The most important thing in our industry is keeping people safe and that is exactly what Dr Nikky LaBranche has dedicated her career to.
When she first stepped onto a mine site for vacation work as a young mining engineer in the US, Nikky never imagined how pivotal the experience would be. Years later the mine, the Upper Big Branch Mine, suffered a massive explosion triggered by a methane ignition setting off coal dust and killing 29 people.
It changed the course of her career.
“That is what made me move from a mine planning role into a health and safety role,” said Nikky.
“I was able to get a job with NIOSH at the US Office of Mine Safety and Health Research, a world class facility for mining research.”
Nikky then got an offer she couldn’t refuse to come to Australia to work in the mining industry. It was during the boom but when the downturn came she moved back into research and was working for the Queensland government when the first re-emergence of black lung was identified in the state.
Black lung, or coal workers’ pneumoconiosis (CWP), had been believed to have been eradicated in Australia since the 1980s but when the first new case appeared in 2015, Nikky wasn’t surprised.
“I knew it was the tip of the iceberg. It wasn’t that the disease had disappeared for the last thirty years, it was that we weren’t detecting it properly.”
Nikky went to work uncovering the gaps in our knowledge and why it wasn’t being picked up. One of the first things she found was that it was regional, which raised the question of why some areas – such as Queensland compared to NSW – recorded higher disease rates.
“It had to be something in the coal characteristics. People have tried to look into this before but the technology just wasn’t there. Now we are in a technological revolution and it’s a matter of the right place at the right time. We have microscopes that allow us to look at particles like never before and we also have the industry funding to support the research.”
While many previous studies have taken shovel samples of coal piles or underground material, Nikky went further.
Repurposing a Mineral Liberation Analyzer (MLA), a scanning electron microscope originally designed for mineral processing applications, Nikky took samples directly from the ambient air – the dust workers breathe – which enabled her to analyse the respirable dust and provide detailed measurements of particle size, shape and composition.
What she discovered was that the general seam composition and bulk dust samples didn’t match what people are inhaling.
“A bulk sample contains all particle sizes, but that’s not what is airborne. What we are finding is that airborne particles are significantly smaller than models predict, which means exposure limits are being based on larger particles not the smaller, more hazardous particles we can’t see.
“I did my PhD thesis underground and found that for the same filter mass, one mine could have twenty times the number of smaller particles compared to another. Smaller particles penetrate deeper into the lungs, so exposure limits can’t just be based on mass.”
This is especially true for engineered stone. Cutting, grinding and polishing the silica-rich slabs release ultrafine silica particles, many more per unit mass than from natural stone. The result is a material linked to aggressive lung disease in workers often only in their 20s or 30s.
Nikky’s work is already informing industry policy around dust exposure limits and engineered stone regulations – but that is just the beginning.
Another application she is currently working on is a ‘redeposition method’. Currently, gravimetric filters used in routine dust sampling are sent to labs for analysis, but the results which often come back weeks later report only the total mass of dust and quartz, not its overall composition.
This new method will allow standard compliance samples to be reanalysed, revealing what workers were exposed to – whether it was welding fumes, coal dust, muscovite, calcite or something else.
“This will allow us to really determine what happened during an overexposure event. If a sample comes back over the limit, I can tell you exactly what it was. It gives us answers we’ve never had before.”
While the MLA is providing an unprecedented view of particles, Nikky is reaching its limits as it can only resolve reliably down to a sub-microns scale of around 0.63 microns.
The next step is even more powerful technology.
Later this year, she will begin using a new Field Emission Gun Scanning Electron Microscope as part of a project with the Dust Disease Board in NSW. It is capable of resolving particles down to single nanometres – fine enough to capture diesel particulates which typically start at 30 nanometres.
The implications are profound.
Through Nikky’s work we know now that mass does not tell the whole story when it comes to respirable dust. A gram of dust made of large particles may look the same on paper as a gram of ultrafine particles, but biologically the finer dust delivers exponentially more particles to the lungs each capable of lodging deep in tissue and causing more harm.
By measuring these characteristics, Nikky’s research will make dust control more predictable, less trial-and-error, and promises to reshape how industries everywhere measure, classify and ultimately control dust.
“I go to a lot of mine sites and see that in some places they are using an off-the-shelf set of dust controls. In some places they work well, but in some places they don’t really work at all.
“Dust control has always been an art as well as a science but now that we can measure parameters that we have never been able to before, we can use those characteristics to improve things on site.
“I urge sites to move higher up the hierarchy of controls. PPE is the last line of defense and if can use an elimination or an engineering control to remove the risk then that is what we should be aiming for.”
While Nikky’s work is transforming the way we look at coal dust, her commitment to health and safety extends even further. As a Research Fellow at the University of Queensland Sustainable Minerals Institute she collaborates across geology, data modeling, psychology, occupational health and hygiene.
Other projects she is working on include examining how return-to-work systems function so workers with permanent lung damage can still have a future and investigating exhaust lagging, the insulated “blankets” used for fire protection on mining vehicles. In August she won the Health Innovation Award at the Queensland Mining Industry Health and Safety Conference for her work on how these synthetic mineral fibre materials behave under heat, helping mines balance fire safety with dust hazard reduction.
Looking ahead Nikky will also be investigating how her methods can be expanded to include critical minerals.
“Currently there are no limits for some critical minerals because they are just not mined often enough to have the epidemiological data to base an exposure limit on. Especially the rarest ones – we have no idea. That is definitely an area that I am interested in.”
Nikky’s work has not gone unnoticed. Last year she received the AusIMM Professional Excellence in Health and Safety Award and then in April this year she was awarded the QRC Exceptional Woman in Technological Innovation Award. She was also named as a finalist for Emerging Leadership in the Australian Financial Review’s Higher Education Awards.
She describes the recognition as meaningful: “It shows that industry is taking health and safety seriously”.
But the real reward for Nikky is making a difference on the ground.
“For people with occupational exposures, we can finally do something about it.
“Better detection means we will see more cases of occupational disease in the short term, simply because we are finally looking. But it also means better management, earlier interventions, and eventually, prevention.”
