Berg Engineering wins GEA Safety Excellence Award
Berg Engineering has been awarded the Safety Excellence Award at the Gladstone Engineering Alliance Industry Awards!
Held on Wednesday 21 October at the Gladstone Entertainment Convention Centre, the Awards celebrated outstanding achievements across Central Queensland’s manufacturing, engineering, and supply chain sectors. The Safety Excellence Award is presented to the nominee that demonstrated a transformational turnaround in safety performance that improved their overall organisational safety culture.
Our safety journey
Berg’s award recognises a journey that began with an uncomfortable admission. While our reporting of hazards and serious near misses was low, we weren’t convinced it was proof our workplaces were safe. The question we put to ourselves was simple: are we genuinely not experiencing serious exposures, or are we just not seeing them?
So we went looking.
Four standards, verified every week
We introduced a Fatality Risk Management process built around the four exposures capable of causing fatalities in our workshops: mobile equipment and pedestrians, rotating equipment, lifting operations and uncontrolled release of energy.
Every week, our operational leaders go to where the work is actually happening and verify it against those standards. Each verification gets a straightforward outcome of pass or fail. The point is not paperwork. It is making leaders physically look at work in progress and decide whether the controls protecting our people are real.
When our tracker started in August 2025, our weekly Fatality Management Scores sat between 15% and 20%. Through 2026 it has sustainably increased to 100%.
What actually changed
What our new process changed on the ground: Guards were engineered and fitted to the hydraulic presses; side handles were made mandatory on grinders; push-pull sticks, tag lines and wrench straps fitted so nobody puts their hands near a suspended load; forklift traffic marked on the floor; a separated waiting area for delivery drivers; and a Stop Work Authority treated as an expected behaviour rather than a line in a procedure.
Berg CEO Patrick Fordyce said: “This award is particularly meaningful, because safety isn’t achieved through policies, procedures or paperwork alone. It’s achieved through our people looking after themselves, looking after their mates, speaking up, identifying risks and continually working towards a safer workplace. What makes me particularly proud of this award is not the score we finished on, it’s that we owned and acted on the score we started on. Our people now feel empowered to start reporting what they are actually seeing and that trust and positive safety culture is the reason we are now where we are today.
“Thank you and congratulations to every person across our workshops who speaks up, stops a job when something looks wrong and looks out for the person working beside them. This award belongs to every one of us at Berg.”
Berg also took out the Wayne Peachey Memorial Award on the night, presented to our Gladstone Operations Manager, Isaac Brame. Read more here.
