AK Steel’s Walbridge, Ohio, US plant of AK Tube LLC has received a Special Award for its safety performance from the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation, division of Safety and Hygiene. The award recognizes the plant for working 803,114 hours without a lost time injury, from 14 November 2006 to 31 December 2008. The award was presented at the Safety Council of Northwest Ohio’s annual industrial safety awards banquet held on 19 May 2009. The Walbridge plant is also a recipient of the Safety Award of Merit from the Fabricators & Manufacturers Association, International and CNA Insurance. That award was presented last month to the Walbridge plant for posting an injury and illness incident rate during 2008 that was better than the published Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) rate for their industry by 10% or greater. For 2008, Walbridge’s injury and illness incident rate of 1.75 was 77% better than the BLS rate for their industry. AK Steel’s corporate-wide total recordable injury rate of only 0.28 last year was about 8 times better than the industry average of 2.33, according to data compiled by the American Iron and Steel Institute.