Airleg mining

[pmccarthy]

The management of the Ballarat gold mine is accused by unions of negligence in the death of a miner. They say that airleg mining is a cost cutting exercise.

 I was involved in setting up the Ballarat mine and running it, until about ten years ago. I also worked as an airleg miner when I was young.

it is a more hazardous method than mechanised mining but is still used in many places, though gradually being phased out. At Ballarat the environmental activists have stalled the development of more space in the tailings dam. Airleg mining allows more selective mining so that the amount of waste rock, hence tailings, can by cut to one third or less. It is the only way to keep operating with very limited tailings space. So it is more environmentally acceptable than the safer mechanised method.

I have no connection with the mine and no knowledge of their decisions. But it seems to have been a choice between shutting down, with loss of jobs, or using airleg mining.

People outside the industry react to mining accidents with horror. But they are rare. Road accidents occur daily and we seem to accept them as inevitable. This one seems to me like the environmentalist who demands that roadside trees be preserved. Then someone hits one and is killed. It is an unintended consequence, usually driven by people who do not understand or take responsibility for what they are demanding.

 

[old man emu]

1 hour ago, pmccarthy said:

 I was involved in setting up the Ballarat mine and running it

When I heard that it was a rockfall, I wondered what the geology is at the depth the incident occurred. I thought gold was found amongst metamorphic rocks, which, having been baked by igneous intrusion, would be a lot harder than sedimentary rock.

 

PMC, "Please explain".

[facthunter]

It's recognised as one of the most hazardous occupations. Comparing it with road deaths is not valid. How many people are on the roads at any given time? Infinitely more. Trees on the road verge only hit cars in self defence. The mine operator must bear responsibility for the deaths.  Yes. Unions DO care about members deaths. I don't see THAT as a problem. I come from a long  line of Coal miners and steel workers and have a fair idea what tricks Management get up to with workers. Not all of them. I couldn't fault "Stewarts & Lloyds " when I worked for them.  Nev

[pmccarthy]

Facthunter - do you mean airleg mining? I don't have current stats for airleg mining. But mining is one of Australia's safest industries., has been for a couple of decades.

 

OME - Re the geology - the rock at Ballarat is Ordovician sediment. It is slates, shales and sandstone, but quite strongly weathered to weaken it. There are many faults, some known as "leatherjackets" because they look like leather. The rock is weak and broken compared to most of the mines I have worked on, even others in Central Victoria. It would not be safe to stand under unsupported ground, so the miners work forward putting in rockbolts and mesh from a safe position. That is, you stand under the mesh while boring the rockbolt holes and installing the mesh out ahead. It is a highly skilled business. 

[pmccarthy]

Australian Worker fatalities by industry of employer, 2022

 

Industry of employer           Fatalities (count)      Fatalities (rate per m manhours)

 

Transport, postal and warehousing          67               9.5

Agriculture, forestry and fishing                44              14.7

Construction                                               27               2.2

Public administration and safety               11                1.2

Manufacturing                                             10               1.2

Mining                                                          7                 2.4

Administrative and support services          6               1.4

[facthunter]

IF you take the BAD 2 out mining is the worst of what's left in rate/man hours.. Nev

[pmccarthy]

1 minute ago, facthunter said:

IF you take the BAD 2 out mining is the worst of what's left in rate/man hours.. Nev

True. But twice as dangerous a as desk job is still not very dangerous. I call it one of the safest industries because it is one of those bottom five, quite distinct statistically from the two unsafe industries. 

[pmccarthy]

And as for injuries, teh ABS data for 2021-22 is:

 

 

In 2020-21, the most common industries where men experienced a work-related injury or illness in the last 12 months were:

• Construction - 17%.
• Public administration and safety - 12%.
• Transport, postal and warehousing - 11%.

And for women the most common industries were:

• Health care and social assistance - 27%.
• Education and training - 14%.
• Accommodation and food services - 12%.

