Mining giant Anglo American’s iron-ore business, Kumba Iron Ore, has started a family education programme that is focused on educating children from a young age on the dangers of fatigue and how to mitigate these dangers.

The programme includes books varying from a colouring book for Grade R to Grade 3 learners and two comic books for Grade 4 to Grade 7 and Grade 8 to 12 learners.

“Basically, the concept that we have now is a programme that aims to reduce and manage fatigue within mines, enhancing employee safety and preventing accidents, deaths and lost time owing to injury,” says Dr Doug Potter, director of Fatigue Sharks, which designed the programme.

The programme has been designed to include children from ages as young as five through to their teenage years. The learning material deals extensively with fatigue and has an in-depth focus on nutrition and healthy eating.

“We also provide the children with fatigue education booklets, which educate them on the jobs their parents do during a night shift. “This is done so that the children are taught how to handle and understand the dangers and precautions that need to be taken by their parents and gives them a skill set that allows the children to help and understand what their parents need to do in order to prepare and be safe while working nightshift sessions,” explains Potter.

In addition to educating children on fatigue, Fatigue Sharks has also introduced a new programme, called Visual AIM, which was developed by Prism CEO Dave Nash for mine sites and can be used to determine whether a miner’s working schedule is safe.

“The programme allows for mine operators and workers to determine if a mine schedule is safe. “Basically, it works on a +10 to –10 scale, with the numbers represented on the schedule signifying the safety measure for that particular working day.

“Any negative number, or anything below a zero, is bad, so the mine manager has the chance to correct this and introduce methods that can change this to a positive working schedule.”

Miners and mine managers are given a list of the various methods that can be used to try to eliminate fatigue and bring up the number to +10 to ensure that the schedule is deemed safe.

Further, Potter notes that the mines are also using the Predictive Risk Intelligent Safety Module (Prism), which integrates data from several fatigue tools into a central data- base.

Prism undertakes an analysis of a mine’s requirements, its schedules, employees’ shifts, the number of workers and the mine’s function to identify the changes needed to reduce fatigue. It then tracks each employee and, based on the shift, job-risk profile and shift functions, provides a fatigue score when an employee starts or completes a shift.

“The system will calculate the fatigue score and the hours that the miner has been working. “If the system detects that the worker is in a danger zone with regard to fatigue levels, it alerts the shift manager by text or instant messaging of the conditions and countermeasures can then be enforced should the worker still continue to work,” explains Potter.

Fatigue is kown to have a big impact on miners, especially with so many deaths occurring in the mining industry. These systems are designed to assist in preventing deaths and injuries.

“If we can train the guys ahead, as we are doing with the fatigue programme, which starts teaching children at a young age, by the time they get to the mine, they are familiar with the working conditions and what they need to do to make sure that they are safe and know how to handle fatigue,” concludes Potter.