Health and safety

Alexandre Costa, Work Safety Technician, Siemens Energy Brazil

I’ve just started the late afternoon-to-night shift, which means I wake up around 4 p.m. every day and go to bed around 8 a.m. – with a “lunch” break at 1 a.m. We’re dealing with heavy machinery and hazardous, fire-prone gases like acetylene and oxygen, so carefully planning ahead is absolutely essential.

For over two decades, I’ve been working as a work safety technician, and in all these years I’ve taken part in building and assemblage projects for a whole range of industries – chemical plants, refineries, thermal power stations. In all those industries the policies and protocols around safety culture are important, of course, but the really crucial thing is focusing on people first. If you lose sight of what is needed to protect them, accidents are more likely to happen.

My current project involves servicing a thermal plant here in Cañuelas, Argentina, where our 45-day deadline includes disassembling major equipment, doing maintenance work, replacing parts as needed – and then reassembling everything again. My job is accident prevention and risk analysis, collaborating with the whole team in three different places: at the heart of the power plant where the main turbine is located and in two support and storage areas that are a little under two kilometers apart from each other.

For me, one of the most important tasks of the day is our daily safety dialogue (DSD), when we discuss specific situations and the risks associated with them, always in partnership with supervisors and field engineers. In our line of work, small oversights can lead to huge risks and even severe accidents. So we need to take every task and the correct use of every safety item into account.

Since I’m Brazilian, from Rio de Janeiro, in Argentina I also have to consider linguistic and cultural differences during our DSDs and focus on solid, clear communication. Based on my experience, accidents occur at work two to three hours after a task has started, the time when people become habituated to an activity. The DSDs happen just before that critical window of time, making sure everyone pays more attention to their own and others’ safety.

But the most challenging part of prevention work is dealing with people’s priorities. Everyone has deadlines and productivity schedules, and at times this makes people forget to take care of the most precious assets: themselves and those around them. With the DSDs, we can help them take a step back and not forget that.

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We prioritize people to achieve zero harm

Sustainability at Siemens Energy

We prioritize people to achieve zero harm

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