KANSAS CITY, MO Burns & McDonnell, The Empire Electric District Company (Empire) and the Southeast Kansas Building and Construction Trades Council have received a Zero Injury Safety Award from the National Maintenance Agreements Policy Committee, Inc., for the Riverton Unit 12 Combined Cycle Conversion Project completed earlier in 2016. Burns & McDonnell served as the engineer-procure-construct (EPC) contractor for the $168 million project, located near Riverton, Kansas.

The award also recognized the contributions of major subcontractors, AZCO, Inc., Sachs Electric Company, and Kissick Construction among many others.

Over 618,000 work hours were logged on the Empire Riverton Unit 12 Combined Cycle Conversion Project with zero OSHA recordable or lost-time accidents.

"Empire deserves congratulations for this award along with all the subcontractors and the craft professionals for making sure that all work was planned and safety was a top priority," said Randy Griffin, President of the Construction Design-Build Division for Burns & McDonnell. "Safety is always the highest priority for Burns & McDonnell so we know that the first requirement is to get everyone pulling in the same direction every day on the job."

The major elements of the safety program included Burns & McDonnell's standard Activity Hazard Analysis (AHA), Pre-Task Analysis (PTA), and Task Safety Observations (TSO). The AHA is focused on larger segments of the work, and is planned in detail before operations begin.  The PTA is completed by each crew daily, and addresses the changing nature of the site.  TSO's are required to be filled out by all staff and supervisors daily, and include a review of at least one operation plus an independent review of that crew's PTA.

The Empire Riverton Unit 12 Combined Cycle Conversion Project was launched after Empire decided to retire two older coal-fired units and replace the lost capacity by converting the existing Unit 12 simple cycle natural gas-fired unit to a one-on-one combined cycle unit. The new combined cycle unit boosts power output by 67 percent, from 143 to 255 megawatts (MW) while using very little additional fuel.