Local business wins top safety award

The trucking division of local business Adams Industries is striving to make its employees safer all the time.

Adams Industries, which is headquartered in Sidney and has another location in Texas, improved its average compliance, safety and accountability scores by 68 percent over the past two years. Because of its improved safety rating, Adams trucking division was recently given a platinum safety award by the nation's leading provider of property and casualty insurance for the trucking industry, Great West Casualty Company, according to a press release from Adams.

"Without the commitment of their Safety Director, Brian Wilbur, Adams Trucking wouldn't have received this Platinum Safety Award," the press release stated. "Wilbur is dedicated to keeping every member of our team safe and is continuously implementing new ideas to improve the safety program."

Platinum is the highest award given out by Great West Casualty Company. While there were more than 750 participants in the National Safety Awards program in the past year, only 9 percent of those were given a Platinum award.

"This award is not just a representation of the things I've implemented, but our entire team and it starts at the top with ownership giving us the latitude to think outside the box and work our own program autonomously," Wilbur said. "Jerry Keller and Royce Melton have played major roles in the safety of our company and I owe a lot of this credit to them. We can only be proactive in our program and re-enforce our safety procedures and the importance of them, it is up to our employees to follow them, and obviously they have been. Our professional truck drivers deserve most of the credit for this award, being out on the road is a very risky business and safety is and always has to be the first thing on their minds."

Vehicles utilized in the trucking industry are all inspected regularly by the Department of Transportation, said Sabra Peetz, public relations specialist at Adams Industries. If a trucking company has a low safety rating, it's bad for business.

"To have a high safety rating in the trucking industry is a huge deal," she said.

The trucking safety scores are determined based on multiple criteria including number of vehicles accidents and speeding tickets. Although Adams improved its safety score dramatically within the past two years, its 2012 score was still in the mid level range, Peetz said.

In addition to ensuring truck safety, Wilbur has implemented many new safety programs at the Adams site in Cheyenne County, north west of Sidney.

In the Adams warehouse, workers transporting pipes from rail cars to trucks now use man-lifts which make the job much safer. He also ensures that each outside worker wears a hardhat, vest and steel toed boots and hands out awards to especially safe workers.

Construction is currently underway on the Adams rail expansion project at its industrial park in Cheyenne County. The company has already added 30,000 feet of track at this location and plans to ad 50,000 more feet over the next few years. This expansion will give the company access to additional ladder tracks which will allow it to bring in and store rail cars more efficiently.

In addition to the rail expansion, Adams is also working on site development in the Adams Industrial park. The company recently finished work on a 10 acre site.

"These leasable sites are developed for manufacturers or service providers looking for industrial development that may need large facilities for their operations," Peetz said in an email.

In an effort to expand its business, the company has started doing more frac sand transloading projects for other companies. Frac sand is used in the process of fracking. Fracking is the practice of drilling into rock and injecting water mixed with this sand and other chemicals in order to release the gas trapped inside.

"The frac sand comes in by rail, and our warehousing crew transloads it from the rail cars and into trucks," Peetz said.

The Adams crew also transfers crude oil from train cars to trucks for transport on a regular basis.

Adams has a total of about 150 employees including around 60 drivers at both of its locations.