Promoting Safety

Promoting Health and Safety

We care about the health and wellness of our employees, retirees, and their families. MPC takes a comprehensive approach providing resources and programming to empower our people to thrive in ALL areas of well-being. Taking advantage of these programs and resources heightens awareness of health and safety issues and assists with maintaining and improving health. Ultimately, it leads to a healthier, safer workplace.

MPC’s Occupational Medicine team provides routine medical testing for job related exposures, injury management and case management for all types of leave. Employees are supported by a network of licensed healthcare professionals embedded in every organization. 

MPC's Industrial Hygiene Standards provide systems for identifying and addressing employee exposures to chemical, physical, biological and other hazards through elimination, engineering controls, work practice controls, personal protective equipment and monitoring. Health, Environment, Safety and Security policies and standards cover health programs for all aspects of these hazards.

Life Critical Expectations

Our greatest focus is protecting and preserving the well-being of all these great people. Our goal is an incident-free, injury-free workplace. We want everyone who comes to our sites to go home safely at the end of the workday. We are committed to creating a safe environment and work diligently to prevent incidents and injuries throughout all operations. We focus on continually improving our safety management systems and compliance programs by engaging our employee and contractor workforce via training, behavior-based safety programs, contractor safety councils, and sharing best practices and lessons learned.

We have developed a Life Critical Expectations document that outlines the company’s expectations for its employees and contractors to work safely.

DOWNLOAD THE DOCUMENT

OSHA Voluntary Protection Program (VPP)

OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Program recognizes employers and workers in private industry and federal agencies that have implemented effective safety and health management systems. VPP works!  The average injury rates of companies and facilities achieving VPP status are far below the Bureau of Labor Statistics averages for their respective industries.  VPP is an outstanding cooperative program between regulators and industry that helps drive higher-level safety performance at all levels of an organization. To achieve VPP status, applicants must complete a rigorous application and inspection process by OSHA that can take multiple years. There are three levels of designation: Demonstration, Merit, and Star status, which is the highest level.

Our Logistics and Storage organization’s near-term goal is to achieve VPP Star status at select sites in each OSHA region while our Refining organization’s goal is to achieve VPP Star status at all legacy-MPC sites. Currently, we have earned 38 VPP Star Certifications covering 50 assets. Additional sites are actively pursuing VPP and are in various stages of the process. Achieving and maintaining our VPP participation is a testament to our commitment to the safety and health of our workforce and the communities we serve.

Process Safety

In simplest terms, process safety means that our pipes, tanks, processing units, valves and other hardware all work as intended to keep hazardous materials contained. We manage our process safety risks proactively by continuously improving our process safety management systems (e.g., mechanical integrity program, management of change, safe work practices, operating procedures, etc.) and by maintaining a rigorous process safety risk assessment process to identify risks and implement the appropriate safeguards (e.g., alarms, automated shutoff systems, relief devices, etc.). We track and report the metrics reported in this section to show accountability to employees and all our stakeholders. We want you to know how we’re doing. 

MPC tracks process safety incidents consistent with the American Petroleum Institute’s (API’s) Recommended Practices 754, Process Safety Performance Indicators for the Refining and Petrochemical Industries. This practice includes both lagging and leading process safety metrics to better gauge a company’s performance. The data highlights areas of focus for risk mitigation. Process safety event Tier 1 and Tier 2 rates are calculated per 200,000 worker exposure hours (employees and contractors). This is consistent with the basis for calculating OSHA occupational injury/illness rates. A process safety score is a severity-based metric calculated using the number of Tier 1 and Tier 2 Process Safety Events (PSEs). 

Emergency Preparedness

Robust preparedness enables us to respond effectively should an emergency event occur. Consistently investing in our response capabilities equips us to mitigate and manage the impacts to the environment and people in the event of an incident. All our operating locations have emergency response teams assigned and site-specific emergency preparedness and response plans tailored to the risks they may encounter. These location-specific plans are subject to regular drills to test proper execution in the event of an actual incident.

MPC’s Emergency Preparedness Group (EPG) oversees our response program, including companywide guidelines and procedures on how to prepare for and respond to emergencies. The group’s focus is to continuously strengthen our incident response capabilities. The EPG staff coordinates with business components to share best practices and resources across the company.

The EPG staff facilitates meetings of a cross-organizational team called the Hurricane Advisory Committee (HAC), which monitors storms throughout the hurricane season. The HAC makes certain the appropriate groups have the latest weather updates and communicate effectively before storms make landfall. Click here to learn more about how MPC incorporates extreme weather planning into its emergency preparedness and response program.

Additionally, for emergency events that may require resources beyond those available at a local facility, our EPG maintains a Corporate Emergency Response Team (CERT) with response expertise and training in the Incident Command System (ICS), should an emergency event occur.