AEP believes in strong safety and health management. We focus on the human side of safety and health: preventing harm and protecting health so that every employee and every person we work with can return home safely every day. Our goal is detect and prevent rather than react and correct.

Accomplishing this requires good policies, training, proper procedures, effective leadership, thorough planning, teamwork and hazard recognition – with reporting and corrective preventive actions as the keys to improvement. When an injury or nearmiss event occurs, we analyze it, learn from it and make changes to prevent it from happening again elsewhere.

Our record, however, is not perfect. In January 2007, an explosion occurred when an AEP supplier was unloading hydrogen at our Muskingum River Plant, killing the delivery driver and injuring nine AEP employees. A pressure relief device failed prematurely, causing the event.

AEP versus industry peer group*

	Recordable AEP	Recordable Industry	Severity AEP	Severity Industry
2007	1.76	N/A	42.83	N/A
2006	1.66	2.57	31.77	29.17
2005	2.35	2.68	43.91	28.59

We eliminated this type of relief device, performed a comprehensive evaluation of all hydrogen systems to ensure we are controlling the risks better, and developed new procedures for hydrogen unloading. A qualified AEP employee must now observe the unloading process – a step not previously required. The corrective and preventive actions were communicated to all AEP power plants, shared with utilities across the nation and posted to the Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) web site. AEP settled the case with OSHA and paid a $55,000 fine, but the real penalty was the loss of life and injuries it caused.

	Number of Citations	Fine
2007	6	$60,000
2006	3	$5,500
2005	1	$85,000
2004	6	$83,100

Although every AEP employee is accountable for his or her own safety and health, employees are also asked to look out for each other. AEP encourages employees to speak up when they see unsafe situations in any workplace setting and to share information about near-misses, which can help us prevent harm. Unfortunately, our company culture sometimes inhibits people from coming forward and this must change if we are to succeed. We must do more to encourage and support employees to share information, opinions and ideas while showing concern for each other's safety and health.

AEP has initiated Significant Event conference calls with business units and safety and health leaders to ensure that information is shared across business units when a significant event or near-miss occurs. We conducted five of these calls in 2007 and found them to be effective in communicating important information to prevent similar events from occurring elsewhere.

Last year we began a welding survey to identify possible health hazards to employees. Because of the potentially harmful fumes associated with welding, we expect to prescribe some control measures for specific types of welding processes in 2008. Our sampling of various types of welding processes and metals will help us learn whether these exposures could create health risks for long-term welders and, if so, what precautions should be taken.

If you don't recognize a hazard, you can't take action to prevent being harmed. That rationale underlies our initiative to empower employees with the skills and tools they need to recognize and eliminate on-the-job hazards.

Hazard recognition training across AEP helps our employees to be proactive and take preventive actions. We seek to eliminate conditions or situations that could lead to unintended events: machinery left unguarded or poorly maintained; confined spaces that increase exposure to ergonomic or other health hazards; material handling that could lead to slips, trips or falls; long-term exposure to dusty or dark conditions that affect breathing or eyesight; exposure to continued noisy equipment and conditions that could contribute to hearing loss; and conditions of physical risks related to working around electricity.

As a result of training, we are seeing positive changes: employees are identifying hazards they never before considered and are eliminating them. We believe so strongly in hazard recognition as a first-line defense against injury that we shared our training with our contractor work force. We are now taking this focus to the next level to include risk assessment and ensuring the adequacy of risk controls for our employees and contractors.

Climbing, loading and digging around utility poles present hazards to utility crews every day. Working with and around utility poles is a leading cause of injury: between 2004 and 2006 we had 50 pole-related incidents resulting in 2,500 lost or restricted work days.

Cross-functional teams of front-line workers and contractors from our distribution and transmission divisions launched a Pole Safety initiative whose objective is to reduce the causes of pole-related injuries by 50 percent by the end of 2008 and 100 percent by the end of 2010. Teams analyzed more than 265 recommendations and developed best-practice recommendations, including more training, greater use of fall protection, the use of safety observers and improving job briefings to identify hazards.

A new Safety & Health Event Management System launched in January 2008 that will give us the ability to identify emerging trends and the capability to develop leading indicators – all of which will help us improve our health and safety outcomes. During our stakeholder meetings, an OSHA representative urged us to develop and measure leading indicators around safety and health and this system will allow us to do that.

Safety and health audits also assist us in identifying issues and improving performance. We conducted audit site visits at 13 power plants in 2007, including one comprehensive audit of Northeastern Station (units 3 & 4) in Oklahoma and audits of higher-risk safety and health programs at four other plants. Separately, eight plants participated in an audit of OSHA record-keeping and Control of Hazardous Energy procedures. We also began a pilot safety and health audit of AEP Ohio.

These audits have identified some common issues, such as the need for improved training effectiveness, which we are addressing. And we continue to make progress on MESH (Managing Environment, Safety & Health) to conform to the OHSAS 18001 standard by identifying, reviewing and developing programs to address safety and health hazards. In 2007, AEP expanded the MESH initiative to encompass major construction sites and rolled out the first phase of MESH at 12 power plants.