Open Cut » Health and Safety
This report supports the industry's on-going efforts to manage risk to ALARP and achieve Zero Harm by providing a new method to more effectively establish the adequacy of controls.
Operating mines, both open cut and underground, are required to find a balance between acceptable risk and the costs of adequate control measures in addition to optimising the economics of productivity and reserves. Technology and research are delivering potential solutions to both financial and personnel risk in the mining industry. These solutions are often expensive and both the risk improvement levels and financial benefit are poorly quantified.
How then does a mining company make reliable decisions to implement major risk reduction technologies?
This is a complex problem facing all operating mines and it is a significant challenge to find an operating solution that identifies the correct balance between risk, cost and benefits.
This report outlines how the concept of risk-cost-benefit analysis was born and provides background and history on cost-benefit applications and explores its adoption by different industries over the last few decades. The report introduces the project Risk-Cost-Benefit (RCB) concept development and the RCB Decision Support Tools, RCBGEN and RCEMETHOD, and provides an outline and detailed framework of the Risk-Cost-Benefit processes. The report demonstrates practical applications of the RCB tools on four case studies and steps through the RCB process application for each case study, presents the analytical results, provides interpretation of the analysis results and highlights how the RCB output assists with the decision-making process.
The recommended RCB process involves five stages which are described in the full report.