President's Message
Kevin Hostler, President and CEO

Committed to Improving Safety on TAPS

We talk a lot about safety at Alyeska Pipeline Service Company. You have read my comments about our performance many times on these pages and our employees discuss it openly at every meeting we hold in the company. To understand why we place such importance on safety, look no further than our record in 2006. By our standards, we did not have a good year. The worst possible outcome occurred when an employee tragically died working in our Valdez operations. Evaluating safety performance is not just about numbers on paper – it is about people and I care deeply about the lives of the people associated with the Trans Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS).

Safety is a core value but recent trends indicate that we need to refocus our efforts. We will not tolerate poor safety performance on TAPS. We recently took a comprehensive look at our safety performance over the past several years: Severity of injuries has increased. Simply stated, this means more people are getting hurt worse. We need to understand how we arrived at this point and implement a plan that reinforces our safety philosophy that nobody gets hurt on TAPS.

We have significant work to do in 2007 to improve our safety performance and we will continue this focus throughout the year. With the help of the 1,600 TAPS employees and contractors, we will again be an industry leader. Our record will improve by engaging our leadership to make improvements in the processes and operating environment on TAPS. We will communicate safety priorities and ensure that our culture keeps TAP workers safe. We will not allow ourselves to become complacent. We will not accept a culture where people get hurt.

All employees have a stake in keeping TAPS operations safe. To become an industry leader in safety, we need all of us working together.