The emergency exercises test a mine’s preparedness to deal with an emergency and the systems it has in place. Lessons learned at these events are returned to the rest of the coal mining industry.

For the first time the exercise was designed to test the response to the handling of one of the catalyst components used for polyurethane injection – a very hazardous chemical.

The planned scenario involved an LHD driver who was transporting two drums of diesel and two pods of the catalyst component. He entered the wrong cut-through and crashed into a transformer. The collision generated a fire, ‘injuring’ the driver, who was able to alert others to the incident before ‘dying’

Over the following six hours the mine’s workforce, management and emergency systems were tested to see how they coped with the mock emergency.

The outcome was a mixture of excellent responses in some areas and confusion in others, not uncommon in exercises such as these.

Information flow to and from the control room became something of a bottleneck, made more difficult by the fact the exercise was launched on a Sunday night when only a skeleton crew was on-site. In every previous emergency exercise the control room had emerged as a problem area. The control room officer in charge was commended by assessors but he simply had too much to do with multiple phones and alarms going off simultaneously.

One outcome of the Moranbah test is the suggestion of providing the control room officer with a computer icon able to send out automated messages in the event of an emergency.

Key architects of the exercise include David Reece, senior inspector of mines (Coal), David Cliff, director of research at the Minerals Industry Safety and Health Centre (MISHC) and ventilation and modelling expert Martin Watkinson of SIMTARS.

Both Cliff and Reece complimented the mine on the way the exercise was handled, saying the initial response was excellent and the escape process generally good.

The ‘firefighting’ proved difficult to simulate with the teams getting too close to the imaginary fire. A lack of reality in the simulation has been identified as a problem with the exercise in general, and in future there are plans to make these exercises even more realistic than they are now.

Cliff said Moranbah North should be commended for exposing its emergency response system to external scrutiny and test.

Meanwhile, the mine has begun to implement changes to its emergency systems and has introduced training to improve perceived shortfalls.