introduction into the laws and, before that, an introduction into the laws and, before that, an introduction into the international safety standard that we work towards, which is ISO 45001.
So, we have had a focus on that for a few years now, and we started out with just identifying or understanding the legislation and the new standard, identifying risks, and we're now into sort of a management plan.
Can you tell us a little bit about your chemical storage, in particular across your sites?
Yeah, so a business that's spread out across Tasmania and also into the mainland, but from a power station perspective there's 30 of them. Most of them are unmanned, so they're remotely operated, so they're mostly unmanned. So what we do is we minimise the amount of products that we have on site in most power stations, so to minimise the quantities and therefore minimise the risk. So we'll tend to have a flammable goods, a small flammable goods cabinet, a small corrosives cabinet and a small flammable gas cabinet.
How much have attitudes around safety changed?
Yeah, it's moving in the right direction, but I think there's two sides to that coin, isn't there? There's the way that organisations go about doing safety and you get. You know you reap what you sow, basically, and so I think, as organisations learn how to do it better, I think attitudes to safety are changing in line with that.
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