Australasian Mine Safety

Australasian Mine Safety Autumn 2011

Australasian Mine Safety is the leading voice for all key decision makers within Mining company's and major contractors. Delivering the latest industry news as it breaks.

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MACHINE SAFETY TRAINING HE SCREAMING NEED FOR MACHINE SAFETY TRAINING A large disconnect exists between the education being delivered and the legal obligations of the people in charge of plant and machinery safety, writes Frank Schrever. Removing or minimising machine risks by design, has long been required by law in all state OH&S and mining legislation. The law recognises that reliance on human behaviour for risk control does not work, and will always fail eventually. Yet, the education system does not prepare the technical people who are designing, manufacturing, modifying, operating, importing or supplying machinery with the knowledge necessary to minimise the risk by design, although the principles of doing this have been well established in global and Australian standards for decades. The mining community has been even slower than manufacturing to wake up to this requirement, and as a consequence suffers much higher design-related serious injuries and fatalities than manufacturing. Since there are no tertiary undergraduate or trade courses yet (to the author’s knowledge) which include a component of safe engineering design principles in the curriculum, it is vital that industry arranges this training for itself, either in- house or through public courses run by recognised technical institutes such as the Institute for Instrumentation, Control and Automation (IICA). The saving in lost time injuries, improved productivity, not to mention the main aim of avoidance of human suffering, is very significant indeed. Although the various state OH&S acts and regulations did not equally follow the 1994 National Standard for Plant when it was published by the NOHSC* in an attempt to achieve a harmonised plant regulation; notably Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia followed it fairly closely in 1995/6. Significant to this document and adopted by most states legislation, were the now well- known hierarchies of control and guarding, which recognise that it is best to design risk out of machinery, plant and equipment before we start to rely on human behaviour. We are guided by law to: • • • Eliminate risk, isolate or substitute and if that is not possible to – Use engineering to minimise risk, and only when all of this has been explored can we then apply; Administrative controls (training, procedure, signage i.e. human behaviour) and finally, at the bottom of the hierarchy; • Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). *National Occupational Health and Safety Commission, now called Safe work Australia The reason for this is obvious when one considers the typical reliability of human beings. Human reliability has been well studied and as a guide, the average performance of a trained human performing a familiar task is one failure in every hundred attempts. (An untrained human performing an unfamiliar task will fail one in 10 attempts), not very good odds. And yet, in many environments, notably the mining environment, often the first risk controls that are considered are administrative and PPE, without ever exploring the possibilities of risk minimisation by engineering design. When this happens the enterprise is depending entirely on the unreliable and variable behaviour of human beings for the safety of its employees. This can and often does expose people to terrible risks and in addition, colleagues, family and friends to potential tragedy (not to mention the legal liabilities of duty holders that may flow from that). The law has often been called an ass, but in this instance the thrust of the law is completely correct. Remove risk so far as is reasonably practicable by design (including redesign) before you depend on administrative controls i.e. human behaviour. This term “reasonably practicable” is peppered throughout the OH&S Acts and regulations in one form or another and is well defined in the Victorian OH&S Act. There are five aspects to consider when evaluating practicability: • • The likelihood of hazard or risk eventuating. The degree of harm that would result. • What you ought reasonably to know about the hazard/risk and ways of eliminating or reducing the risk (state of knowledge). • • The availability and suitability of ways to eliminate or reduce the hazard or risk (technology). The cost of eliminating or reducing the hazard or risk. These criteria can be discussed at length, but suffice it to say that it is assumed the duty holders responsible for controlling risk, (employer, designer, re-designer or modifier, manufacturer, importer, supplier) will be applying these tests to determine whether they have done all they can before moving to the lower levels of the hierarchy of control which now start to depend on behaviour. 56 AUSTRALASIAN MINE SAFETY JOURNAL

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