HD Hyundai Heavy halts all operations for safety shutdown

HD Hyundai Heavy Industries, which has declared a commitment to safety and health management, will shut down operations at all its facilities from Wednesday through Aug. 3 in a "Safety Shutdown" aimed at fundamentally eliminating serious workplace accidents.

The move follows fatal accidents involving subcontractor workers at its Ulsan and Gunsan shipyards on July 18 and Friday, respectively, prompting management to conclude that no value outweighs the lives and safety of its employees.

To rebuild its safety framework, the company will begin with a companywide special safety education session on Wednesday. On Thursday, it will conduct a full reassessment of hazards across all facilities, a comprehensive review of high-risk processes and sweeping improvements to safety and disaster-prevention equipment and working environments. Any process found to have unresolved hazards will be strictly barred from resuming until those risks are eliminated.

"We feel a profound sense of responsibility for the recent accidents and sincerely apologize to the public and our workers for the concern this has caused," a company official said. The official added that the Safety Shutdown "is not a performative measure but a new turning point to change the company's safety culture from the ground up."

HD Hyundai Heavy Industries introduced "The Safe Care," a safety and health management system, companywide on Aug. 18 last year to prevent serious accidents at the source. The system is based on the company's own analysis of serious accident cases in the shipbuilding industry and designates nine core hazards — falls, entrapment, electrocution, suffocation and fire among them — as "absolutely unacceptable accidents" to be managed with the full resources of the organization.

Earlier, in May last year, the company launched a "Visible Safety" project to eliminate factory hazards by painting fluorescent markings on zones where workers risk being struck by vehicles and installing collision-warning signs and safety signage throughout its facilities.

Despite those efforts, three workers have died in separate accidents this year alone: a fire at the Ulsan submarine factory on April 9, an entrapment between a gondola and an upper scaffold at an external dry dock in the shipbuilding division on July 18, and an entrapment in equipment at the Gunsan shipyard panel factory on Friday.