[facthunter]

Being underground in a mine is only twice as dangerous as a desk Job? You have to be kidding.  Nev

[willedoo]

The reason for the safety stats in mining is because it's a highly regulated and supervised industry. The opposite of that is why farming has such a poor safety record. Farmers aren't as regulated or supervised. There are safety rules applying to farming but they aren't able to be enforced properly due to the isolated nature of working on a farm. Some farm workers roar around flat out on quad bikes without helmets, grind metal with no eye protection, leave guards off machinery, and many more risky things. Nobody really knows they're doing it until something goes wrong and they front up at a hospital. The way mining is regulated, very few capers like that occur.

[pmccarthy]

Many mines do drug and alcohol screening. That alone must make a big difference.

[pmccarthy]

2 hours ago, facthunter said:

Being underground in a mine is only twice as dangerous as a desk Job? You have to be kidding.  Nev

That is the difference between perception and reality.

[willedoo]

I've never worked in mining apart from doing an occasional short term contractor job for small time alluvial prospectors. I spent a fair portion of my life working in the oil and gas industry and saw quite a few safety changes over the years. Primary companies like Santos have long had strict safety rules for their employees, but as contractors, we had a much slacker system back in the day. That all started to change as the primary companies began mandating their safety rules for contractors to fall in line with their systems. No more shorts or T shirts on the job; long pants, long sleeves buttoned at the wrist at all times, hats mandatory when outdoors, long ankle lace up boots only, drug testing, drive-right vehicle monitors and the list goes on. It was all worthwhile and not over the top in my opinion. We were also lucky to be in a relatively low risk/low accident rate sector. The drill rig crews had the most dangerous job in that industry.

[pmccarthy]

We did a risk analysis for one mine site once, the biggest risk was an aircraft accident for the commute crew. Measured as likelihood and severity.

[facthunter]

Not enough instances of death to derive a reliable conclusion statistically.  Nev

[old man emu]

Mine safety is a fine example of how strict supervision of safety factors by Unions and Government has made working in that industry safer. As PMC said, the rock strata being mined through is composed of relatively weak material, so it would be expected that sheets of material would fall from the roof. That's why they would bolt and mesh. Also this is the first time I have heard of these safety capsules that the miners can get into to protect themselves. Unfortunately, it's only the blokes who didn't have the roof cave in on them who could run to the capsules. No doubt the two miners involved were either underneath the collapse, or a bit slow to take off. 

 

As for farm injuries and deaths, it was today that NSW WorkSafe raised the very points that willedo pointed us to. Quad bikes as big sources of injury and deaths as well as side-by-side 4-wheelers 

[facthunter]

Some farms would be incredibly dangerous. Post hole digger drive shafts and hydraulics generally. I don't like hydro drives much..  Working near a creek bank with a tractor. Deadly.   Nev

[willedoo]

I think tractor rollovers used to be one of the leading causes of farm deaths, but I'm fairly sure quad bikes are the leading cause now, at least in this state. My dad broke a leg on a quad bike rollover and a brother got some severe lacerations riding one when he hit a tensioned fence wire at full speed. He was lucky the wire caught him in the mouth and threw him off the bike, as a bit lower would probably have resulted in a decapitation. I was almost killed on a tractor when I was fifteen and still have permanent injuries as a legacy. In the hospital there was another young bloke the same age in the ward and he had lost a leg in a tractor rollover a couple of days before my accident. Adding to all that, our next door neighbour was killed on a crawler towing a scarifier. When I finally got out of hospital and went to ag college, a local girl was completely scalped when her plaits got caught in a chain drive on a potato digger. Also at the college, a few of the local farm hands and one of the lecturers all had half a hand missing from chaff cutters. These are just some of the people I personally knew or knew of who had farm accidents, but there were always plenty of other examples in the district from time to time.

 

From my experience, I can understand why the stats show mining to be a lot safer than farming.

[Marty_d]

Factories can be dangerous places.

 

A bloke went home one day and told his wife he'd been fired.

When asked for the reason, he said "I stuck my dick in the pickle slicer."

 

Aghast at this terrible news, his wife blurted out "What happened to the pickle slicer??"

 

"Oh," he said, "She got fired too."

