Mining major Gold Fields is eyeing a 33% improvement on its safety performance during 2008, when 21 fatalities took place.

Last year, the group set itself a target of 50% improvement on 2007’s safety record, a target that CEO Nick Holland reported last week the company had achieved. He was speaking at the World Gold Conference, in Johannesburg.

He put Gold Fields’ improving safety performance down to a change in mindset and recalled how, at a memorial service in 2007 for workers who had died at the company’s South Deep mine, he promised that if the company could not mine safely, it would not mine.

“Many people thought that the company was crazy. They said that the company exists to mine. But, in living up to the commitment made at the memorial service, the company closed down its Kloof mine for seven months to carry out maintenance work. The company lost between 15% and 20% of its market value in one day,” said Holland.

However, this did not deter him, and the company forged ahead with an ambitious campaign to repair its fractured image. Holland reported that Gold Fields’ Driefontein mine had gone eight months without a fatal accident. Similar results had been achieved at Beatrix, in the Free State, where the mine had gone almost nine months without a fata- lity, while South Deep had gone 17 months without a fatality.

“If one goes back five years, these opera- tions were recording a fatality every week,” said Holland.

He attributed the company’s improved safety performance to five key tenets that he instituted when he began his tenure.

The first is a programme where employees are encouraged to be aware of the area they work in – workers are encouraged not to take unnecessary risks and to pull out of an area that is unsafe rather than work in it.

The second is technical, engineering and mine design. Holland reports that the board relooked at the designs of its South African operations and employed companies to make improvements in key areas.

The third is to encourage a culture of safety. Holland reported that this was the hardest to achieve because, by nature, the workers’ lives are at risk as much away from the mine as on it. He added that the company needed to change the workers’ value and belief system to encourage a culture of safety.

The fourth is organisational effectiveness and efficiency, where employees are encouraged to work smarter, and the final tenet is performance and leadership excellence, where mine managers and high ranking officials within the company visibly visit the operations and engage with workers.

Holland reported that, although the company had taken significant steps in improving its safety performance in all risk areas, seismicity was still a major hazard to the workers.

“The company has not been able to signifi- cantly decrease its fatalities in seismicity. A task team has been established to identify and reduce the impact in high-risk areas. Mining was also stopped in areas that were identified as high-risk areas and the company increased its overhead support through stope roof bolting and heavy-duty nets at various heights,” said Holland.