Regulatory Compliance

Our ultimate goal is to have no EH&S regulatory contraventions or enforcement actions. When regulatory contraventions do occur, we investigate and take corrective actions to prevent recurrence.

In 2004, there were 48 environmental contraventions across the company, 22 more than in the previous year. These included five spills to land. The most significant was the release of 900 litres (200 gallons) of oil into a coal seam from a leaking hydraulic cylinder at our Highvale mine. The oil was contained in the coal seam and reclaimed.

We are concerned about the increase in contraventions and are taking steps to promote preventive measures. In late 2004, we developed a new database tool to track investigations of EH&S incidents in terms of completeness, recommendations and follow-up actions. This tool will enable us to better capture information related to EH&S incidents, share learnings among employees, and track performance trends.

We continued to improve our record for health and safety enforcement actions. In 2004, we reported six enforcement actions, or 12 fewer actions than in the previous year. We remain optimistic that our continued emphasis on near miss and hazard reporting and other fundamental safety practices will further improve our performance, which is already highly rated for companies in our industry.

Fines and Penalties

Our goal is to achieve full EH&S compliance with no fines or penalties. We did not achieve this in 2004 as we received EH&S fines amounting to $60,000, compared with $3,700 in 2003.

During the year, we agreed to pay a $50,000 penalty resulting from a 2002 charge under the Alberta Occupational Health and Safety Act. The charge was for failing to install an alarm system to give effective warning of moving machinery in connection with an Aug. 13, 2002 incident at the Keephills plant where a contract worker was injured on a conveyer. Our company was fined $25,000 and agreed to make a $25,000 donation to the Parkland Ambulance Authority, a local emergency response agency.

Compliance Summary

	2000	2001	2002	2003	2004
Environmental Contraventions (#)	56	48	37	26	48
Environmental Enforcement Actions (#)	2	4	7	8	10
Environmental Fines ($ thousands)	3.9	0	76.3	2.2	10.0
Health and Safety Incidents (#)	n/a	71	79	57	88
Health and Safety Enforcement Actions (#)	1	1	43	18	6
Health and Safety Fines ($ thousands)	0	0	0	1.5	50.1

n/a = not available

Environmental contraventions include events that contravene our company's permit conditions or environmental regulations. Environmental enforcement actions are contraventions that result in fines, orders or citations. Health and safety incidents include employee and contractor incidents resulting in medical aid and lost-time injuries. Health and safety enforcement actions include employee and contractor incidents that contravene health and safety regulations and result in fines, orders or citations.