APM Terminals Apapa, Nigeria’s largest container terminal by volume, has set a new safety record at the port, as it recorded 400 days of no Lost Time Injury (LTI).
No Lost Time Injury, a key indicator of the effectiveness of an organisation’s safety programme, means no injury was sustained on the job by an employee or contractor that resulted in the person being away from work.
This was made known recently, at an event to mark the company’s 2022 Global Safety Day in Lagos, with the theme ‘We Learn and We Adapt’.
Igor Van Den Essen, regional managing director of Africa and Europe at APM Terminals, who was on a visit to Nigeria, commended the Apapa team for the major safety milestone, and charged them to sustain and improve on the record.
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“While we observe Global Safety Day, we continuously highlight how deeply it impacts our operations and the entire company. Being in an asset-heavy industry and due to the nature of our operations, we consider safety to be non-negotiable. Our people and partners are across the port logistics ecosystem and it is also one of the three pillars of our strategy ‘Safer, Bigger, Better’.
Klaus Laursen, the country managing director of APM Terminals Nigeria, commended employees, and reminded them of the importance of maintaining safety.
He pointed out the need to maintain 400 days and more of no LTI, by applying the newly learned knowledge to make the place a safe to work.
Steen Knudsen, terminal manager, APM Terminals Apapa, encouraged employees to celebrate themselves as they had achieved a huge milestone of going through a whole year without any injury.
He urged employees to always remain safety conscious.
“We should inculcate the practice of coming forward to report incidents to ensure a more robust safety. Safety is not only for today but tomorrow and so forth. We have the ambition to change how we fundamentally do things in APM Terminals. We want to be more efficient, give customers a better experience, and deliver more to the Nigerian economy,” he added.
Knudsen added that over the past 16 years since it commenced operations, APM Terminals Apapa had made a substantial investment not only in equipment and facility upgrades but also in continuous training and manpower development.
“We are not only looking at functional skills – I mean skills that enable us to do our jobs more efficiently and faster, we also look at how we develop our supervisory levels, managerial levels, and front line levels in order to ensure that we grow the company to where we want it positioned for the future,” he said.
