Safety at Fluor Hanford (A)

Fluor Corporation has always prided itself on its competence in safety. It was a core value of the company, and Fluor had achieved remarkable safety records on complex projects all over the world. But now, in the spring of 1997, Fluor found itself managing the Western Hemisphere’s largest environmental cleanup site, the Hanford reservation in Washington State. The Hanford site was established as part of the Manhattan Project in the 1940s that gave birth to the atomic bomb. Hanford produced nearly two-thirds of U.S. plutonium during the Cold War period. The Hanford site was half the size of Rhode Island, occupying 586 square miles in southeastern Washington State. The cleanup that began in 1988 was expected to take 30 years or more.

Improving safety at Hanford was proving to be a significant challenge. As the new site manager at Hanford, Fluor Hanford (FH) inherited lower- and mid-level managers and thousands of unionized employees, many of whom were second- or third-generation Hanford employees. These employees had seen many contractors come and go over the previous years. Some of the managers who had worked with the previous contractor saw Fluor’s emphasis on safety as getting in the way of operations. Union/management relations were fractious. Hanford’s culture was described as “production driven—management told everyone what to do, and, if you didn’t do it, there were consequences.” Worker involvement in designing and implementing safety programs was negligible. FH also was having trouble satisfying its client, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).