PERTH (miningweekly.com) – An independent report commissioned by the Queensland Department of Natural Resources, Mines and Energy has warned that the mining industry in the state was stuck in a ‘fatality cycle’, which would continue unless significant changes were made to how the sector operated.

Six fatalities occurred between June 2018 and July 2019, with the study finding that the rate of fatalities was likely to continue at current levels if the industry continued to take a similar approach to safety, and use the same philosophies and methodologies that have been adopted over the last 20 years.

“The cycle further suggests that the periods with few to no fatalities should be viewed as simply part of the fatality cycle – they are not evidence of the industry becoming safer over the long term. Instead, further fatalities should be expected as the cycle continues. This may appear a bleak prediction, but this cycle has proven surprisingly resilient over the past 191⁄2 years,” the report reads.

The report noted that the mining industry should recognise that the causes of fatalities are typically a combination of banal, everyday, straightforward factors, such as a failure of controls, a lack of training, or absent or inadequate supervision.

“Internal incident investigations in mining companies must strive to capture these combinations of causal factors, and avoid simplifying them to a single cause, such as human error, bad luck or freak accidents, which has the potential to mask the underlying system failures.”

The report said that of the 47 fatalities reported over the last 20 years, nearly all of them were the result of systemic, organisational, supervision or training failures, either with or without the presence of human error, with 17 of these not involving human error at all on the part of the deceased.

The report recommended that the industry had to ensure that workers were appropriately trained for their specific tasks, and needed to focus on ensuring workers were appropriately supervised for the tasks they were undertaking.

The report also made a number of other suggestions, including that the regulator should develop a new and greatly simplified incident reporting system that is easy to use by those in the field, that is unambiguous, and that aims to encourage open reporting, rather than be an administrative burden to reporting, and that the industry should shift its focus from lost-time injuries and the lost time injury frequency rate as a safety indicator.

The Queensland Resources Council (QRC) has welcomed the report, which was tabled in Parliament this week, saying that it endorsed all of the recommendations made.

The industry body has committed to redoubling efforts to do everything possible to maintain vigilance and remain safe.

“The QRC fully accepts that while the mining industry has inherent risk we must always improve the focus on the practical actions that can keep our workers safe. The QRC will now undertake further detailed review of [the] findings as a matter of urgency,” it said.