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SAFETY IN CONFINED SPACES HE TO KEY PREPARATIONS TO PREVENT CONFINED SPACE FATALITIES WITHIN THE MINING INDUSTRY Regular training and emergency scenarios should focus on enhancing skills by exposing personnel to a variety of different situations to greatly reduce the likelihood of fatalies and injuries within the mining industry, writes Steve McLeod. When was the last time you reviewed your confined spaces on site? Have your personnel undertaken training based on their specific roles related to confined space entries? Within the mining industry workers regularly enter confined spaces such as furnaces, bag-houses, bins, crushers, chutes and grinding mills in conjunction with their daily work. Sadly confined space fatalities and injuries still occur, often due to a lack of identification and training. The only way to protect your workers from death and serious injury is to ensure that you place confined space safety as a top priority. To reduce the likelihood of fatalities and injuries to your workers you must regularly perform confined space risk assessments and undertake nationally-recognised confined space training that is appropriate to the job roles that your personnel perform. Confined Space Identification and Job Safety and Environmental Analysis (JSEA) Job hazard identification within the mining industry is part of daily life. However confined space work demands specific attention as confined spaces present specific hazards and risks. Australian Standard AS 2865-2009 Confined Spaces places the responsibility of Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment squarely on the employer or their representative. The listed objective is to eliminate or minimise the need to enter confined spaces. The only way for employers to comply with AS 2865-2009 is to undertake confined space identification and risk assessments prior to entry. During a recent analysis that I conducted of confined spaces fatalities within the last 10 years in Australia, I found that the major cause of fatalities were occupant(s) not understanding that the space they were working in could be classified as a confined space and therefore not understanding the consequences if things go wrong. This often leads to work such as hot work, the use of petrol-driven equipment and the usage of chemicals being completed within a confined space with often deadly results. The workplaces in which these deaths occurred were varied, however in most occasions no formal confined space identification, risk assessment, entry permit, isolation register or training was completed prior to entry. In fact the lack of understanding about what confined spaces are, what potential hazards can be found within and what control measures are appropriate could be recognised as a primary cause of these incidents. Whilst completing a risk assessment of each particular confined space is an important part of your OH&S policy, a specific JSEA should be completed by the confined space team for each confined space entry to ascertain the specific hazards and risks based on the job that you are completing. By ensuring that the confined space team complete the JSEA together, effective control measures can be developed for each job taking into account the work that is required to be done and the specific hazards and risks that may be encountered. Generic risk assessments of the confined space itself will not normally drastically change from year to year, however tasks that workers complete may indeed change as various tasks are performed within the one confined space. If the confined space team completes a JSEA that is ‘job based’, all hazards involved with the task should be assessed and controlled thereby reducing the likelihood of confined space fatalities and injuries. Confined Space Training Consider this: you have completed a one-day confined space entry course 18 months ago. It was a theory-based course with no practical activities and conducted in a classroom. You are now on site at a mine in Northern Queensland performing maintenance work. Over the radio you hear ‘emergency, emergency, emergency, one person unconscious within a water cart.’ You attend to the site (no Emergency Response Team (ERT) personnel at this site) and you are confronted with a setup tripod and 36 AUSTRALASIAN MINE SAFETY JOURNAL