DOE Safety Metrics Indicator Program (SMIP) Fiscal Year 2000 Annual Report of Packaging- and Transportation-related Occurrences

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has been charged by the DOE National Transportation Program (NTP) with the responsibility of retrieving reports and information pertaining to packaging and transportation (P&T) incidents from the centralized Occurrence Reporting and Processing System (ORPS) database. These selected reports have been analyzed for trends, impact on P&T operations and safety concerns, and lessons learned (LL) in P&T operations. This task is designed not only to keep the NTP aware of what is occurring at DOE sites on a periodic basis, but also to highlight potential P&T problems that may need management attention and allow dissemination of LL to DOE Operations Offices, with the subsequent flow of information to contractors. The Safety Metrics Indicator Program (SMIP) was established by the NTP in fiscal year (FY) 1998 as an initiative to develop a methodology for reporting occurrences with the appropriate metrics to show rates and trends. One of its chief goals has been to augment historical reporting of occurrence-based information and present more meaningful statistics for comparison of occurrences. To this end, the SMIP established a severity weighting system for the classification of the occurrences, which would allow normalization of the data and provide a basis for trending analyses. The process for application of this methodology is documented in the September 1999 report DOE Packaging and Transportation Measurement Methodology for the Safety Metrics Indicator Program (SMIP). This annual report contains information on those P&T-related occurrences reported to the ORPS during the period from October 1, 1999, through September 30, 2000. Only those incidents that occur in preparation for transport, during transport, and during unloading of hazardous material are considered as packaging- or transportation-related occurrences. Other incidents with P&T significance, but not involving hazardous material (such as vehicle accidents or empty packagings), are not rated by the SMIP criteria but are archived in the SMIP Subsidiary Database of occurrences, a sub-database of the main SMIP P&T Occurrence Database. A total of 146 reports were classified by the SMIP criteria, of which 144 have been finalized. Trending comparisons were made with these reports and the 851 other occurrence reports (ORs) accumulated in the SMIP P&T Occurrence Database since FY 1994, all of which were also evaluated according to the SMIP criteria. Additionally, information on the number of shipments made by DOE carriers and the types of materials transported was obtained from the Enterprise Transportation Analysis System (ETAS), formerly the Shipment Mobility Accountability Collection. This information was used in conjunction with the Transportation Routing Analysis Geographic Information System (TRAGIS, a GIS-based transportation and analysis model that replaces the older HIGHWAY and INTERLINE models) to estimate point-to-point mileage, yielding a metric of vehicle-miles or package-miles. This information was subsequently used to develop indicators for (1) determining the relative safety of DOE contractors who package and ship hazardous materials and (2) comparing of DOE P&T safety with that of private industry