Sacrificing Safety
On the 6th of May 2020, without warning, a methane explosion occurred on the Grosvenor Mine's LW 104 face engulfing 5 mine workers. Suffering life threatening burns all of the miners miraculously self escaped from the face and were transported out of the mine. Emergency medical treatment and some luck saved their lives. This was the closest Queensland Mines have been to a major mine disaster in almost 30 years.
Sacrificing Safety, Lessons for Chief Executives by Andrew Hopkins explores the causes of the explosion, closely based on the report by the Board of Inquiry into the explosion. It seems almost incomprehensible that the findings of the Grosvenor explosion included in this book are very similar to the findings of the Moura 2 explosion in 1994. The book includes Chapters related to:
Chapter 1. Introduction.
Chapter 2. Some Preliminaries
Chapter 3. The Mismanagement of Methane
Chapter 4. Dilemmas in Hazard Management
Chapter 5. Exceedances
Chapter 6. The Failure to Manage Catastrophic Risk
Chapter 7. Constructing Countervailing Pressure
Chapter 8. Recommendations for Regulators
Chapter 9. Conclusion
The book uses the Board of Inquiry Report as the basis of information combined with decades of analysis of past disasters for the conclusions. It is easier to read than the Board of Inquiry Report and it makes more sense. The book also comments on the limitations of the Board of Inquiry and explains why the Board of Inquiry is limited in its recommendations. My only hope is that in another 30 years time future inquiries don't say that we haven't learnt much in the past 30 years, which is really what this book says about the Queensland mining industry.