This year’s Queensland Premier’s Award for Excellence in Road Safety, announced in October, honoured a program aimed at cutting the incidence of driver fatigue among mine workers in the Bowen Basin coal region through a partnership of industry, community and government.

The education program, aimed at workers who drive home after completing shifts as long as 12 hours, is part of a larger suite of road safety initiatives overseen by Mackay’s Road Accident Action Group and the Mining Industry Road Safety Alliance, which it formed with resources companies operating in the region.

The programs run by the group began in 2001 but were stepped up in 2004 once the mining boom in the Bowen Basin took off. And the concurrent infrastructure boom in the region has seen the group also target tired construction workers driving home from projects including a power station being built at Chinchilla.

RAAG member and Mackay Police senior sergeant Noel Lang estimates the group has spoken to about 5500 mine workers and given 160 presentations since its inception.

Lang said mining companies in the Bowen Basin region began to take notice of the work the group was doing in the past year and have collectively donated $715,000 to the programs it is running.

This money allowed Lang and a Queensland Transport official to effectively work full-time on the group’s road safety programs.

As well as fatigue, these look at addressing dimension and constraint issues with wide loads on trucks, the promotion of turning on vehicle lights at all times and eliminating risk-taking behaviour such as mobile phone use while driving.

They rely on education sessions delivered on mine sites as well as billboards with road safety messages erected in problem areas.

“We’re focused on the ‘fatal four’ of drink driving, fatigue, not wearing seatbelts and speeding,” Lang said.

Among the group’s members is Queensland woman Dawn Deakin, who become an advocate for eliminating driver fatigue following the death of her husband, who got behind the wheel after a long shift on the mines with terrible consequences.

Deakin’s testimony about the effects on family of such a tragedy form a key part of the program that won the RAAG its recent award.

Also included in these fatigue management program are statistics about the number of deaths and injuries attributable to fatigue and policing issues such as penalties faced by those who drive tired.

And Lang said it wasn’t just the mining and construction workers who came under the scope of the group’s ambitions.

“We target anyone who is on a road, even though we have the mining industry as our main focus. We also deal with transport companies that might be going out and servicing the mining industry and so on,” he said. “The distances that some of these people travel are just massive.”

To this end, Queensland transport firm McAleese Transport, which moves most of the wide loads in the Bowen Basin area, is a core member of the Mining Industry Road Safety Alliance along with mining companies including Xstrata, Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton and Peabody.

Lang said surveys of Bowen Basin miners had proven the need for a heavy emphasis on eliminating driver fatigue.

“Throughout the industry we’ve surveyed probably 2500 people and 89% of those have reported experiencing fatigue at some stage while traveling from work,” he said.

“We ask what they do about it and 56% said they pulled over and took a rest, swapped drivers or did something else, 33% said they kept driving and the rest didn’t respond,” he said.

Partners in the RAAG include Queensland Transport, Main Roads, fire services, police and government agencies.

Published in the November 2006 Transport Review