Page 53 - Advances In Productive, Safe, and Responsible Coal Mining

Zero Harm coal mining 39

challenges associated with safety systems, culture, and leadership; but it is critical that
this work be integrated [16]. Otherwise, the complexity can become unmanageable.
Safety improvement ideas regularly percolate and reverberate across the industry
with two primary sources of origin: dissatisfaction with status quo performance and
a lack of consensus regarding the optimal approach required to achieve safety excel-
lence, including zero harm. Serial experimentation with safety initiatives, without the
ability to make empirical conclusions regarding intervention effectiveness, together
with a tendency to seek silver bullet solutions work to hamper the industry’s ability
to clarify the optimal strategy and subject it to continuous improvement analyses. This
is ironic given the disciplined and structured approach applied to identifying opera-
tional enhancements through logical, incremental, process improvements and the
application of statistical experimentation tools to help define what works and what
does not. In the context of Zero Harm, safety would benefit from a greater dose of
process improvement.
Coal production can be optimized while maintaining a sufficiently low enough risk
profile to enable a mine and a whole company with proactive leadership and effective
safety systems to achieve safety excellence. Above all, pursuing safety excellence in
the form of Zero Harm or similar manifestations is an exercise in systematic risk man-
agement. In the zero harm framework, one of the most significant changes required to
facilitate zero harm performance for those who are not already using it is an accurate
understanding and control of operational and human risk.

3.5 Coal-mining risk

Coal-mining safety is a reflection of coal-mining risk and its unique chemical–
physical properties as a carbonaceous mineral. Risk has several meanings that are
important to coal safety. Risk is both a perception held by every person who works
in the industry and a technical concept open to qualitative and quantitative assessment.
Perceptions of what is acceptable and unacceptable risk can vary widely and for very
different reasons. However, the lack of consensus regarding how coal-mining safety
and health risks are viewed is a challenge for which companies motivated to achieve
zero harm must address. A lack of normalization or consensus is a major challenge.
It may be obvious that the benefit of risk assessment is in understanding potential
incidents that have negative impacts. However, it is worth mentioning that the coal
industry could never have evolved into its globally important status today without
accepting risk. Risk is a necessary element in successful coal mining because it is
not possible to mine coal, by any method, in any location without accepting some
degree of risk. That is, risk is both a negative and a positive concept. When a coal
mine is developed and operated with high levels of productivity and quality and
low levels of frequency and severity of safety events, it may be characterized as man-
aging risk positively. Given the nature of mining in general and coal mining in par-
ticular, there is no risk-free coal mining. To truly eliminate risk would require
cessation of mining operations. As such, it must be understood that zero harm perfor-
mance cannot be achieved through comprehensive risk elimination. It is the