Building a Stronger Safety Culture at Kuraray America Washington Works

At Kuraray America, Inc.’s Washington Works site, safety is personal.

Located in West Virginia, Washington Works (WW) is a site where employees are closely connected to the safety decisions that shape their work. With about 50 employees, the team has created an environment where concerns can be raised directly, questions are encouraged, and safety improvements are shaped by the people closest to the work.

For hashtag#NationalSafetyMonth, Patrick McBurney, Chemical Engineer III at WW, is sharing how WW continues to build on that culture through KuraSafe
and the sites ongoing safety improvement efforts. Patrick joined Kuraray America (KAI) in 2020, during the height of the pandemic.

From the beginning, he saw how seriously the site approached employee safety and well-being. For him, it reinforced that he had made the right decision to join a company where safety was not treated as a checklist, but as a responsibility to people.

That commitment continues today.

Ahead of WW’s upcoming Safety Culture Improvement Team (SCIT) implementation, the site’s First Impression Analysis (FIA) helped identify existing strengths in its safety culture and areas to continue building on such as:
✅Strong employee engagement and sense of ownership across the site
✅Timely incident investigations that begin quickly and continue until a root cause is identified.

Opportunity: The Advanced Interlayer Solutions (AIS) WW site is deepening its focus on psychological safety to increase the inclusion of all employees and ensure employee input helps shape decisions and improvements.

Over the past several years, the site has strengthened safety culture through actions that make expectations clearer and help employees stay engaged in the work happening around them:

Operating direction reviews that bring together operations, maintenance, lab, technical and other relevant employees to review updates supporting safety and health.

Updated Lockout-Tagout Procedures that clarify expectations for both KAI and contractor personnel.

Stop Work Authority that reinforces employees can pause work if something is unsafe, or even questionable.

One recent safety win at WW was upgrading the site’s Safety Instrumented System. The improvement makes Safety, Interlock & Alarm (SIA) testing easier, increases reliability, and helps reduce the risk of failure on demand. Because SIAs are developed following a Process Hazard Analysis, this system plays a critical role in helping the site manage risk and maintain safe operations. For WW, it reflects the practical side of safety culture: making thoughtful improvements that better protect people, processes and operations.

As Patrick shared, safety begins with a simple question: “How can we complete this task safely?”

Because everyone deserves to show up to work, complete their work safely and return home the same way they left.

Jason Ware