Fritz Djukic
Inspector, (Occupational Hygiene), Department of Natural Resources, Mines and Energy
Inhalable dust refers to all dust that may enter the mouth and nose during normal breathing. Inhalable dust may be divided into ‘respirable’ and ‘non- respirable’ fractions. The dust particle size will ultimately determine the site of deposition within the respiratory system. Respirable dust particles (<10 micron) may penetrate deep into the gas exchange regions of the lung. The ‘non respirable’ faction includes both ‘extra thoracic dust particles (<100 micron)’ and ‘thoracic dust particles (<25 micron)’.
The re-identification of CWP among Queensland coal mine workers and, more recently, the increase in cases of silicosis among engineered stone workers is a stark reminder of the hazards associated with exposure to respirable dust. Recent reforms to the respiratory component of the existing coal mine workers health scheme have resulted in major improvements with respect to the early detection and diagnosis of mine dust lung disease (MDLD). These improvements have led to a number of other forms of MDLD being detected among Queensland mine workers that are not associated with pneumoconiosis. A growing number of these cases fall into the broad category of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). There is an increasing body of evidence implicating exposure to larger dust particles (outside the respirable fraction) and an inflammatory response in the lung, resulting in COPD.
Unlike the Queensland metalliferous mining and quarrying legislation, there is currently no prescribed regulatory limit for inhalable dust in Queensland coal mining legislation. Despite this, the majority of coal mines have recognised this as a potential health hazard as part of their site health risk assessments (HRA).
This paper reviews available inhalable dust exposure data that has been provided to the Mines Inspectorate for Queensland coal mines since the introduction of risk based legislation in 1999. The paper considers the evidence basis for regulatory amendment to ensure risk is at an acceptable level and as low as reasonably achievable.
Greg Manthey
Inspector of Mines – Occupational Hygiene, Department of Natural Resources, Mines and Energy
Effectively controlling worker exposure to respirable crystalline silica (RCS) in mineral mines and quarries (MMQ) is an ongoing challenge. Increasing cases of mine dust lung disease show this has not yet been met.
RCS can cause silicosis, lung cancer, chronic bronchitis and emphysema after prolonged exposure. Acute silicosis can result after very high, short term exposure as tragically seen in the manufactured stone industry.
The MMQ sector has nearly 1400 operational sites employing approximately 12,800 workers, many of them at elevated risk from RCS exposures.
The 2017 introduction of the Guideline for the Management of Respirable Crystalline Silica in Mineral Mines and Quarries (QGL02) provided the industry with structures to address RCS exposure. Barriers to effective implementation include:
- limited understanding of the hazard,
- difficulty implementing effective dust control,
- limited number of Occupational Hygienists,
- monitoring costs,
- a generally poor understanding of QGL02.
DNRME’s compliance monitoring program continues the Inspectorate’s close engagement with the sector, ensuring SSE’s understand QGL02 and comply with their obligations including risk evaluation, exposure monitoring and reporting.
This presentation describes findings from the program and focus areas, including:
- sampling results and data,
- compliance issues,
- at-risk groups
- increasing RCS education,
- improving risk identification and evaluating,
- effectiveness of control measures.
Darren Marinoff
Principal Consultant – Occupational Hygiene, Greencap
The high-risk nature of the Mining and Resources industry prescribes multiple layers of safety requirements that workers need to undertake to access a site and carry out specific works safely.
Greencap’s depth of experience in occupational health and safety within the Mining and Resources Industry includes the organisation’s engagement by the South Australian Mining and Quarrying Health and Safety Committee to undertake Respirable Crystalline Silica (RCS) monitoring at various mines and quarries throughout South Australia as part of their Health Surveillance Program. This project alone saw over 1,000 personal and static monitoring samples collected throughout 2016 to 2018.
This presentation will first give background information on the hazards of RCS dust and the risks of exposure. Analysis of the data collected from the monitoring programs will be presented with a focus on elevated exposures relating to Similar Exposure Groups, operational locations and mined/quarried products. Discussion will be presented on observations of existing controls and their effectiveness together with use of respiratory protective devices and a fit testing program conducted during the third year of the program.
Dr. Tristan Casey
Lecturer, Griffith University
What exactly is a ‘safety culture’? How is one achieved (and is it even possible)? What is the link between leadership and safety culture? As a result of the plethora of answers to these questions, there is also diversity of approaches to safety culture improvement within mining. The LEAD model is an integrated and evidence-based framework that focusses on the leadership and team work practices required to build a safety culture.</p .
