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Also on Friday, we ran a story atop the Region page with the headline, “Contractor gives itself safety award.” The story was about the Washington Group — a 30,000-employee corporation with defense, mining, engineering and power projects worldwide — giving its Westinghouse Anniston operation an award for what it called an outstanding safety record. The local workers operate the chemical weapons incinerator facility in Anniston.
A streak of 5.5 million work hours without major injury and the employees’ effective ability to shut down the system based on safety concerns when necessary were cited among reasons for the award.
The Star handled the story poorly, in all phases of writing and editing. Yours truly takes the responsibility, as with all the news items we publish.
While the chemical weapons issue is plenty divisive enough, with many opinions on how the weapons should or shouldn’t be destroyed, this was not the proper forum to create such a debate. We did that by quoting an opponent source high in the story ripping into the operation for what he called its ability to keep things quiet when they go bad, and who patronized the award as one the company gave itself.
Although his arguments may or may not be true, and although the operation takes plenty of heat for safety issues in many other stories by nature of its tremendous responsibility, the reason for this story was to celebrate safety. That is how we should have reported it without hard evidence of anything to the contrary.
Our apologies to Westinghouse employees, and not only our congratulations, but also our sincere thanks for the safety record you have compiled.
We will continue to be a watchdog critic of the chemical weapons operation, but we also will look harder at recognizing the outstanding effort of the local work force.