Air Force Depot Maintenance

Conditions at the Air Logistics Center in San Antonio, Texas, raise doubts about whether the safety program there has received enough emphasis. Although the Center has taken several steps to overcome maintenance safety and training shortcomings, problems remain. Data on accidents and injuries from the Center show that mishap rates there have been on the rise during the past few years and are greater than Air Force-wide rates. Additionally, safety deficiencies that investigators have spotted recently are similar to major shortcomings linked to past accidents at the Center. Continued corrective and preventative safety improvements are warranted. Because of the way in which lost workday data are collected at San Antonio, mishap data there do not reflect all instances when workers are away from their jobs due to accidents or injuries. Neither Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) nor Air Force guidance is clear on how such data should be collected. As a result, reported statistics omit cases in which workers cannot do their regular jobs and are instead assigned other work, a situation that not only overstates safety conditions at the centers but also reduces the likelihood of an OSHA inspection.

GAO found that: (1) conditions at the San Antonio ALC raise concerns regarding whether the safety program has achieved desired safety improvements; (2) although the San Antonio ALC has undertaken several efforts to correct maintenance safety and training deficiencies, problems remain; (3) accidents and injuries at the San Antonio ALC have increased over the past few years; (4) continued corrective and preventative safety improvement efforts are needed to reduce the likelihood of mishaps in the future; (5) accident data do not reflect all instances when workers are away from their assigned duties because of accident or injury and do not indicate when workers cannot perform their normal duties or are assigned to some other work; (6) inadequate mishap data overstate the safety conditions at ALCs and reduce the likelihood that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) will target ALCs for inspection; and (7) OSHA should revise its guidelines for computing lost workdays to ensure that mishap data are accurate.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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