3 YEARS

4 YEARS

6 YEARS

Driver Safety

Summit addresses driver safety every year to make sure that the team is up to date on all safe driving practices. In 2020, we invested in our fleet vehicles to decrease blind spots and to enhance ergonomic accessibility for our team.

A Life Changing Choice

After a life-changing safety incident in 2019, a valued AOG team member agreed to help spread the word about safety in the workplace. In 2020, Summit published a safety video that shares the story of how one choice and one injury impacted colleagues, friends, and family. Safety investigations are taken very seriously, and this event could have resulted in tragedy. This video provides us with a way to connect and engage with the Summit team, and to drive home the importance of safety.

Chris Polley

Senior GIS Analyst

“Safety is at the core of everything we do at Summit, but we don’t leave it behind at work. The safety training that we receive on the job follows us home and we adopt the safety practices in our everyday lives. Whether I’m working in my woodshop, digging in my yard, or driving through my neighborhood, Summit’s safety training stays with me. We learn from the experiences of our teammates, and we are all safer because of it.”

Safety Awards

DART Award

For the seventh year in a row, Summit received an “Industry Leader Accident Prevention Award” for excellence in safety performance from the American Gas Association. Similar to the past two years, we finished in the top quartile of our company size category with a DART rate of 0.85. The DART incident rate measures recordable cases involving days away from work, days of restricted work activity or job transfer. This accomplishment is a testament to our company value to “Put Safety First” each and every day and our focus on tracking leading indicators like near misses, job hazard analyses, and safety training.

Enhanced Damage Prevention (Gold Shovel Standard)

Hit lines from contractors, construction activities, home improvement projects or day-to-day events can result in hit gas lines. These hit lines impact the safety of the communities we serve and increase emissions. At Summit, we are proud of the work we do to educate our customers, team members, and local stakeholders about how to reduce line strikes through our Damage Prevention practices. Through this work, we have achieved the Gold Shovel Standard certification for our quality efforts we put into safe excavation and damage prevention awareness. Our in-house Damage Prevention Application allows us to track gas loss caused by third-party damages and helps us focus on areas that need the most attention. Circulating educational and informational communications and focusing on outreach to excavators and homeowners to bring awareness to the dangers of line strikes will help us achieve greater safety and increased emissions reductions. We work with agencies such as 8-1-1, the Common Ground Alliance, and other stakeholders to protect the safety of our customers, communities, and team members through damage prevention awareness.

Stakeholder Safety

Stakeholder engagement is very important to Summit, particularly when it comes to educating various stakeholders about natural gas safety. In 2021 Summit team members participated in approximately 70 safety related stakeholder meetings and events. In addition, since 2017, Summit has worked to educate local students about natural gas safety, providing in-school training presentations at schools in the service territory. In 2021, because of the impact of COVID-19 and remote learning environment in most states of operation, Summit continued an online training format. We sent the recorded presentation to all schools in its service territory so that children would still benefit from the natural gas safety information while learning remotely. The short 8-minute YouTube video presentation focused on educating 3rd and 4th graders on natural gas safety. Core ideas included call 8-1-1 before you dig, safety around construction sites, and what to do if you smell gas. In total, Summit provided this training to 173 schools.