Freely available through the Safety Leadership at Work program, the LEAD model and toolkit are designed to empower organisations regardless of size or industry to achieve positive safety culture outcomes. Developed through a partnership between academia (Curtin University and University of Queensland), government (Workplace Health and Safety Queensland), and industry (including the Sustainable Minerals Institute), the LEAD model has been operationalised as a practical toolkit.
A cohort of 12 workplaces representing a diverse snapshot of different sectors (including the mining industry) participated in the design, delivery, and evaluation of the LEAD toolkit. In addition to presenting the LEAD model, my presentation will also describe the main phases and resources within the LEAD toolkit, and present a short case-study around the outcomes achieved through this project.
David Pope
Principal, POPEHSE Pty Ltd
Richard Wall
CEO, EMEX
Behavioural Safety is helping many organisations make inroads into improving safety performance.
Founded on decades of psychology research, behavioural safety positively reinforces target behaviours. By interacting in a positive manner, the studies indicate behavioural change is initiated.
Interactions occur between people and is often called a ‘safety observation’. Safety observations are, in many cases, documented into a system to scoreboard the number and type of behaviours observed.
Scoreboards focus on how many observations occur, rather than why behaviours occur. Evaluating the effect of an interaction, assessing the behavioural change and its repeatability, is paramount in behavioural safety.</p .
Powerful algorithms have been developed using the latest data science techniques, to assess the effect of interventions, like safety conversations, on large groups. These techniques are widely used in Marketing/Advertising, Finance/Insurance, Healthcare, Law Enforcement, and Politics.
Safety conversations are a window into the individual interactions. With certain data, it is possible to identify positive, negative or neutral interactions, and the effect over time.
This paper presents a robust and novel approach to assess sentiment analysis of documented safety observations, to predict the persuasive effects of leaders on their groups, and the resultant safety outcomes.
Christian Young
Managing Director, Impress Solutions Pty Ltd
Safety Differently describes a movement within the safety community to change the perspective of organisations in three key areas – the definition of safety, the role of people, and the focus of the organisation.
Traditional or “normal” safety management tends to view these three areas in this way:
- Safety is defined as an absence of negatives (e.g., accidents, unacceptable risk, unsafe acts, etc.)
- People are a problem that must be controlled
- The organisation focuses on safety as a bureaucratic accountability to those above us hierarchically
By contrast, Safety Differently views these three key areas this way:
- Safety is defined by the presence of positives, such as a capacity to be successful in varying conditions
- People are the solution
- The organisation focuses on safety as an ethical responsibility to those who do the organisation’s messy, risky work
Safety Differently is an approach used by organisations who wish to move beyond traditional safety management.
Through the lens of Safety Differently organisations can evaluate their existing strategies and look for opportunities to alter course. This presentation will further discuss how Safety Differently can be applied within the mining context.
Dr. Rebecca Allen
Researcher, School of Psychology, The University of Newcastle
Coal mining has been internationally recognised as a high-risk industry with high fatality rates in comparison to other occupations. Within the Australian coal mining industry, the level of occupational risk has been identified as 70% higher than the national average. The present study undertook an exploratory investigation of the causes of risk-taking among Australian coal miners. The study is the first to use a longitudinal approach to investigate the association between safety culture and risk-taking among Australian coal miners.
This approach allows clearer conclusions about the causal relations between variables. Data was collected via repeat survey from a sample of 233 open-cut and underground coal miners from New South Wales and Queensland. Perceived safety norms were found to be a significant longitudinal predictor of reported frequency of risk-taking. Miners who perceived it to be normal for miners at their mine site to ignore safety procedures and take risks were more likely to report taking safety risks in the future. This finding suggests that poor safety norms cause subsequent increases in risk-taking behaviour. Safety interventions are considered, focusing on improving perceived safety norms to potentially reduce risk-taking.
Dr. Philip Tynan
National Toxicologist, Safe Work Laboratories
Dr. Naomi Rogers
Sleep and Fatigue Specialist, Naomi Rogers Fatigue
Despite longstanding industry attention to worksite safety, Safe Work Australia reported a 51% rise in serious injury claims in the mining sector from 2000 to 2014. There is a dangerous self-reinforcing relationship between workplace accidents and mental health, drug use and fatigue, which was highlighted by the recent ‘Mental Health and the NSW Mineral Industry’ report commissioned by the NSW Minerals Council which estimated that in any 12-month period between 8,000 and 10,000 NSW mine workers experienced mental illness and around 2,000 experienced a substance use disorder.
The use of drugs, including alcohol, has a disproportionately large impact on workplace safety. Altered memory, impaired coordination and poor concentration may delay reaction times and increase the risk of accident and injury –not just to themselves, but to their co-workers – especially when coupled with fatigue.
