Safety solutions start at the top: Cutifani

THE past few years have been tough for the safety of miners as the alternating demands of boom and belt-tightening put workers and managers under pressure to perform.

According to WA Department of Mines & Petroleum figures, the lost time injury frequency rate (LTIFR) for miners in Western Australia declined steadily from 3.5 per million man hours in 2007 to 2.8 in 2009. But fatalities actually rose from three in 2007, to four in 2008 and six in 2009.

Meanwhile, the safety record of South African miners remained appalling, as fatalities continued with frightening regularity.

Against that backdrop, hundreds of industry participants attended the WA Chamber of Minerals and Energy’s 2010 Safety and Health Conference in Perth last week.

Heading the bill was Mark Cutifani, the Australian-born chief of South Africa’s AngloGold Ashanti, and BHP Iron Ore president Ian Ashby.

Accidents were rife when Mr Cutifani took the helm at AngloGold in 2007, a year during which it suffered 34 fatalities.

However, Mr Cutifani said workplace changes had cut fatalities by more than 70 per cent since that time, and AngloGold now believed it could achieve zero mine fatalities by 2015.

He said that improvement reflected changes to specific mining practices, particular at underground operations, but also to AngloGold’s focus on how risks were communicated to, and understood by, workers themselves.

With up to 11 different languages spoken at some AngloGold sites, “a two way conversation (was) a challenge”, Mr Cutifani said.

AngloGold subsequently focused on worker literacy, doubling literacy levels to more than 70 per cent. It has also created a hybrid language of about 200 key words to make it easier to communicate risk awareness and procedures to workers.

“We’ve got a long way to go, but it’s something the company has taken on ... and I think it is a long-term key,” Mr Cutifani said.

It has also fostered a culture of “owning” individual worker behaviour, he said.

“The behaviour of workers is a function of the leadership we provide,” Mr Cutifani said.

“In our organisation, I’ll never blame the worker ... because it is our responsibility, our accountability. I own the behaviours of 63,000 people. That level of accountability, in terms of leadership, goes right through the organisation and until you get that, in my view, you haven’t got what safety is about.”

BHP Iron Ore’s Ian Ashby said his company had undertaken a fundamental review of its safety practices after suffering five fatalities in the Pilbara in 2008 and 2009.

It had consequently deployed a catastrophic risk management process (CRM), which set out proscriptive and explicit requirements for every person on a BHP site.

“CRM is a top-to-bottom process. It demands involvement and leadership at all levels of the organisation,” Mr Ashby said. It involved a “proscriptive approach to what people are expected to know” coupled with intensive and constant monitoring of compliance.

BHP had already retrained more than 600 supervisors, all required to achieve a 90 per cent pass mark to retain their supervisor’s credentials. About 10 per cent of supervisors had failed to achieve that mark, and were no longer supervisors.

Another critical issue was ensuring contractors met the same standards as BHP’s own people, Mr Ashby said.

“Contractor safety performance is broadly not to the standard that our industry should be demanding,” he said.

Consequently, BHP was undertaking a “comprehensive program ... to materially improve our contractor performance”.

“Essentially contractors won’t get through our gate unless their people have been verified through a third party that they are trained and competent to do the work we have proscribed in their contracts,” Mr Ashby said.