The International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM) released the Benchmarking 2018 Safety Data report on Wednesday, detailing the safety data of its company members.
The report, which collates the safety data of about a million workers and contractors, recorded 50 fatalities in 2018. This was a decrease from 51 fatalities in 2017 and 63 fatalities in 2016.
This benchmarking report includes data from 2018 and does not include fatalities from the Brumadinho tragedy that occurred in January 2019. 11 of ICMM’s 27 company members reported no fatalities in 2018 compared to eight in 2017
Eleven of ICMM’s 27 company members reported no fatalities in 2018 compared to eight in 2017. Miners reporting no fatalities were: Africa Rainbow Minerals, Barrick, Freeport McMoRan, Goldcorp, JX Nippon, Minera San Cristóbal, Minsur, Mitsubishi Materials, Newcrest, Orano, and Sumitomo.
The number of hours worked across ICMM’s members increased by 16% due to data included from new company members: Minera San Cristóbal, Minsur, Newcrest and Vale. While total fatalities dropped by 2%, the fatality frequency rate dropped 19% from 0.027 to 0.022 fatalities per million hours worked.
There was also a drop in the injury rate from 3.94 in 2017 to 3.41, despite an increase in the number of recordable injuries from 7,515 to 7,751. The highest number of fatalities (14) occurred in South Africa, where 400 million hours were worked
The report findings include:
- One fewer fatality recorded in 2018 compared to 2017
- Nine fatalities (18%) were caused by fall of ground in underground mines, 8 fewer than the 17 in 2017
- Fifteen fatalities (30%) were caused by transportation/mobile equipment, 4 higher than the 11 fatalities recorded in 2017
- In the 6 years of safety data published by ICMM, fatalities have dropped from 90 in 2012 to 50 in 2018 and in this time, the fatality frequency rate has dropped by 33% to 0.022 deaths per million hours worked.Since 2012, total recordable injuries have dropped from 13,895 to 7,751 and the total recordable injury frequency rate has dropped by 33%.
The report also examines incidents by country. The highest number of fatalities (14) occurred in South Africa, where 400 million hours were worked. There were six fatalities in Chile and Ghana where respectively 281 million and 51 million hours were worked.
“Our annual safety data tragically records that 50 people lost their lives at work in 2018. ICMM and our company members are determined to eliminate fatalities from their operations. The single highest cause of deaths in 2018 was from mobile mining equipment which is why we are exploring collision avoidance technology in our Innovation for Cleaner, Safer Vehicles program,” Tom Butler, ICMM’s CEO said in a media release.
Read the full report here.
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