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OEMs, miners and academics gather for safety

ERGONOMIST Robin Burgess-Limerick will deliver the findings of an ACARP project to update his acclaimed 2005 Reducing Injury Risks Associated with Underground Coal Mining Equipment study at seminars in New South Wales and Queensland.

Blair Price
OEMs, miners and academics gather for safety

The full-day seminar program also features presentations from Joy, Sandvik and Industrea to express their viewpoints and make safety updates.

The NSW seminar will be held at the Sebel Kirkton Park in Pokolbin on June 22 and will feature an opening address from Xstrata Coal group safety manager Dave Mellows.

Xstrata Coal group engineer Paul Gill and Centennial Coal group manager of business improvement Peter Bergin will provide an update on the activities of the underground coal committee of the Earth Moving Equipment Safety Round Table at the Pokolbin seminar.

The state government regulatory view will come from Investment & Industry NSW’s Paul Drain and Chris Gearing.

The Queensland seminar will be held on July 13 at the Ocean International Hotel in Mackay.

Peabody Energy Australia chief engineer Peter Brisbane will make the opening address while the Department of Employment, Economic Development & Innovation senior principal ergonomist Trudy Tilbury will discuss the state’s regulatory view.

Anglo American Metallurgical Coal general manager underground operations Tim Hobson will provide an update on the activities of the underground coal committee of EMERST at the Mackay seminar.

Guest speakers at both seminars include consultancy Ergowork’s Justin O’Sullivan, Foster OHS’s Gary Foster and Xstrata’s senior mining engineer of the Ulan West project, Ben Smith.

O’Sullivan will explore the integration of ergonomics in equipment design, Foster will look into assessing and controlling whole body vibration risks while Smith’s talk is on ensuring “safe design” through procurement.

Registration closes June 16 for the Pokolbin seminar and July 7 for the Mackay event.

Each seminar costs $150 and includes meals. Burgess-Limerick will handle any queries and can be contacted by email at robin@burgess-limerick.com.

The flyer is available here: http://burgess-limerick.com/site/Home_files/seminarflyer.pdf

Reducing injury risks study

Preliminary findings of the ACARP project were released last year.

“The aim of the analysis was to identify opportunities for further improvements to the design of underground equipment – by both identifying the most frequent injuries and the low frequency but potentially high consequence ‘sentinel’ events,” Burgess-Limerick said.

In the three years to the end of June 2008, there was a total of 4633 injuries in underground coal mining in New South Wales, excluding accidents occurring at the surface of an underground mine and deafness claims.

Continuous miners and bolting machines present the most dangers, but the preliminary report featured some examples of high-pressure hydraulics injuries.

There were 555 injuries relating to CMs (12%), 257 injuries with bolting machines (6%), 351 with load haul dumps (8%), 332 with longwall equipment (7%), 194 involving transport (4%) and 152 with shuttle cars (3%).

Another 308 injuries came from other equipment, dominated by the 115 from using hand-held bolters, while graders, stone dusters, dolly cars, road headers, longwall moving equipment and gas drainage drilling made up the rest.

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