A FIELD ALERT - CoreSafety on U.S. Mining Risk Assessment

Health & Safety - Mining, Environmental, & Cybersecurity

Date posted: 02/07/14

U.S. mining has improved overall safety performance as reflected in injury statistics, but continues to experience high severity events that seem resistant to both regulatory and company-specific intervention. The human tragedy has produced enormous suffering for the affected families and the entire mining community. The persistence of high severity events suggests a new approach, rooted in safety management systems,is clearly needed in order to have different mine safety outcomes. The backbone of this effort is the risk management process, which identifies risks associated with specific mining activities and ways to proactively mitigate those risks to prevent injuries and fatalities. The risk management process has been used by other industries and mining in other countries to successfully improve safety and health performance.