Raising awareness of the symptoms of these underlying conditions, and the synergistic effects of drugs and fatigue in worsening mental health – primarily through educational Fit-for-Work programs tailored to the needs of each particular industry and robust workplace drug-testing programs – has been shown in Australian and overseas studies to significantly reduce workplace accident rates by fostering the development and maintenance of zero tolerance safe workplace cultures.
Dr Ross Tynan
Research Lead, Everymind
Supporting a healthy workforce has a range of potential benefits: improved employee performance and morale, improved safety, cost benefits, and broader social benefits to employees, their families and community. Achieving such gains requires timely and early access to effective options for providing health in a form that is tailored to the target population and the Industry more broadly. While health screening has been introduced in some sectors of the Coal Industry, innovative, accessible treatment options that wrap around available workplace health care options are needed.
This paper reports on the development and evaluation of a proposed solution; an online portal (‘Health-e Mines’) that provides a direct, real-time link between coal mining employees and the latest evidence based online screening, early intervention, and treatment programs for enhancing mental and physical health. Since January 2018, there have been 817 Health-e Mines site users. This has translated into 1,485 sessions by coal miners visiting the website, who have viewed, on average, two pages per session. The majority of visitors are accessing the site on Sundays at 4am, Mondays 12-3pm, and Wednesday 6-11am. Evaluation data on facilitators and barriers to use of Health-e Mines will also be reported.
James Pearce
Advocate, Black Lung Victims Support Group
The re-emergence of Dust Diseases in Queensland’s coal industry is having a devastating effect on workers, their families and mining communities. More than 100 employees have been diagnosed as suffering from different forms of pneumoconiosis, predominantly Black Lung and silicosis. There are many more Victims being regularly identified.
While the main challenge facing our entire industry is the effective prevention of Dust Diseases in our coal mines, the identification of all Victims is a moral obligation on all stakeholders in the industry. This involves not only world’s best practice testing of the present workforce but also of those who have retired from the industry and those who have left it before retiring.
While prevention and identification of Black Lung are essential, the most pressing issue at the present time is the treatment and health care of those who have been, and will continue to be, Victims of these Dust Diseases. This paper on behalf of Black Lung Victims will outline our proposals for how the industry working with government can provide for the life-long medical care needed for the best possible quality of life for sufferers. We owe them at least that.
Glenn Aitchison
Project Officer, Simtars
Information deficiencies during emergencies is increasingly seen as a critical issue for emergency response. Information should be gathered to provide “intelligence” about the underground conditions after a major incident, such as an explosion or rock fall. This project investigated four key areas related to information gathering:
- Post explosion atmosphere monitoring:– An industry study into available, low powered, sensors were conducted. The study was to identify commercially available equipment to sample the mine atmosphere post an underground incident.
- Ultra-resilient communication system:– An investigation was undertaken into the feasibility of components for a robust and resilient mine communication network. The network must survive an underground incident and be able to transmit information in and out of an underground mine environment.
- Blast protection (or blast resilience):– The blast protection was evaluated through subjecting different shapes of enclosures to actual blasts, in an explosion propagation tube.
- Navigational aids:– A series of test were undertaken to determine the suitability of using visible light, infra-red as well as radar to aid in self rescue. All test were undertaken in a “dusty”, or low-visibility, environment.
This paper will present the results obtained for each of the key areas and highlight the potential of such a system in an underground coal mine environment.
Nikky LaBranche
Industry Fellow, Minerals Industry Safety and Health Centre, Sustainable Minerals Institute, The University of Queensland
David Cliff
Professor of OHS in Mining, Minerals Industry – Minerals Industry Safety and Health Centre, Sustainable Minerals Institute, The University of Queensland
NIKKY LaBRANCHE – Nikky is a resources sector professional with mining engineering and health and safety research experience spanning three continents. She is currently an Industry Fellow with the Minerals Industry Safety and Health Centre undertaking a strategic gap analysis of particulates in the resources sector. Her research interests also include incident management practices and accident/injury analysis and investigation.
Nikky is currently Chair of the AusIMM Southern Queensland Branch and a Board Member of the AusIMM Health and Safety Society. She holds an MBA and both an RPEQ and Professional Engineer credentials in the US.
DAVID CLIFF – David has over 30 years in the resources sector in Australia. His experience spans both research and consulting settings as the manager of both the Occupational Hygiene Environment and Chemistry Centre and the Mining Research Centre at SIMTARS, Occupational Health and Safety Advisor to the Queensland Resources Council and Professor of OHS in Mining and Professor of Risk and Knowledge Transfer at the University of Queensland.
David has provided OHS advice particularly in the areas of OHS risk management, governance and education and training. He has provided this specialist support to governments, unions and companies.