Addressing about 60 delegates at the fourth annual Bulk Materials Handling conference in Brisbane last week, the Swinburne University of Technology professor said he had never seen a conveyor belt that would receive more than a 75% pass mark if the Australian Standard was applied to it.

“Over a number of years, I’ve seen a number of cases where people have lost their lives as a result of a lack of safety in bulk materials handling, particularly with belt conveyor systems,” he said.

Viner said the problems could be attributed to a combination of factors involving each member in the conveyor belt chain, namely principal contractors; the designers, manufacturers and suppliers; the erectors and installers; and the operators.

“The real scenario looks like this, these people who are involved in the process and production in the design of something and its operational parameters, who are of crucial importance in providing a safe workplace, don’t actually know what is going on,” Viner said.

“I’ve never seen any operating manuals, inspection manuals from a designer, ever. My feeling is that they’re not connected to the world and real-life experiences, there is nothing connecting them to the experience operators are having.”

On contractors, Viner said he once had the opportunity to speak to a contractor who was finishing the construction of a belt conveyor. After walking around the system, Viner said he could tell it did not comply with Australian standards.

“I asked him why and he said he couldn’t possibly comply with all those requirements at a competitive price.

“Contractors are subject to some serious competitive cost pressures, I know, I am a director of a company which is a contracting organisation.

“I know from personal experiences that unless you dumb it down and simplify it and provide your services at a price which is utterly inappropriate with running a good, well organised, high quality service which is sustainable into the future, you’re a dead duck in the water.”

In addition, Viner said manufacturers and installers have to try and make a profit with minimal cut down to the ‘bones’ price and if anything goes wrong, they’re eating into their minimal profit.

“I also suspect that the engineers who get involved in the commissioning probably haven’t had a detailed read of the code practice book for the plant, the code practice of safeguarding of machinery, the Australian standard on the safeguarding of machinery or the Australian standard on the safety of conveyor systems,” he said.

“At the operating point, what we’re talking about is statistically pretty unlikely to happen, these deaths don’t occur twice a year, so you may have people operating conveyor systems for most of their working life and they won’t personally experience one of these sorts of problems.

“But it is my feeling there are no learning mechanisms in place, there are no proactive control mechanisms in place.

“Without the correct understanding what the safety is, we’re not going to go anywhere. Part of that understanding is to try and get not just the individuals in the industry to understand safety but also to create within the community some systems and processes which actually facilitate an understanding of what that actually means.”