Mine Emergency: Proactive and Robust Planning
Contributor:
Mining IQ Editorial
Posted: 03/05/2012 12:00:00 AM EST | 0
Mining IQ: What do you think a lot of specialists in this area neglect or don’t do as well as they could in their risk assessments?
Mining IQ: As the Queensland Mine Inspector; what are the common risk areas in you’ve seen in most mines? How can we mitigate its effect on safety?
Mining IQ: When running through any rescue and emergency practice drills, what do you think is the best practice here?
Posted: 03/05/2012 12:00:00 AM EST | 0
|
|
Emergency preparedness is crucial for those working within the mining industry. Ensuring that you and your team can successfully respond to an onsite emergency is important for the safety of your workers, business continuity as well as overall corporate reputation. This boils down to having a proactive and robust mine emergency plan, one that considers the various contingencies a mine site may face and one that clearly aligns responsibilities to each and every onsite member.
John Sleigh is interviewed by Mining IQ about mine site emergency preparedness and what risk areas he thinks alot of mine sites still face.
John is the Queensland Mine Inspector, MacKay Mines and Energy and is a speaker at the Mine Rescue & Emergency Management 2012. For more information about this event, please visit www.MineRescue.com.au, call 02 9229 1000 or email enquire@iqpc.com.au
Mining IQ: Our emergency plans need to be updated frequently to ensure that it adheres to best practice and any mine site or operational changes - what tips do you have for risk assessment when identifying the potential emergency situations in a mine site?
John Sleigh (JS): With the mine emergency plans, it’s important that they’re up to date and current. So revising this plan should be part of revising any management decision, by asking ‘what could go wrong?’. The other part is asking ‘what has gone wrong?’ as part of the incident investigation; what additional emergency procedures do we need to put in place; and what do we need if a worse incident occurred.
It’s about what have we learnt and how can we apply that in the future.
A great source of information is the mining department website of various states, which have safety alerts on their website. And the Queensland government has safety alerts for mining, so if you Google ‘Safety Alerts mining’, you’ll be able to find this online. These are certainly useful tools to take with you when you’re looking to revise any emergency plan.
Mining IQ: What do you think a lot of specialists in this area neglect or don’t do as well as they could in their risk assessments?
JS: I don’t think whether it’s about “a lot of specialists” neglect it. Perhaps a better way to put it is the really smart ones – there are things they do well - they identify trigger levels and TARPs, Trigger Action Response Plans. So if emergencies happen, day or night… it may be a gas concentration level or loss of power, there might be a fall etc. When that happens, these steps need to be taken. Firstly by people on site, then by people who are coordinating the activity, then by the supervisor and by people away from the mine, and then by experts like a Geotechnical Engineer or Mine Ventilation staff. There are trigger response points, so if we reach those triggers, this is what needs to happen.
The other thing is that in serious incidents, a set of duty cards make life a whole lot easier for everyone. And the first duty card is obviously for the person who takes the emergency call. They need to know who to contact. Then progressively, as people come to them, they hand out the duty cards. For example, there’s a duty card for those who are recording the people coming out of the mine in a time of evacuation; there’s a duty card for someone to go to the mine entrance to make sure no one enters; and there may be a duty card for someone to take to the gate and look after security there.
These duty cards can even be for someone to make external phone calls, and another duty card to make internal phone calls. These duty cards really make an emergency management operation far less harrowing and less of a problem.
Mining IQ: As the Queensland Mine Inspector; what are the common risk areas in you’ve seen in most mines? How can we mitigate its effect on safety?
JS: Probably the most important thing is that each mine is unique and different. But while a mine might have a problem with spontaneous combustion, we need to manage potential spontaneous combustion, but also not neglect other issues and what would go wrong.
A significant event three years ago involved severe weather where demountable buildings were blown away during a storm. This has happened three times in Queensland, and led to fatalities in WA five years ago. So things like weather may well be the risks we need to manage. And of course, we all have the potential exposure to weather emergencies. It’s about knowing all the functions – man-made or natural – that can affect your mines, prevent it from going wrong, then adding preparation in case it does go wrong; and then having a response plan so that if it does go wrong, we know how to handle it through TARP or duty cards. And of course, ultimately a recovery plan for afterwards as well.
