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Mines that kill (part 2)
Allan Seccombe
Posted: Fri, 24 Oct 2008
[miningmx.com] -- One of the major concerns about imposing safety measures in mines is the human factor. For example, come month-end workers might expose themselves to dangerous working conditions to make sure they win production bonuses.
There could be a revisit of how production bonuses are compiled, with a strong emphasis on health and safety.
The parties will also set up a centre at the MHSC to promote research, training and implementation of that research in rock engineering as well as mining, health, hygiene and general engineering.
A training programme will be developed by mid-2009 for health and safety representatives, unions and supervisors. It will train 40,000 representatives and shop stewards. It will also develop a strategy to attract and train health and safety inspectors as well as retain them in the mining sector.
New dust and silicosis reduction
strategies will be drawn up and a new policy to buy quiet machinery to reduce hearing loss of miners. Schemes to reduce fall-of-ground incidents are also being addressed.
“It was a marvellous step forward in the sharing of information,” says Sietse van der Woude, safety and sustainable development adviser to the Chamber of Mines. “There’s now recognition from all stakeholders that something has to be done. We’re not always going to agree on how we’ll get there, but we’ve got a common objective. We have targets and milestones of where we want to get to. We’re now a step closer.”
Jan Steenkamp, who heads the ferrous portfolio at African Rainbow Minerals, says he sees the difficulties of sharing information across the eight business units within the diversified miner, saying sharing between corporates is extremely difficult.
“Legislation is being designed to force people to be safer – but they must do it because they want to do it,” Steenkamp says, adding
the safety audit of the mines could be one of the best things to happen to the industry if it’s properly applied and not turned into just another policing and blame exercise.
Van der Woude says the drive for safety couldn’t be achieved by just one party but needed all three components – industry, labour and Government – to work together, with the emphasis on blame that’s marked the debate to date taken out of the equation. “What will make a sustained difference is all the parties working together.
You can have short-term gains through a punitive approach. But they will be just that – short-term gains.”
Makers of specialised underground machinery say mechanisation is the answer to remove people from dangerous working areas. But the uptake of new technology is notoriously slow on South African mines.
“Fewer people working underground means there will be fewer people at risk if there’s an issue,” says Chris Brindley, president of Sandvik Africa,
which has developed equipment just 88cm high to mine platinum reefs 1,2m high. “We’re seeing a drive from our clients asking how they can take people out of danger areas. There’s been a shift in the view that was prevalent some years ago that job opportunities must be maximised in the mining sector.”
Sandvik has developed the reef miner as well as a borehole borer mainly due to the demands from Lonmin, which has pushed hard its focus on mechanisation at its platinum mines. “Technology isn’t the fundamental limiting factor in the move towards mechanisation but mine management’s perceptions of how to utilise it,” says Sandvik’s Rod Pickering.
“There has to be a match between mining processes, technology and skills for mechanisation to be successful. In platinum we’re 99% there in technology. I don’t believe the mining processes and skills are there yet.”
A stab at mechanisation on gold mines in the Eighties failed and tainted views of the viability of that
technology on those mines, Pickering says. “We’ve tried for more than a hundred years to make the system currently in use safer. It’s not worked. There’s not much more that can be done.”
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