Five million hours LTI free at Wheatstone

16/10/2017

The Downer team at the Wheatstone LNG project in Western Australia has achieved five million hours without lost time or injury.

Downer was awarded the Chevron-operated Wheatstone contract in October 2013 and has spent the past four years refining safety practices.

Paul Hopkins, Senior Project Manager at Wheatstone, said: “The overall safety performance to date has been a credit to the team, and the milestone of five million man hours LTI free is a huge achievement."

“The team will now face the challenge of maintaining these high standards through to the project’s completion.”

From the contract’s award date in 2013, the team used an almost two year start-up plan for mobilisation and preparation, achieving the milestone of being 1% complete on 9 October 2015. Today, the Wheatstone project is 89% complete with roughly 500,000 man hours to go.

Throughout the project, the team has exceeded expectation on delivery times for a variety of KPI’s such as cable installations. In 2016, the team were installing 40,000 metres of cable a week, sometimes achieving 60,000 metres a week throughout the year. “The team’s ability to achieve safety targets is a real testament to the team’s capacity to encourage and maintain a safety culture,” said Paul.

Roughly 500 Downer personnel remain on the Wheatstone Project. “When the project started to ramp up, we had about 57 people and reached a peak workforce of 1,440 people in March 2017. The team looks forward to delivering the rest of the project and continuing to achieve these high standards,” said Paul.