PrintLesson 9.3 A Sustainable Approach to Mine Safety and Health
We studied mining laws in Lesson 2.2, and you learned that various laws affecting mining form the basis for regulations that are administered and enforced by federal and state agencies. The act of following, i.e. complying with, the regulations is known as compliance. If you do not strictly follow the regulations, your company can be penalized, i.e. given a citation. These penalties can range from a few tens of dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and can include temporary closure of the mine until the citation is corrected. In a few instances criminal charges can be brought against mining company officials in addition to civil penalties. The procedures for interpreting and enforcing the regulations, as well as the calculation of the penalties, is beyond the scope of this course4.
If you examine different types of regulations across many industries, you will find that they are generally performance-based regulations. A performance-based regulation specifies the desired outcome and leaves the means of achieving that outcome to you. A prescriptive regulation, on the other hand, not only specifies the desired outcome but directs you to achieve that outcome in a specific, i.e. prescribed, fashion. Many mining safety and health regulations are prescriptive in nature. There are a limited number of cases where a prescriptive regulation is warranted, but in many cases, it is problematic; and the biggest problem is that it unwittingly transfers responsibility from the mine operator to the enforcement agency (MSHA)!
Historically, many operators held the belief that because MSHA told them how to comply with the regulations and because MSHA inspected their operations for compliance, they were absolved of any responsibility for adverse safety and health outcomes... as long as they complied with the regulations. MSHA requires the companies to prepare detailed plans on topics such as ventilation and ground control, and the company is not allowed to operate until MSHA has agreed to their plan and approved it! It is no surprise that operators took the view that their responsibility was to comply with MSHA’s requirements and that MSHA was ultimately responsible for the safety of miners.
It became clear after the U.S. mine disasters in 2006 that a system focused solely on compliance was not achieving the desired outcome. Moreover, that was a contrasting approach in another great mining country, Australia. While the tipping point for the U.S. was the Sago Mine disaster in 2006, the Australians had theirs in 1994 with the Moura Mine disaster, and over the ensuing years, they developed and institutionalized a very different approach to achieving safe and healthful workplaces, which could be characterized as a risk-based approach, and by 2006, their system was producing remarkably better outcomes.
An analysis of fatalities over the decades reveals that root causes are not simply engineering failures, but are often a combination of cultural, leadership, and systems failures. The approach that was adapted for U.S. mining was based on the Australian successes as well as similar approaches used in other industries where low probability but high consequence events cannot be tolerated (think nuclear power plant). The U.S. National Mining Association, took these successful approaches and adapted them for the U.S. industry; and then developed implementation materials and training to facilitate the diffusion of this approach through the industry. Their approach is known as CoreSafety.
4 If you are interested, I would recommend taking a quick look at three sources: Subchapter P of 30 CFR, which describes the calculation of civil penalties, Section 104 through 110 of the Federal Mine safety and Health Act, which describes penalties and processes including orders for mine closure, and The Mine Inspectors Manuals, which provides detailed guidance on how to interpret certain regulations and how to select the level of penalty that is to be assessed for a specific violation of a mandatory safety or health standard. You can access all of these through the MSHA website.