Global Safety Day: safety is everyone’s business

Wednesday 8 September, Maersk and Svitzer celebrate Global Safety Day, bringing sea and shore together to discuss safety and how we all play an active role in ensuring that everyone gets home safe, every time.

For Global Safety Day this year the main topic in Svitzer is the Stop Work Authority – a mandate and right anyone working for Svitzer has to stop any unsafe work, anywhere and at any time with full support from management.

Chief Engineer Claudio Daniel Doglioli from Argentina and Master Aleksi Sitnikovi from Georgia welcome the Stop Work Authority and reflect on its importance at sea in the video below.

A simple yet powerful tool

The Stop Work Authority sounds like a simple tool but saying STOP during a towage operation with tight deadlines and things moving fast is hard and takes courage from the individual. But sometimes it is necessary. To keep people safe, to safeguard our operations and ultimately to ensure that we can deliver timely and efficient services to our customers and partners. And it comes with full support from management.

“Global Safety Day is a great opportunity to discuss Stop Work Authority, to empower each other and to fully understand how we use the authority to keep people, assets and our customer’s business safe. In my view, it is one of our most important tools to get everyone home safe. Anyone using the authority can trust that their decision will be backed. By their colleagues, by their managers and by me,” said Kasper Friis Nilaus, CEO of Svitzer.

Every day a safe day

At Svitzer, we do difficult things in difficult places and so every day has to be a safe day – not just once a year for Global Safety Day. The safety of people, the Svitzer fleet, and the environment where we operate, is the foundation of everything we do. We work together to ensure the integrity of ports and to provide our customers with safe, reliable and efficient towage services in ports and terminals across the globe.

Safety is a matter of protecting human lives, protecting the environment, and protecting assets, both for our customers and for ourselves. We have a responsibility to always strive to prevent incidents from happening as well as ensure we learn from those that do happen.