The phrase “safety is built from the ground up” may seem like a cliché.
But a group of mining companies is taking the message to heart with a concerted campaign to work with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to ensure that safety is incorporated into the design of mining equipment.
The Earth Moving Equipment Safety Round Table (EMESRT) was established in 2006 to set up a process of engagement between mining companies and OEMs. The original group of six has since been expanded to 10, and now includes Anglo American, Barrick, BHP Billiton, Centennial Coal, Collahuasi, Rio Tinto, Vale, Newcrest, Newmont and Xstrata.
The group meets with OEMs on a regular basis, typically once a year, bringing forward recommendations for design changes to equipment in order to improve safety. While the initial focus was on surface mining equipment, EMESRT has expanded into three other equipment areas — exploration drilling, underground hard rock, and underground coal and soft rock.
Scott Rosenthal, senior director, open pit mining at Newmont Mining, said the rationale behind the group was to look at accident statistics at mines, including fatalities, injuries and near-misses, and try to determine what was causing them. “It was a review of how we were hurting people, and then getting back to what arethe risks we are puttingour people into, on our equipment?” he said.
One report from New South Wales in Australia noted that approximately 77 percent of mining accidents involved some type of equipment, withthe largest number of fatalities associated with trucks, followed by load haul dumpers.
EMESRT found that while mining equipment has advanced technically over the years, these advances have not been matched by “human” factors when Designing for Safety: Mining Companies Collaborate with OEM’s designing the equipment, such as safe access and egress.
“Sometimes we expect people to be acrobats,” Rosenthal quipped, referring to the imperative for equipment to be designed so that operators can enter and exit easily. Another is the risk from falling objects, where two people working on the same piece of equipment could be in danger of being struck from above.
Typically, the “design vacuum” is filled by local dealers who retrofit equipment according to the miner’s requirements, but this can result in lost time and additional costs. EMESRT started talking with the OEMs directly, so that the OEMs can designandengineer the changes right at the factory.
The group came up with a list of 15 design philosophies that would help designers reduce health and safety risks to an acceptable level. They include: equipment access and egress; working at heights; noise; whole-body vibration; fire; dust; isolation of energy, including parking; visibility/collision detection and avoidance; machinestability/slope indication; guarding; controls and displays; tires and rims; manual handling; operator workstation; and confined spaces.
Each design philosophy is championed by an EMESRT representative.
When EMESRT initially approached the OEMs, their response was that they design to ISO standards. But with the OEMs sitting on the boards of the standards bodies, “it was like the fox guarding the henhouse,” Rosenthal said, adding that in fairness to the OEMs, many need to design for a huge range of equipment, meaning the standards are often overly general.
But the OEMs quickly realized the benefits of working with EMESRT. “Those 10 companies represent a large portion of their customer base, so to a real large extent the OEMs like it because now they’re getting a common voice from the customer,” said Rosenthal.
The results of the collaboration are becoming tangible.
In 2009 a surface haul truck operator was killed at a mine in Australia. The operator was suspected to have fallen from the truck while cleaning the windshield,and the design flaw – a vertical ladder leading to a small platform with no railing – was identified by EMESRT. The incident resulted in a design change from vertical to diagonal ladders.
Rosenthal said one OEM noted that making the changes at the factory rather than at the dealer’s yard halves the time it normally takes to get the equipment working on the minesite.
“With it coming from the factory it now has a part number, it’s part of the design, it’s more robust,” he said. “It can save the mine operator time to get it into the dirt.”
And while the OEMs are under no obligation to follow EMESRT’s design recommendations, Rosenthal said it makes good business sense to do so. He said Caterpillar has started working with EMESRT guidelines to improve the safety of their haul trucks, and he’s confident that safety-related designs will spur more competition from the OEMs, knowing thatsafer designs sell.
“There starts to be a gap between safe and unsafe designs,” he said. “We as miners will start buying the safer-designed equipment.”
Click here for full list of links: