Anderson Dahlen Celebrates 600 days without a lost time accident!

Anderson Dahlen is proud to announce passing a major safety milestone of over 600 days with ZERO lost time accidents. To put this more into perspective, that’s almost two years and over 600,000 hours worked. In addition to this superb accomplishment, the Applied Vacuum Division has had over 750 accident-free days.

At Anderson Dahlen, we believe that every accident is preventable, and we practice that every day in each detail of our work.

There are some great safety slogans out there, but the real accomplishment is that none of our treasured employees have been injured, lost work time, or even worse, had permanent disabilities.

• Protect your hands, you need them to pick up your paycheck
• Those who work the safest way, live to see another day
• A spill, A slip, a hospital trip
• Safety – A small investment for a rich future

When a company has 600 days without a lost-time accident, that’s something to celebrate! Anderson Dahlen has come a long way with safety habits and following safety regulations. If you’re thinking, “How did they get 600 days so far?”, let’s look at some important reasons. When we asked our Safety Director, Warren Lawrence for some answers, he replied:

“We’re doing so well because more and more people are wearing their required PPE. The increase of near misses in the last year has sky-rocketed and the supervisors are more hands-on with investigations.”

Anderson Dahlen is constantly building new training programs for safety in specific topics. One of the next ones we are working on is “Rigging Safety” since we move such large and complex equipment and parts. Check out the photo below and see if you know what is wrong with it. A simple shackle seems easy enough to use, do you know how?

Jennifer Castle, our HR representative and former director of safety said:

“We all care about each other’s wellbeing. One of the best decisions we’ve made as a company is keeping an active partnership with OSHA consultation. No matter what happens, they’re always there to call.”

Jennifer provided a lot more in-depth about the history of safety at Anderson Dahlen, which showed that great safety didn’t happen overnight. Anderson Dahlen is MNSHARP certified. There are under 40 companies total in the state of Minnesota that are certified and apparently, it isn’t an easy process for you to get certified. When Anderson Dahlen started working with MNSHARP our workers comp experience modification was 1.19 which wasn’t exactly the best. However, by being in the MNSHARP program and everyone contributing and being safety aware, we have recently been notified that our rating is now .70, which is the best rating possible in this safety system!

This is huge news for the company and is also a great step in the right direction to build trust, communication and protection in the work environment. I look forward to seeing how far Anderson Dahlen can go in keeping employees safe and to the celebrations we have for those accomplishments. Now we expect to keep setting safety records each year, raising the bar on accident-free days and walking-the-talk about safety.