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CONFERENCE COVERAGE N ALL-RISKS APPROACH TO MINE RESCUE AND EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT Safety officers must ensure best practices are adhered to when it comes to mine rescue and emergency management strategies, writes Arthur Chan. The successful rescue of the 33 miners trapped in San Jose Mine, Chile in October last year, highlighted two things we at Mining IQ believe can never be reiterated enough: firstly, the unpredictable nature of our industry; and secondly, the importance of effective rescue and emergency management strategies. Of course, safety and emergency response management systems have always been critical to our industry, but the National Mine Safety Framework (as part of the National Workplace Health and Safety legislation), as well as the severe skills shortage in the industry, mean there has never been a more important time to review your mine operations and emergency management procedures. Whilst the legislation will no doubt act as a solid foundation from which to build emergency management plans, safety officers must still ensure best practices are adhered to when it comes to mine rescue and emergency management strategies. We interviewed Grant Chisnall, Director at Dynamiq Pty Ltd, to discuss his views and opinions on best practice in the area of mine safety and emergency management. How do you devise a mine site emergency management plan? What do you consider to be best practice? For mine site emergency planning, the best practice we talk about is about developing resilience. And this is about integrating safety management, people, risk management practices, business continuity strategies along with crisis and emergency management strategies to ensure resilience in organisations. This makes them well prepared for, and able to respond quickly to, any incidents that may threaten them. When we talk about implementing the mine site emergency plans, I think we’re starting to see a trend across the industry, where they take the this idea bit further and talk about a framework approach to mine emergency. 16 AUSTRALASIAN MINE SAFETY JOURNAL With recent events such as Pike River, global miners are increasingly aware of the reputation risks associated with operational emergencies. So they are now starting to take their planning from purely an emergency management level right through to a crisis management level. And we’ve seen this a lot in our clients, both here and overseas. Their best practices have certainly improved over the past few years as they change their approach. They review and improve on their plans, and understand their operating environment and risks, and ultimately, develop crisis management plans and business continuity plans tailored to these. What we’re seeing is that their capability investment becomes quite good, so people are investing in the training and testing of these systems. This obviously ensures that in the worst case scenarios, they’re still well- prepared. So it’s a more holistic approach to emergency management from the mining industry, and I think it’s on the forefront of most industries we’ve worked with. We know that it is impossible to plan for every contingency and scenario, so how do you decide what to draft detailed plans for? I think it’s a difficult challenge. In the past we’ve seen companies have had a real focus on scenario-based plans. And often, for a number of clients, they have a templated plan they’ve dusted off from another site or engagement, or have a corporate association with them. For example, they might have to include a sabotage or security threat one, which may not be a major issue at a remote area site. Whereas for an overseas operations, a sabotage and/or kidnap threat would be a more tangible threat for an operation in Africa or other more difficult places. The trend now (and certainly the advice we give) is that mine emergency plans need to be risk-based and aligned with legislative requirements. In turn, this gives efficiency in your emergency planning investment. Companies don’t really need to have a whole suit of various plans that they: • • • have to establish have to train people on have to maintain every year That’s because, as we know, emergency planning is a big investment and difficult task, especially so if you have to manage all these various procedures. So from the way the industry is moving, it’s an all-hazards, all-risks approach, one which focuses on the key risks relevant to the particular operations. Ultimately, it’s about knowing your operations, daily tasks, people and operating environments to start with. Building tailored plans to suit this is essential. But more importantly, you have to make sure your people are extremely well prepared to quickly identify these risks before they eventuate into an incident. And you have to have effective strategies in place to activate your response. To make the right assessments, you need to get the right people together at the right time to make the right decisions about your response in face of a threat. Grant Chisnall will be speaking at the Mine Rescue and Emergency Management conference to be held in Brisbane on 31st May – 1st June. Now in its fifth year, the conference has been designed to equip you with strategies, methods and models that you can apply on your own mine site. For more information about the event, please visit www.MineRescue.com.au or call +61 2 9229 1000. You can also email enquire@iqpc.com.au You can also visit www.miningiq. com for regularly updated industry interviews, podcasts, opinions, articles, Q&As, white papers and industry updates or follow us on Twitter: @ MiningIQ *Note: Responses were taken from Mining IQ’s audio interviews and were repurposed for print.