Modern Mining October 2016

SAFETY IN MINING

Safety – how good (or bad) are we really? One of the speakers at the recent Joburg Indaba to address the issue of mine safety was Dr Sizwe Phakathi, Head of Safety and Sustainable Development at the Chamber of Mines. His presentation was entitled ‘Safety: How good (or bad) are we really?’ The conclusion he came to was that South Africa’s mining industry was generally performing well in the safety arena, with fatalities dramatically down and with most other statistics heading in the right direction.

Dr Sizwe Phakathi addresses the Joburg Indaba (photo: Wynand van der Merwe). One graph he showed indicated that South Africa’s fatality rate per million hours had improved markedly since 2003. In that year the figure for South Africa was 0,30, well above the figures for the USA, Canada (Ontario) and Australia which were all below 0,10 at that point. By 2014 the South African rate had come down to 0,08, a figure on a par with the other mining jurisdictions. Moreover, South Africa’s platinum mining sector had performed better than international metalliferous mines over the past two years while local coal mines were now operating more safely than US coal mines. The fatality rates by commodity within South Africa’s mining industry had also improved over this same period, he said – by 81 % in the case of coal, 79 % in the case of platinum and 61 % for gold. Dr Phakathi listed the major contributors to fatalities as being ‘fall of ground’, ‘trans- portation and mining’, and ‘machinery’. Here again all the statistics were pointing in the right direction with ‘fall of ground’ fatalities having declined from 303 in 1993 to just 22

D r Phakathi said the South African mining sector had made signifi- cant progress over the past two decades to improve safety and occupational health, achieving an 87 % reduction in the number of fatalities between 1993 and 2015. He added that the industry had now reduced fatalities for eight consecutive years (to 2015) and had also been achieving a consistent reduction in serious in- juries per year. He further noted that South Africa was doing well measured against international benchmarks, a laudable achievement given the fact that the local mining industry was still to a large extent labour intensive, using conventional mining methods (which are gen- erally less safe than mechanised methods), and faced challenging geological conditions. He also pointed to the depth of South Africa’s gold and platinum mines.

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Total reduction in the number of fall of ground (FoG) related fatalities, 2003-2015.

38  MODERN MINING  October 2016