Safety Moment

Check your anchor point, before connecting your safety harness. 

My first mining job was in 1992 for Hudson Bay Mining & Smelting, in Flin Flon Manitoba. We received excellent hands-on safety training, their introductory program was 40 hours long. The trainer seemed to enjoy picking on me because I was a young engineer and not a miner. However, the trainer’s enthusiasm taught me several valuable safety lessons.

On that day, we were learning to tie and fit our safety harnesses, we all anchored into the side of the drift/tunnel wall and the instructor came around to check our safety harnesses. Miner no. 1 harness was good, Miner no. 2 harness was good; HATLEY your harness is good, do you feel like you are ready to go to work?  “Yes, sir!” The trainer reached over and pulled my anchor point out of the wall, the mechanical shell that holds the eye bolt cut-off!  I was set-up as an example for the class, but lesson learned, always check your anchor points. 

Five years later I was working at a gold mine in Ontario,  I went to check on a mining crew that had just started rehabilitating a raise and sure enough when I attached my safety lanyard to one of the anchor points, and leaned hard the mechanical bolt came out of the wall.  So, I had a good talk with the mining crew as well as the surveyors who had been through that area that day about checking their anchor points, and using resin rebar and a plate, not mechanical eye-bolt as anchors.  

In the world of incident and loss prevention, for every major incident there is almost always three areas to look for root causes to an incident:

(1) design

(2) execution, and

(3) human behaviours 

(1) design: mechanical bolts inappropriate for altered/weak rock conditions, (2) execution: improper torqueing of bolt, (3) human behaviours: crew not checking on their anchor point