Weyerhaeuser’s Columbus Cellulose Fibers’ 350 employees, who produce fluff and paper grade pulp to be converted into paper or into absorbent products like disposable diapers, have achieved the following safety milestones in the last year:

• Two million work hours with no lost time accident (reached Dec. 28, 2007)
• One calendar year with no recordable injury (reached Dec. 31, 2007)
• More than 700 days (since Feb. 25, 2006), and counting, without a recordable injury.
• Nine of the operation’s 16 work teams have worked more than five years without a recordable injury.
• Ten of mill’s 12 dayshift maintenance teams have worked more than five years without a recordable.

These achievements have the Columbus Cellulose Fibers operation in line for the company’s Gold Senior Management Team Safety Excellence Award. In addition, employees are carefully counting down to another safety milestone Feb. 26 – two years without a recordable accident -- which will be a first for Weyerhaeuser Columbus and a rare achievement at any manufacturing facility.

A recordable incident is an at-work injury serious enough to require a doctor’s care and to be considered a recordable incident by the standards of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA); a lost-time accident is an at-work injury serious enough for the employee to miss work.

Weyerhaeuser’s Columbus operation has one of the company’s consistently best safety records and has been recognized and benchmarked by the company’s cellulose fibers business.  The complex was the first Weyerhaeuser operation to achieve OSHA Star status in 1993 and had that national safety designation recertified three more times, in 1996, 1999 and 2004. In addition, Columbus employees have reached the one-million-safe-work-hour milestone 11 times, including one stretch of 5.6 million work hours over a four and one-half year period.

The Columbus employees’ recordable incident rate (RIR) of 0.0 for 2007 reached world class status of less than one, a high safety standard which employees have met six times since 1999.

Employees use a combination of processes and behavior-based safety practices to keep working safely, said Kent Walker, vice president and mill manager for the Columbus pulp operations.  “We try to ensure that we never cycle from one focus or program to the next, but instead continuously provide a holistic and pervasive safety approach that permeates everything that happens here,” Walker said.

The facility’s Safety Work Order process – in which any potentially unsafe condition is reported and promptly addressed – is considered a benchmark in the industry. Also, employees work on reducing at-risk situations with an employee-led safety observation process called the Safety Tracking System, which recorded 12,252 safety observations in 2007. Also, employees and contractors were all trained in multiple SAFESTART modules in 2007. This program helps all employees to develop safe work habits at work and at home.

The daily “can do attitude” helps keep Columbus Cellulose Fibers employees safe, said safety manager Mac Lochala. “Our people believe we can do it, that we can all work safely day after day,” he said, noting that employees from other Weyerhaeuser operations have requested to spend time at Columbus, to “see how this works, on the floor, everyday.”

The Columbus Cellulose Fibers operation is Weyerhaeuser’s largest Mississippi operation. Also in Lowndes County, Weyerhaeuser operates the Columbus Modified Fibers mill, with 95 employees, and has headquarters for the Mississippi-Alabama Timberlands region and Weyerhaeuser’s Southern Timberlands’ Research group, employing more than 50.

In Mississippi, Weyerhaeuser employs about 1,500 people and manages more than 778,000 acres of forestland, all certified to the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI)^TM  standard.  In addition to the Lowndes County operations, Weyerhaeuser has box plants at Jackson, Magnolia and Olive Branch, iLevel lumber mills at McComb, Bruce and Philadelphia, an iLevel Service Center at Gulfport, and timberlands management units at Bellefontaine, Hillsdale, McComb, Scooba and Columbia.

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