Tom Hethmon
The global mining industry continues to demonstrate improvement in safety and health management. This includes both actual performance, notwithstanding challenges with performance metric criteria and application, and recognizing the number of variables that contribute to the morbidity and mortality that has plagued the industry for millennia. It is not an exaggeration to acknowledge that sustainable safety and health management in mining is as complex as mining itself.
While there is no reliable global database of mine safety and health performance statistics in which to monitor the industry over time, one useful indication of the performance trend is reflected in mining organizations such as the International Council on Mining and Metallurgy (ICMM), an influential trade association whose members include 25 of the largest mining companies and 40 mining-related trade and professional associations in the world. ICMM reports annual performance statistics for its member companies and reached a milestone relative to trailing performance metrics in 2022 with an average total recordable injury frequency rate (TRIFR) of 2.66 per million work hours based on an exposure of 2,683,513,114 work hours. This reflects 33 fatalities, the lowest count since ICMM began tracking these data in 2012, and accounts for both company workers and contractors.
" The U.S. remains one of the only major mining countries whose regulations are not based on risk management principles "
This has occurred due to improved governmental legislation and regulations and enforcement, more academic research identifying new opportunities for improvement, greater consistency among major mining companies in terms of risk management-centered systems of control, and the formal and informal adoption by smaller mining organizations of the same or similar risk management tools, institutionalizing effective training and competency verification, improved accountability for line management relative to safety, improved medical surveillance, among others.
In the U.S., the National Mining Association (NMA) embarked on a voluntary member initiative to integrate a risk management-centered safety and health management system with structured culture enhancement linked to leadership development into companies that had focused primarily on compliance with Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) regulations.
The U.S. remains one of the only major mining countries whose regulations are not based on risk management principles. Called CORESafety, the goal was to eliminate fatalities and reduce other injuries by 50 percent within five years. Launched in 2012, that goal was realized by CORESafety participating members in 2017, providing further evidence of the general effectiveness of the underlying strategy.
Despite the long-term positive trend, less frequent but significant incidents continue to occur among the larger mine operators, but they tend to be more commonly associated with tailings and transport risks, for which consequences are primarily off-site. There remain clear opportunities for improvement as even the loss of one life is unacceptable, but the macro trend is increasingly toward the human loss occurring at smaller mines and companies, including both legal and illegal artisanal mining around the world. This is less likely to occur using the current informal approach to knowledge and experience sharing within the global mining community.
The following set of recommendations would facilitate improved performance.
● More effective industry leadership in setting expectations regarding safety management and performance. Companies will achieve the level of performance they come to expect and for which they are willing to manage accordingly.
● Pursue tripartite debate and decisions regarding policy that defines the most effective structure for mine safety regulation in relation to current knowledge about how to achieve safety excellence and not just what is most expedient in terms of enforcement.
● Better understanding of how to leverage culture enhancement and leadership development for the purpose of optimizing risk management.
● Increase collaboration and transparency within the mining community to ensure lessons are learned collectively.
● Accordingly, develop a common, global taxonomy of root causes based on the body of knowledge that reflects optimal safety and health management performance to facilitate information sharing.
● Develop global consensus regarding the appropriate body of knowledge for effective safety and health management that is more complex and multifaceted than the usual content of safety regulations. The body of knowledge will need to be known by both safety and health professionals and line management alike.
● Develop consensus regarding empirical and acceptable/tolerable risk that guides mining companies toward safety excellence, including zero harm, across the entire life cycle of mines.
● Ensure true parity between safety and occupational health management, including psychological safety.
● Cooperate in the conduct of intervention effectiveness research that can provide a better understanding of how risk-centered safety and health management systems work and can be optimized.
● Lastly, as the global industry is only as strong as its weakest member, a call for the development of voluntary local and regional communities of practice based on the knowledge and transparency of leading mine safety and health companies and organizations. The goal is to facilitate practical learning among smaller and lesser-resourced but proximate mines to understand and scale best practices.
