By CYNTHIA VINARSKY

By CYNTHIA VINARSKY
VINDICATOR BUSINESS WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- Roger Lindgren was trying to be cautious as he prepared to cross an unfamiliar shipping area at the V & amp;M Star steel tube mill.
Dressed in a hard hat and other protective gear, the company president and chief operating officer said he was startled when two employees called out a warning just as he took his first steps across the yard.
Pulling Lindgren aside, the workers advised that he was walking outside a designated crossing area and had failed to activate a light to alert crane operators of a pedestrian below.
Did those workers know who Lindgren was?
"Oh, yes, they knew," he said, grinning. "They were watching out for me. Our workers have learned to watch out for themselves and for each other."
The workers' response reflects a safety-oriented culture that helped the mill reach a significant milestone late last week: Two years without a disabling injury resulting in even one day of missed work. As of Friday employees had worked approximately 1.75 million man-hours without a serious injury.
That's a notable achievement, said Greg Leslie, safety, health and security manager, considering the average industrial plant the size of V & amp;M reports 10 disabling injuries a year, based on statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor.
Formerly known as North Star Steel, V & amp;M has 443 employees. Government data indicates manufacturing companies in the steel industry generally average 2.5 disabling injuries a year per 100 employees.
Old buildings
Any steel mill can be a dangerous place, Leslie said, but V & amp;M could be especially hazardous because its buildings are old, some dating back to the early 1900s. Most of the steelmaking equipment has been replaced over the years, but the walkways and other building features are originals.
"The potential for someone to be seriously injured is very high," he said.
The mill's safety success is saving money, Leslie said, more than offsetting the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year V & amp;M spends on its safety training and safety bonus program.
"If you consider the indirect cost of injuries --the cost of lost production, equipment repair, investigations -- I believe it's well worth it."
Incentives
V & amp;M pays its 330 hourly production and maintenance workers an hourly bonus whenever the plant is free of serious accidents. The bonus amounts to about $3,000 a year per employee if the mill makes it through 12 months without a disabling injury, so it cost the company close to a million dollars this year and last.
Leslie and Lindgren acknowledged that the cash bonus is a powerful incentive, but they said employees wouldn't have the ability to keep the plant accident-free without training to see and avoid hazards.
"The bonus program helps a lot, but there's a danger in saying incentives are the only answer," Lindgren said. "First, we train the employees to recognize hazards; then, we train them to avoid the hazards; finally, we provide an incentive to follow what they've learned."
The company disciplines employees for failure to report an accident. "We're very serious about that," he said.
Always a priority
Safety has long been a focus at the steel tube mill, said Leslie, and was considered a "core value" when the plant was owned and operated by North Star Steel, a division of Minneapolis-based Cargill. Most of the programs now in place at V & amp;M started then.
When the French tube maker Vallourec and the Japanese-owned Sumitomo Corp. of America bought North Star's two-plant tubular division in November 2002, he said, the new owners were impressed with its safety record and determined to continue making safety a priority. V & amp;M also has a plant in Houston.
Management meetings always include a discussion of safety, and management groups tour the plant three times a month looking for hazards and unsafe work procedures.
All employees are required to participate in a series of interactive safety videos supplied by a Pittsburgh company which show actual mill settings, including some scenes from V & amp;M. Designed specifically for steel mill safety training, the films address mill hazards like heat and hot metal sparks and include interviews with mill workers who have been injured at work.
Finally, V & amp;M employees working in teams observe their co-workers on the job, watching for ways to make the work safer. Lindgren believes behavior is much more important to a safe workplace than physical improvements designed to protect workers from hazards.
"In my 30 years in the steel industry I can't remember one person injured where the accident wasn't caused by the person injured or one of the people working with him," he said.
Gradual improvement
Success of the combined education and bonus programs at the Youngstown facility has been building gradually, Leslie said. When he joined the company in the late 1990s the mill was averaging about nine disabling accidents a year.
The number dropped to six in fiscal 2001, and the mill has had no accident serious enough to result in missed work since Dec. 5 of that year. It hit the two-year mark at midnight Thursday.
There have been minor accidents -- 16 in 2002 and 17 this year -- which required medical treatment beyond first aid but were not serious enough for the victim to miss work. Now, Lindgren said, the company is turning its attention to those less-serious injuries with plans to reduce their numbers as well.
vinarsky@vindy.com