With the completion of aircraft carrier USS Nimitz (CVN 68)'s recent extended planned incremental availability at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard (PSNS) comes the recognition of performing the safest aircraft carrier availability in the last 10 years.

It starts from the day new recruits get to boot camp. They're expected to carry out every action, from the way their racks are made to the precise positioning of the recruit manual they must carry in their right hands. Boot camp stresses the importance of following directions closely without making mistakes or missing steps.

Every military evolution has a set of directions which, if followed, is intended and proven to prevent injury. It is imperative a Sailor be able to carry them out without mistake to ensure the safety of themselves and others. This is something Nimitz Sailors excel at.

The recent availability comes in as a complete anomaly, with nearly half the injury rates of any maintenance period recently recorded at PSNS. Nimitz concluded the yard period with a Total Case Incident Rate (TCIR) of 3.02.

The average TCIR for an aircraft carrier going through a maintenance period similar to the one Nimitz just completed is usually in the sixes, according to Cmdr. Jason Garrett, Nimitz's safety officer.

TCIR is defined as the average number of work-related injuries incurred by 100 workers during a one-year period. Use of the TCIR report allows for the comparison of accident and injury statistics across industries and segments of work.

Due to the inability to accurately track a Sailor's amount of work hours, TCIR only accounts for shipyard workers' work-related injuries. In most cases evidence suggests if required data could have been obtained, a similarly low mishap rate for Sailors would also have manifested itself.

"By the time we hit the four-month mark, we already had people coming from all over the place to figure out what we were doing differently to get these results," said Garrett.

Nimitz works hard to cultivate an atmosphere that promotes first time quality while always keeping safety in mind. At the core of one the safest carriers in the fleet is Nimitz's Safety Department.

"There are lots of reasons that safety in general is important," said Garrett. "If you work in a very dangerous environment where people are constantly getting injured, the work proficiency, production, and morale all go down. There are a lot of things that come as a result of safety, and we were dedicated to promoting job efficiency and effectiveness."

Over the course of the yard period the Safety Department implemented an approach they referred to as "Find it. Fix It." The idea was if they found an issue or deviation from the safety standards, no matter how big or small, they would bring it to the attention of the Sailors in charge of the work being done.

"We set incredibly high safety standards from the very beginning and made sure everyone knew it," said Garrett. "We would go looking for the smallest discrepancies to put them into a spreadsheet and send it out the leadership daily. Those issues continuously got fixed."

This process proved effective in multiple ways. First, fixing the small things as soon as they were noticed, and then getting them corrected immediately prevented them from becoming bigger violations and contributed to the rectification of the already existing problems out of compliance.

Secondly, it set a precedent of positive involvement from the Safety Department which sometimes doesn't exist during a yard period. Being approachable about safety questions and always willing to help find the solution to any safety hits they found was one of their largest goals.

"Our approach helped to foster a lot of cooperation between us and the crew, and people respected that," said Petty Officer 1st Class Greg Geske, a member of Nimitz's Safety Department. "We rarely got kick-back."

Developing and maintaining a culture of safety at a command as large as Nimitz takes a lot of teamwork. Safety teamed up with Code 106, the shipyard's safety team, to help keep safety in the forefront of everyone's mind.

Their collective effort is what kept Sailors informed and gave them the tools and motivation to carry out daily tasks free of danger and harm. It also helped that Nimitz Sailors and PSNS contractors bought into it.

"The leadership set-up a culture of safety that went from the very top to the very bottom of the deckplates," said Garrett. "It came down from the captain and the project superintendent, and trickled all the way down from the officers and chiefs to the junior Sailors and those that were doing the work day-in and day-out."

The numbers alone prove Nimitz had safety figured out in the yards. Now that Nimitz is underway, safety's newest mission is to maintain the standard while dealing with new challenges of a fully-operational aircraft carrier.

The beginning of Nimitz's preparation for her upcoming 2017 deployment brings with it added obstacles as the ship acquires its full capabilities.

"We are going to have to learn how to safely operate side-by-side with the air wing and strike group," said Geske. "Integration is our new goal, and were excited to do it and become a safely operating team."

While underway, it is safety's job to provide a constant presence and be at every major evolution to be the extra set of eyes and make sure the proper procedures are being carried out.

Anyone in the Navy has likely heard the expression "written in blood" time and time again. This saying comes from the fact that every safety rule and regulation the Navy has implemented has come from an injury or life lost. The Sailors of Nimitz' Safety Department work hard to ensure no more rules are written in the blood of a Nimitz Sailor.

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