Published in the August 2011 Australia’s Mining Monthly

The report from a coroner’s inquest, released earlier this year indicated the deaths of two miners in separate road accidents may have been due to fatigue.

The inquest recommended mine operators did more to reduce the risks associated with commuting and fatigue.

Miners Graham Brown and Robert Wilson died in two vehicle accidents, one on October 24, 2005 and the other on February 1, 2005 in Queensland.

Brown worked at the Blackwater mine and was making the two hour drive home after his shift when the accident happened. He collided with a police car driven by senior constable Malcolm MacKenzie, who also was killed.

Wilson was working at Norwich Park mine and after finishing his night shift hit an oncoming car and was killed instantly. The driver of the other car was not seriously hurt.

Wilson’s colleagues later described him as being very tired when he left work that day.

In 2007 a Caterpillar Global Mining study revealed 65% of truck haulage accidents in surface mining operations were directly related to operator fatigue.

The commute to and from a minesite is often a long drive and can be exhausting, especially after a 12-hour shift.

One alternative is providing buses for those tired commuters, and Greyhound Australia has been working with mining giants Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton to help them assess transit providers.

Greyhound has developed a bus vendor capabilities audit that features more than 100 questions covering a range of topics from maintenance and monitoring to incident and disaster management.

The audit has been developed to improve the standard of buses and bus services provided to the mining and resource industry.

Greyhound general manager Osman Bahemia said that since the charter airline industry was highly regulated it was just as important the bus industry followed suit.

“What we do is essentially the same thing as the charter airlines except we’re on the ground, where there are more trafficaccidents, dangers, risks and the bus industry has, in terms of the mining side, no regulation apart from licensing for a heavy vehicle,” he said. “There’s no standard for safety, there’s no standards for maintenance, no specific requirements for drivers or the types of vehicles being used.So what we would like to see is a high level of standard brought into the mining industry.

“We are trying to raise the bar and bring the industry with us because we feel that the mining industry, the people making decisions on selecting buses, are really uneducated in what is required to transport people by bus.”

The audit features a range of technology that can help reduce risk on road.

This includes vehicle tracking, monitoring, key performance indicators, passenger manifest, cameras and engine motoring.

Bahemia said Greyhound wanted to reinforce the message that a bus was not just a bus, it was a safety component.