[Jerry_Atrick]

3 hours ago, facthunter said:

Not enough instances of death to derive a reliable conclusion statistically.  Nev

Maybe I am reading this wrong, but I am not sure I follow. If we are measuring the occurence of an event per quantum of a measure, surely it is the measure that we need a statistically valid populatioon of the measure (in this case, series of hours worked) and not the event itself? In the case of deaths per hours worked (presumably under standard conditions of the industry as it is comparing industries.. And to be a proper staticstical analysis, there would have to be some scaling, as, for example, if in agriculture there was an aggregate of say 3m hours/year worked but in mining there was only 3,000, an absolute comparision would not necessarily be accurate. Of course, a better comaprison would include a hsitogram or simolar to plot the relative safety over a period of time, noting a standard deviation over that period of time.

 

I am not sure we would wait for a number of occurencesa deaths to occur before determining the realitve safety between industry - since we are working out the rates of death over a series (in this case hours worked).

Edited March 15 by Jerry_Atrick

[willedoo]

The reasons for quad bikes overtaking tractors is fairly evident I think. Modern tractors are much safer than their older versions, and when tractors were of a less safe design there weren't any quad bikes around to compete in statistics. In those days you got around in the farm ute or a two wheeled conventional ag bike which is a lot safer than a quad bike. In the last 20 to 30 years there's been an explosion of quad bike use on farms. And now they have the side by side two seater buggies that ome mentioned.

[Jerry_Atrick]

8 minutes ago, Jerry_Atrick said:

there would have to be some scaling, as, for example, if in agriculture there was an aggregate of say 3m hours/year worked but in mining there was only 3,000, an absolute comparision would not necessarily be accurate

Actually, I take this back.. I was thinking od non-linear risks, which I don't think a straght number of fatalities per working hour falls into.

[pmccarthy]

It also varies a lot year to year. The mining industry deaths include vehicle accidents anywhere on the lease including access roads. You might have only four or five total fatalities across Australia one year and a dozen the next.

[willedoo]

I suppose statistics can reveal a lot if they're properly broken down. Something like the oil and gas industry is a hard one to generalise because of the diverse nature of work. Fixed facilities like processing plants might have the odd welder blow themselves up, but most accidents happen driving on roads out on the lease somewhere. With drilling, a lot of accidents have been on or around the rig itself and are related to the dangerous nature of the machinery they operate. Then there's pipeline construction work, well servicing and seismic exploration; all varied types of work with their different hazards. If you exclude the working of the rigs, most of the deaths by accident I know of have been from vehicle accidents or crew change aircraft accidents. With crew change planes I personally know of 13 deaths, three serious injury cases and a couple of planeloads of walking wounded that were lucky to walk away.

 

I've only had one close call in a 206 making a bad landing. The pilot landed in the wrong direction with a heap of wind up his tail and the little Cessna didn't want to touch down. When it finally did touch down, it did a big broadside to port, a bit of a fishtail, a broadside to starboard, and a bit more fishtailing before straightening up. Problem was by then we were rapidly running out of strip as we had traversed most of it ten feet off the ground. We pulled up with about six foot of strip left and very smelly brakes. It's the only time in my life I've assumed the brace position (twice). Beyond the end of the strip was a gradually rising sand dune, so in the worse case we probably could have stood on our nose or flipped over if we'd overshot it. Not preferable options but better than trees. Obviously it was a dirt strip. The funny thing is that the nervous, relatively inexperienced pilot went on to become a very experienced, confident bush pilot within the next two years. That was due to the big number of hours he put in when we had crews in the Kimberleys and were flying out of the base in Queensland.

[nomadpete]

Similar story in the power industry. In 18 years I recall a couple of fatalities. Working on high voltage doesn't give you a second chance. We used to joke 'one flash and you're ash'.

 

1. Driver fell asleep at the wheel on the way home from a job. Tree stopped him.

 

2. Man crushed by a trailer when he unhitched it on a slope.

 

3. Electrocution! Poor bloke was working on a rural line when lightning hit the line 2k away. Note that both ends of the run were grounded.

 

4. Snake bite when walking through long grass.

 

5. There was another WTF fatality but I can't  recall details of it.

 

Our regular safety bulletins advised all staff when incidents occurred so no problems were hidden.

Although strict risk assessments and processes are annoying and often slow down productivity, they really do save lives.