A special investigator from one of the nation’s most high-profile mine disasters wants employers to remove dangerous conditions.
Michael Quinlan believes there are many lessons from a recent rock fall that killed a drilling contractor at Gold Fields’ St Ives mine (80km south of Kalgoorlie), and a fatal crash between a MACA utility truck operator and dump truck at Capricorn Metals’ Karlawinda mine (530km southeast of Port Hedland).
The University of New South Wales management and governance emeritus professor, who examined the 2006 Beaconsfield mine collapse, wants mine managers to eliminate – or at least better control – workplace hazards.
“If you engineer the hazard out then you are relying less on people’s behaviour to protect them from serious events, and the system is more forgiving for people making mistakes which they do on occasion,” he said according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
“[The sector] has to really show a lot of attention to safety and be prepared to spend some money on it in terms of engineering out hazards.”
He predicts internal investigators and external WorkSafe officials will examine roadways, line of sight at intersections and ways to separate light- and heavy-vehicle movements across the mine site. This could help avoid more preventable “single fatalities”.
“Traffic conditions on open-cut mines are a really major area and, if there is not more regulatory guidance about how to deal with this, I think that would be something that the regulators should be looking at doing too – and what lessons they can learn from other sites in terms of that particular type of hazard,” he said according to the broadcaster
“The Australian mining industry has come a long way [in the past century] due to the companies, regulations and laws, and unions but there is still the issue of single fatalities still occurring – and are they preventable? Absolutely.”
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