Review of major mining hazards to keep workers safe

The AGL Loy Yang mine generates approximately 30 percent of Victoria’s energy requirements, powering over two million Australian homes each year.

With their Major Mining Hazard (MMH) review period approaching, AGL required a regulated assessment of health and safety impacts for personnel and contractors in high hazard scenarios onsite.

As part of our shared commitment to safety, we provided a structured and comprehensive qualitative bowtie risk assessment. This provided AGL with an understanding of the major mining hazards onsite, enabling them to focus on a selection of critical controls to safeguard their people and engage their workforce in managing these risks.

Collaboratively, we reviewed each MMH bowtie using a three-step process:

• Creating a focus group to meet and review the existing bowtie assessments and determine which were classified as a MMH
• Selecting and interviewing specialists for each MMH bowtie before each session to create efficient workshops
• Facilitating 13 workshops, covering 10 MMHs.
  
  

Through this process, we reduced the amount of time required in workshops and identified several improvement opportunities including:

• Aligning bowtie methodology with industry recognised methodology from the International Council on Mining & Metals (ICMM) Guidelines
• Re-selecting critical controls to align with the ICMM Guidelines
• Adopting a holistic approach to the alignment of all MMH bowties to a common level of detail
• Rationalising and reducing the number of bowties that did not meet the threshold criteria
• Reviewing outstanding actions
  
  

Our comprehensive risk management practices will help safeguard AGL’s people onsite so that they can continue to provide essential power to Australian homes.

For more information, please visit www.ghd.com/advisory or contact us.