Modern Mining October 2016

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38 MODERN MININGOctober 2016
SAFETY IN MINING
feature
Dr Phakathi said the South African
mining sector had made signifi-
cant progress over the past two
decades to improve safety and
occupational health, achieving
an 87 % reduction in the number of fatalities
between 1993 and 2015. He added that the
industry had now reduced fatalities for eight
consecutive years (to 2015) and had also been
achieving a consistent reduction in serious in-
juries per year.
He further noted that South Africa was
doing well measured against international
benchmarks, a laudable achievement given
the fact that the local mining industry was
still to a large extent labour intensive, using
conventional mining methods (which are gen-
erally less safe than mechanised methods),
and faced challenging geological conditions.
He also pointed to the depth of South Africa’s
gold and platinum mines.
Safety – how good
(or bad) are we really?
Total reduction in the number of fall of ground (FoG) related fatalities, 2003-2015.
Dr Sizwe Phakathi addresses the Joburg Indaba (photo:
Wynand van der Merwe).
One of the speakers at the recent Joburg Indaba to address
the issue of mine safety was Dr Sizwe Phakathi, Head of
Safety and Sustainable Development at the Chamber of
Mines. His presentation was entitled ‘Safety: How good (or
bad) are we really?’ The conclusion he came to was that
South Africa’s mining industry was generally performing
well in the safety arena, with fatalities dramatically down
and with most other statistics heading in the right direction.
One graph he showed indicated that South
Africa’s fatality rate per million hours had
improved markedly since 2003. In that year
the figure for South Africa was 0,30, well above
the figures for the USA, Canada (Ontario) and
Australia which were all below 0,10 at that
point. By 2014 the South African rate had come
down to 0,08, a figure on a par with the other
mining jurisdictions. Moreover, South Africa’s
platinum mining sector had performed better
than international metalliferous mines over the
past two years while local coal mines were now
operating more safely than US coal mines.
The fatality rates by commodity within
South Africa’s mining industry had also
improved over this same period, he said – by
81 % in the case of coal, 79 % in the case of
platinum and 61 % for gold.
Dr Phakathi listed the major contributors
to fatalities as being ‘fall of ground’, ‘trans-
portation and mining’, and ‘machinery’. Here
again all the statistics were pointing in the
right direction with ‘fall of ground’ fatalities
having declined from 303 in 1993 to just 22