Page 56 - Advances In Productive, Safe, and Responsible Coal Mining

42 Advances in Productive, Safe, and Responsible Coal Mining

While risk management is a universal human ability, people do not necessarily see
a hazard and its related risk in the same way. One person may see a hazard as being
more risky than another person. This perspective is reflected in theories that have been
developed to understand individual differences in the response to similar risks. One
such theory is risk homeostasis, which postulates that all people have a set point
for acceptable risk and will function in their daily lives to optimize risk to their
own benefit. When risk is perceived to be unacceptable, they will change their behav-
ior or the circumstances of the exposure to the risk [21]. When they perceive the risk to
be lower than is generally recognized; either by their peers, government regulators,
company management, or others; they may seek to accept more risk as they may feel
that they will not be negatively affected, or if they are, that the cost-benefit of the cir-
cumstance is justified. Inputs into this conscious and subconscious decision making
may be economic, psychological, social, or cultural.
Mining risk can be understood through a technical lens that attempts to qualify and/
or quantify mining hazards using a variety of assessment techniques. At the most basic
level, understanding coal-mining risk requires identification of all relevant hazards
and comprehension of: (1) the probability that a specific risk will be “expressed”
as an incident or event; and (2) the consequence of such an incident. Mechanisms
to inventory, assess, and communicate risk take the form of existing regulatory
criteria, risk registries and inventories, as well as multimedia techniques such as
images and video to minimize the lack of understanding due to language. There
are a wide variety of techniques to facilitate this assessment from simple brainstorm-
ing to “what if” analysis, bow tie analysis (BTA), hazard and operability studies
(HAZOP), failure mode, effects and criticality analysis (FMECA), and fault tree anal-
ysis (FTA), to list a short selection. These risk assessment techniques have the same
core functionality: use of professional judgment and, if available, actual failure prob-
ability and consequence data, to express the product of the probability and conse-
quence of any coal-mining hazard of interest.
As described previously, the application of risk-centered management systems is
the primary tool to control risk. Consensus risk management standards, such as ISO
31000, have been developed for application to mining and other industries and many
mining countries have integrated risk management into their mine safety legislation
and regulations [22]. Most risk management processes are implemented as the most
critical element of a safety and health management system. Other national or interna-
tional consensus safety and health management systems include BS 8800 (UK),
OHSAS 18001 (international), ANSI Z10 (US), C-1000 (Canada), and ISO 45001
(international). Examples of successful mining industry initiatives based on risk man-
agement principles include the US National Mining Association (NMA) CORESafety
management systems [23]. The International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM),
an international trade association, has advocated refinements to the traditional generic
risk management process by increasing focus on critical (aka, catastrophic) risk and
using risk-specific management systems to define appropriate controls and verify their
ongoing effectiveness [24].
Mining companies across the globe, including the vast majority of large mining
companies, are currently using risk-centered management systems and many report