Mining IQ: When running through any rescue and emergency practice drills, what do you think is the best practice here?
JS: There is a Queensland government standard that’s on our website which sets out the requirements we have for coal mine for emergency practice drills.
Each year we have a level one exercise which uses all the resources available in the state and is put together by representatives from all of the mining companies, the unions and inspectorate. Together we plan an activity and let the mine know we’re going to conduct it at their mine. We tell them that at an unspecified time in the next month, we’ll be doing an emergency project – and that’s all they know about it. We get there with a full scenario and watch how it carries out. So this is the ultimately level one of emergency response. We also ask each mine to do a major whole-of-mine exercise each year where every worker at the mine at the time will be involved in an exercise that involves evacuation or the sort of things that can go wrong. We also ask that every mine worker who is not involved in the whole of mine exercise be involved in an activity that at least deals with evacuation from their work place.
And we also ask mines to do desktop exercises where they go through the plans of what they’d do in certain scenarios. The sort of things these do is getting our contact details up to date, so we have their next-of-kin details. These things are so easily overlooked and take time, and during an emergency, we don’t have this extra time.
Mining IQ: Lots of mine safety professionals talk about proactive emergency management - but can we truly implement these to safeguard their operations from danger?
JS: The Emergency Management Australia, which is the federal government body that looks after the various emergency management exercises and various organisations such as fire, ambulance and SES etc. -they have a four prong approach.
Their first approach is prevention: do the things that make an emergency less likely. Then preparation so that equipment that’s needed in an emergency is available, then a response plan so that when something does happen, we know how we’re going to respond. Then there’s the recovery phase to resume operations.
If you look at your emergency plans through those four dimensions, you’ll come up with a proactive approach places prevention first. And this covers incidents and accidents that happen – or close calls as I call them. So it’s about investigating high potential incidents thoroughly and asking how this could have been worse and how can we prevent it from getting worse – because maybe it could have just been a warning shot.
John Sleigh is the Queensland Mine Inspector, MacKay Mines and Energy and is a speaker at the Mine Rescue & Emergency Management 2012. For more information about this event, please visit www.MineRescue.com.au, call 02 9229 1000 or email enquire@iqpc.com.au
|
Contributor:
Mining IQ Editorial |
-
Mine Site Stress Management: Health and Safety Focus -
Internet Access is Not a Birth Right -
Creating Leadership Roles for Women in the Mining Industry -
PDAC delivers on Expectations: Commodity Outlook Strong and Gold Steals the Show -
Safety Training and Your Mine Site - Mining IQ Industry Focus -
Women in Mining: Mining IQ Industry Update -
Mining IQ Member Profile: Gordon Fellows, Chelopech Mining EAD -
Australian Mining Editor's Comment: Cole Latimer on the start of the end -
Uncertainty Looms over Rare Earths Industry -
Women in Mining: Gender Diversity in the Mining Industry
* = required.
Not a member yet? Sign up
You Should Check Out:
Advertisement
Events of Interest
-
Latest Webinar! Learn how to Increase Productivity in your Mining Operations
June 5, 2013
Register Now -
GIS in Mining and Exploration Online Summit
February 6, 2012
Register Now -
Zero Harm Management – Is it Worth It? A Field Study
September 1, 2012
Register Now -
Free Webinar: 13 Step Guide to Workforce Planning Success
March 7, 2012
Register Now
Advertisement
|
Reach Mining professionals through cost-effective marketing opportunities to deliver your message, position yourself as a thought leader, and introduce new products, techniques and strategies to the market.
Learn More » Join today and interact with a vibrant network of mining professionals, keeping up to date with the mining industry by accessing our wealth of Mining articles, videos, live conferences and more. Sign Up Today! |
| Mining IQ, a division of IQPC 2013 All rights reserved.Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy. Careers With IQPC | Contact Us | About Us | Cookie Policy |
|
Not a member? Sign Up
Reasons for Joining
Address your challenges through knowledge sharing with peers from our global network of specialists.
Benchmark your business initiatives with the who's who in the field.
Hear from industry pioneers how to maximize ROI in today's challenging economy.
And best of all It's FREE!