The longwall industry was rocked in 1999 when trainee miner North - then 23 - lost both his legs after being caught in an armoured face conveyor at the tailgate drive sprocket of longwall 14 at Oaky Creek No. 1 mine.
Enduring an eight-hour ordeal underground, including amputation surgery for four hours, North was fortunate to survive the incident and has since rebuilt his life away from the mining industry, representing Australia in the Paralympics.
Now returning to the industry that almost took his life he has joined safety trainer Andrea Lamb to deliver his story as part of a personalised safety motivation program to those in the mining industry.
Named "Choices and Consequences", his seminar with the Walter Mining employees brought home the truths and serious consequences of safety and was boosted by a 3D animated behavioural observational program, developed for Walter Mining by Lamb and business partner Akia Design.
"By discussing his own missed opportunities for prevention, Brant reinforces the necessity for personal responsibility towards safety and the correct application of the risk management tools available," Lamb said.
"With an honest and genuine approach, Brant encourages employees to take time to assess the hazards and manage all associated risk.
"The 3D training program was modelled on a underground coal mine and uses an interactive scenario enabling employees to identify the various obvious and subtle substandard practices and conditions typical to underground mining," Lamb explained.
"Employees are then required to record these as part of the assessment. The scenario is replayed, displaying the correct standards and conditions.
"This has generated a lot of interest from various companies as a way of improving the current hazard identification training programs available, so we are working now with various mining companies to produce a diverse range of 3D training animations."
Having recently established her training company, Step Up Safety and Training Services, Lamb said there has been a shift in attitude towards safety across the industry, with the workforce getting more involved in the training process.
"Personal responsibility for safety continues to be a big issue at the moment and there seems to be more input from the workforce on how to improve systems and processes," Lamb said.
"Support and commitment from management is essential, however, to ensure the input is valued and implemented where appropriate as this will ultimately encourage the reporting process.
"Improvement of current training programs seems to be a common theme I have witnessed lately. A lot of the minesites are interested in improving their current material while machine interface and hazard identification have generated a lot of interest in particular."
To read Brant North's storyclick here.
