A custom-made motion inhibitor has been recognised in Queensland’s Banana Shire.
Anglo American’s workshop wheel chock was recently commended for significantly reducing the risk of workplace injuries and fatalities.
The simple, effective and trapezoidal design significantly reduces the risk of sideways ejection which can cause serious harm to employees at the Dawson Coal Mine in Kianga – 194km southwest of Gladstone.
The device is made from lightweight polyurethane foam, and claimed to be easy to manoeuvre and low-risk for manual handling tasks.
Dawson mining and maintenance manager Luke Wilkie revealed colleagues made the devices in-house after a conventional, 14 kilogram chock was ejected sideways into an adjacent workshop.
“[There was] such force that it would have caused serious harm if it had hit one of our colleagues,” he said in a public statement.
“While the industry has known about wheel-chock ejection for some time, the controls which are typically put in place are administrative. We wanted to take action to introduce an engineering control that would improve safety for our colleagues and the broader industry.”
Judges attending the Queensland Mining Industry Health and Safety (QMIHS) conference agreed the new design is much safer. They voted for the proponent in both safety innovation and people’s choice categories at the 2022 QMIHS Awards.
“The team’s solution moves the dial on safety in mine workshops by introducing a hard engineering control to remove the risk of unsafe wheel chock ejection,” QMIHSC chair and chief coal mines inspector Peter Newman said.
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