Michael Tamone
State Sales Manager – Queensland, uvex safety Australia
uvex is established as a world leading manufacturer of sports and safety PPE with more than 90 years’ manufacturing experience.
The uvex mission is protecting people, with our three core values being quality, leadership and enthusiasm. Our focus is on science-based innovation to create Personal Protective Equipment including safety eyewear, hand, respiratory and hearing protection for people at work.
Over the past year uvex Safety Australia has officially launched our global partnership with Grand Rapids Michigan based protective product manufacturer, HexArmor. HexArmor are the global leaders in extreme cut, impact, puncture and needlestick resistance hand and body PPE. Our dedicated team welcome your visit to our stand #19 at the conference.
Eric Tomicek
Sales Manager, Australian Diversified Engineering
ADE is passionate about haul roads and efficient water truck operations. The ADE Spray system consistently sprays at a specific water rate to manage overwatering and underwatering and can safely deliver more water to more of the mine. Friction Plus by ADE is a free phone app for measuring haul road friction so that risks associated with wet roads can be objectively measured and the risks effectively managed.
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.
Dr. Philip Tynan
National Toxicologist, Safe Work Laboratories
It is widely accepted Customs and Police Drug confiscation, self-report surveys (such as the National Household Drug Survey), and roadside and workplace drug testing give only a crude picture of overall community drug use. By assaying drug concentrations in sewage effluent, it is possible to obtain timely information on the actual spectrum of drugs used at a site and calculate the average drug dose per person.
Wastewater Drug Testing has been used internationally and in Australia (in the National Wastewater Drug Monitoring Program 2016 – 2019) to measure and interpret drug use within national populations and at selected worksites enabling the identification of problem areas, drugs of concern and monitoring changes in use patterns. A great advantage of Wastewater drug analysis is that it is not subject to response bias and can be used as an outcome measurement tool to gauge the effectiveness of a workplace’s drug use intervention strategy. Workplace drug use may reflect local drug use but as Australian workplace studies (including minesites) have shown, it can often be a reflection of the unique drug-taking culture at that workplace.
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.
Ramsay Wells
Business Manager, Queensland Mines Rescue Service
Matthew Farrelly
Manager VRT, Queensland Mines Rescue Service
We live in a world that is constantly changing, and that change continues to accelerate.
Technology has improved the way we train, everything from video animations to learn from disasters, through to e-learning to enhance assessment capabilities.
A new era of training is here, a growing number of organisations are recognising the power of simulation based training. Simulation based training is hardly new, it’s been used in military and aviation for over 50 years – however it has always been expensive and out of reach for most organisations.
Enter the wave of VR and AR headsets available to the consumer, meaning that this technology is now affordable for any business. eg. Walmart uses VR to train over 1 million associates, seeing an improvement in their test scores by 10-15%. This has been achieved by providing almost 20,000 VR headsets across their stores.
QMRS started delivering simulation based training 24 months ago, using desktop-based VR. Then 12 months ago presented headset based training to the industry. Now, the service is preparing to roll out free-roam based VR training for the industry at their Rescue Stations.
24 months is all it has taken to see such a massive change to the way people can be trained.
This presentation will show the journey that Mines Rescue have taken to equip the industry with access to the next generation of cost effective training, that is available right now for the industry’s workforce.
We will highlight the benefits of improved safety outcomes, better prepared employees, safer work environments and value dollar propositions in your continued push to stay meaningful in this technology revolution.
Melton White
Mideco
Mideco provide dust control products and solutions for mines, quarries and any commercial environment. We are an Australian owned company and have been operating since 1950. With over sixty years of successful dust collection experience behind us, Mideco has designed Bat Booth, the system for cleaning workers’ clothes after the shifts, helping prevent dust related conditions like silicosis and black lung.
Approved and recommended by NIOSH, UL certified and installed on sites all over the world, Bat Booth provides the highest value for OHS in mining and quarrying.
Professor Jianming Wu
Visiting Professor of University of Wollongong and Director of AST Australia
A/Professor Ting Ren</br/>Director of Centre of Infrastructure Protection and Mining Safety, University of Wollongong
Spontaneous combustion (sponcom) of coal remains a major safety issue for underground coal mining operations. Recent heating incidents in Australia further highlight the need of improving current knowledge and practices of sponcom management to ensure safety and productivity of coal mines extracting coal seams that are prone to spontaneous heating.
This presentation will provide some the fundamental theory and practices in the early detection, prevention and control of spontaneous combustion of coal. Case studies based on Chinese and Australian coal mines will be presented to demonstrate a range of techniques, including radon detection, jel and fly ash injection materials, that can be practically used for coal heating and fire management.
The presentation will also include studies of goaf gas flow dynamics based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modelling. Based upon fundamental fluid flow governing equations, computational models are developed to investigate the impact of different ventilation layout and ventilation parameters on goaf gas flow characteristics and in particularly, oxygen leakage and ingress patterns, and hence identification of high sponcom risk zones. Inertisation strategies, using both nitrogen and carbon dioxide, are modelled to optimise operational parameters (e.g, injection flow rate and location etc) for active longwalls and seal-off operations.
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.