Often labelled as the highlight on the NSW Mining calendar, the 2024 Health, Safety, Environment and Community (HSEC) Conference was held in the Hunter Valley in August and included the annual HSEC Awards dinner.
The prestigious annual awards are an important part of the conference highlighting the industry’s efforts to deliver better outcomes for the mining workforce, the communities they operate in and the environment.
NSW Minerals Council CEO Stephen Galilee said all the entrants this year were of a very high standard.
“The drive to innovate and develop world-leading practices is part of the NSW mining industry’s commitment to mine responsibly now and in the future.
“Our 2024 award entrants have continued a very high standard, demonstrating our industry’s commitment to improving how we operate. Congratulations to all our winners and finalists.”
The winners were announced in four categories – ‘Health Excellence’, ‘Safety Excellence’, ‘Environmental Excellence’ and ‘Community Excellence’.
HEALTH EXCELLENCE AWARD
Peabody’s Metropolitan Mine won the 2024 Health Excellence Award for their Spring Panther initiative. The Spring Panther is a low-cost, high-return initiative combining a spring balancer with a lightweight monorail system to eliminate substantial manual handling risks from using hand bolters.
Before Spring Panther, the workforce at the colliery at Helensburgh manually operated heavy hand bolters to carry out highly repetitive daily tasks. The manual operation of those hand bolters over time leads to increased muscle tension and related ailments, decreasing the quality of life of the employees and their ongoing productivity.
The Spring Panther is easily portable, and has been shown to be transferable between sites, making it easy for any mine or equivalent industry to use.
Zoe Matthews, the Health and Safety Training Administrator at the mine said manual handling was a huge issue.
“It was causing up to about 60 injuries over the last four years. Some of the main injuries that we had on site were lower back, shoulders, mostly in the upper body region, we’ve had shoulder reconstructions, and that’s twelve months away from site that not only impacts site, but it impacts the person themselves, so these injuries come at a huge cost that’s about $6 million for the rehab, wages and the insurance premiums.”
Peabody said they have seen a positive boost to production, reduced long-term injuries, and lost labour.
SAFETY EXCELLENCE AWARD
Newcastle Coal Infrastructure Group (NCIG) won the Safety Excellence Award for their development of the Safety Culture Score (SCS).
The development of the SCS was in response to NCIG’s challenge of not being able to effectively measure safety performance due to the limitations of traditional lag indicators, especially given its low injury record.
The SCS integrates lead safety indicators across four key dimensions – Environment, Practices, People and Leadership. It’s integrated into monthly reporting which NCIG said creates transparency and accountability.
NCIG said the introduction of the SCS has yielded tangible benefits, notably a 10% increase in SCS over the FY21-23 period correlating with a reduction of 34% in total incidents and 50% in recorded injuries.
NCIG believes that in creating the SCS they have set a precedent for enhancing safety performance reporting globally with a framework that can be adopted to any organisation.
ENVIRONMENTAL EXCELLENCE AWARD
The environment team at Wilpinjong mine north-east of Mudgee won the award for Environmental Excellence for their Mine Adit Restoration for Microbats.
During an environmental assessment at the mine, a historical oil shale mine adit within the proposed Wilpinjong extension area was discovered to be home to two threatened species of microbats.
When it was uncovered, old timber beams were supporting the adit, however there was evidence of rock falls at the entrance and concerns that blasting for a future extension project within 150 metres could accelerate the adits likely eventual collapse.
The Wilpinjong Environmental Department collaborated with a bat specialist to design a cost-effective, innovative adit support structure which protects the microbat colony.
Monitoring by the environment team has shown the bats are actively using the support structure.
“This project is important to Wilpinjong because it partly demonstrates our commitment to the environment but also our commitment to being a good community member within our local Mudgee community,” said Kieran Roberts, Manager of Environment and Community.
COMMUNITY EXCELLENCE AWARD
Muswellbrook-born Dreampath Recruitment took out the Community Excellence Award for their pre-employment training program targeted specifically at indigenous people entering mining.
Dreampath identified that the major barrier for indigenous people entering the mining workforce was the lack of appropriate pre-employment training. Dreampath came up with an immersive pre-employment experience that combines advanced simulator training with classroom theory, practical demonstrations, and life skills coaching, equipping candidate with over 80 hours of accredited training.
Dreampath launched its new Hunter Valley branch near Muswellbrook last year that houses a CAT 793 simulator that has a fully immersive screen that takes candidates through real life situations as part of their training.
“The simulation program that we currently have is a great initiative. The candidates get to come in for a two-week trial period into our process system, they get to drive our simulator, go to a mine site and get their hands involved and it helps provide those pathways and give people a bit of an insight into what their future might look like,” said Steven Fordham, Managing Director Blackrock Industries.
The program is already having an impact with 25 of 50 candidates securing a CERT III Surface Extraction Traineeship. The development of the project was supported significantly by MACH Energy and its Aboriginal Community Development Fund.
