How mining sites are improving their emergency evacuation procedures
Underground Victorian goldmine Stawell is using data to save lives. Recently, they digitalised their people management system. They found the changes increased safety and accountability, especially with emergency evacuation.
Mining emergency evacuation procedures in Stawell Goldmine
Stawell employs 250 personnel and 250 to 350 contractors. Keeping track of workers, especially in times of emergency was problematic.
“Trying to track down where staff members were in relation to the site (was difficult),” says Andrew Shaw, senior safety advisor and emergency response coordinator.
Stawell conducts emergency evacuation musters every three months, underground and on the surface. However, their manual tagboard system resulted in unreliable data, and didn’t give them the full picture of the worker’s location.
“Underground is critically important. If we have an incident relating to any of our exposures underground, we need to make sure our staff are accounted for as quickly as possible so we don’t have anyone going; oh, where are they? What are they doing?” says Shaw.
The Challenge
Stawell wanted to modernise their people management to improve safety on site. The main reason being the current system couldn’t provide real time data on worker’s movements. Monitoring people moving to muster areas during an evacuation was difficult. They couldn’t reliably account for all workers before explosives were detonation underground. Stawell also needed to know who was within high security areas at the end of a shift.
They needed to account for all people at all times.
“Especially if we’re deploying an emergency response team.”
Updating the tagboard system
All mines have a tag board system, where miners manually place their tag on the board when they go underground, removing the tag when they return.
Time and People added a digitalised system.
“We’ve built a digital dashboard to simulate the keyboard system. So they can see who is underground from anywhere,” says Peter Morrissey from Time and People.
Adding the digital system has major advantages. All workers, contractors and visitors are messaged and accounted for during an emergency evacuation.
“It’s literally black and white,” says Shaw about the changes.
The software works across multiple locations and numbers can be accessed live and remotely.
“We know where they’re located underground, and we can start the message and tracking from there,” says Shaw.
Since Stawell implemented the new system, they’ve noticed an improvement in accuracy and time efficiency with musters. Time and People provide data printed out. So the safety team can check who’s accounted for, rather than recording, go back to the board and checking off manual tags.
“It’s just streamlining the system with functional data that’s easy to extract from the system,” says Shaw.
Safety works hand in hand with education
The miners quickly adapted to the new system. However, educating the miners was crucial to its success.
“If they don’t tag on, it’s referred to as a tag breach, and we treat that very seriously. We need to know who’s in our underground environment,” says Shaw.
“It’s not just walking in and having a look around, and it’s all good. There’s a very strict process that we need to follow. That’s very heavily regulated.”
The safety and emergency response team are looking at how they can use the information and systems Time and People offer to increase efficiency and operation. But also provide them with better data.
“So if we have an emergency, we know where we’ve got people. We know what staff are available, where they are and what location they’re expected to be in.”
If you would like to know more about access management for mining, call Time & People and chat with an experienced staff member now.
1300 800 077
