PERTH (miningweekly.com) – The Western Australian Department of Mines and Petroleum is investigating a fatality at Fortescue Metals’ Christmas Creek iron-ore mine, in the Pilbara – the state's first mine death in two years.

The miner reported on Thursday that a contract worker had died during an incident overnight.

Fortescue operations director David Woodall said the company had suspended mining and processing operations at Christmas Creek, which is primarily a contractor-based site with mining and ore processing outsourced to major contractors.

In a statement posted on its website, the Electrical Trades Union (ETU) identified the victim as a 24-year-old electrician from New Zealand.

The union stated that it had previously raised concerns about the safety practices of the contracting firm involved.

ETU WA secretary Les McLaughlan said the union understood that the man was carrying out maintenance work on a large motor operating in the crushing plant when he was killed. The union said it had, in the past, raised concerns about this type of work in a different part of the mine.

“Working on live equipment is inherently dangerous,” McLaughlan said. “What we need to know is whether the company took any extra safety precautions after we raised these concerns.”

He also said the incident highlighted the dangers of people working alone during the night shift, and the ETU had previously called for this practice to be stopped. “Working alone is a particularly dangerous practice during the night shift - as in this incident; because there are fewer people around to assist should a worker get into trouble.”

Woodall said the company was deeply saddened by the incident and that it had made chaplaincy and counselling services available to family members and colleagues of the deceased.

The last Western Australia fatality was on August 16, 2011, when a 27-year-old man died while changing a hydraulic cylinder on a front-end loader at Rio Tinto’s Brockman 2 mine, near Tom Price.

Mining began at Christmas Creek in May 2009 with major expansion projects undertaken over the next two years to increase its capacity. During the Christmas Creek expansion, two ore processing facilities were constructed and commissioned, in April 2011 and September 2012. The processing facilities have a combined throughput capacity of more than 50-million tons a year.