In the past seven years, Keith Heffner, corporate safety director for Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, in Anchorage, Ala., has witnessed the number of OSHA recordables of his company's contractors drop as low as the temperature on an Alaska thermostat. A minimum of 1,000 contractor employees help 832 full-time Alyeska workers excavate pipe as deep as 20 feet in permafrost (permanently frozen soil) in order to maintain the 800-mile-long Trans-Alaska Pipeline that keeps the more than 20 percent of U.S.'s domestic crude oil flowing from the North Slope in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to the state's southern town of Valdez, the nearest ice-free port. Intense cold, darkness and raging winds contribute to most accidents, says Heffner. Eighty feet of snow alone falls in Thompson Pass, which is located above the Valdez Marine Terminal. Sixty-four percent of accidents are due to slips, trips and falls. But thanks to Alyeska's own 15-person fire and safety staff, contractors working on the pipeline learned to work safely in Arctic conditions. Alyeska's safety staff comprises three 'leads' who head the safety peer group which oversees safety at all Alyeska sites (sites are located in Fairbanks, Ala., the Valdez Marine Terminal, and headquarters are in Anchorage, Ala.). Remaining staffers in the other three sites are six safety specialists, a fire chief, two assistant fire chiefs and a fire brigade at Valdez to prevent fires on 18 crude oil tankers holding 500,000 barrels of fuel. Together, Alyeska's safety staff helped the company's contractors reduce their disappointing 1991 OSHA recordable rate of 5.0 to 1.99 by 1997. Alyeska and its contractors knew both companies could profit from accident prevention techniques. If the contractors could prevent accidents, keeping their workers' compensation rates low, cost savings would 'trickle down' to Alyeska. So in 1994, the company and its contractors partnered to step up and standardize training.