The Industrial Minerals Association – North America (IMA-NA) on April 28 announced the companies and mining operations that will receive its safety recognition awards.

IMA-NA Vice Chairman David Brown and IMA-NA President Mark Ellis presented the awards at the IMA-NA’s Spring Meeting. The safety recognition awards program is run in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA).

Six companies and 24 individual mining operations were honored. The two classes of awards recognize different levels of safety performance.

The IMA-NA Safety Achievement Award recognizes the best reportable injury rate for an individual IMA-NA member company by size category for the preceding calendar year, in this case 2010.

The award criteria evaluate a company’s safety performance at all of its U.S. facilities and non-U.S. mining sites in North America. This year’s winners include the following:

• OCI Wyoming L.P.

Atlanta

Large Category (700,000 or more employee hours)

(761,860 hours)

• Columbia River Carbonates

Woodland, Wash.

Medium Category (Fewer than 700,000 but more than 100,000 employee hours)

(104,358 hours)

• Old Hickory Clay Company

Mayfield, Ky.

Small Category (Fewer than 100,000 employee hours)

(71,196 hours)

“The safety performance of these IMA members is truly inspiring,” enthused IMA-NA’s Mark Ellis.  “OCI Wyoming had only 3 injuries while working 761,860 employee hours, for an injury rate of 0.79 per 200,000 employee work-hours. Columbia River Carbonates and Old Hickory Clay Company each had a zero reportable injury rate, while working 104,358 and 71,196 employee work-hours respectively. To put that in perspective, the preliminary injury rate for all metal and nonmetal mines in 2010 was 2.56.”

Three additional Small Category companies tied the winning zero reportable injury rate, but had fewer employee hours.

Of these companies, Ellis said, “These honorees operated all of their mines throughout 2010 with zero injuries. That truly is benchmark mine safety performance.”