In an industry like coal mining, employees work with heavy equipment and have numerous other risks on the job, so safety will have to be a top priority.
Brian Trombley, the safety manager at Westmoreland Coal’s Estevan mine, says the company stresses safety for everyone at the mine, including visitors.
They will employ any method possible to encourage safe practices, ranging from meetings to events. Communication is vital, he said. And as they get the message out, the number of incidents will continue to decline.
Trombley noted Westmoreland Coal has adopted five upcompromised life safety rules. These rules, when applied properly, will mitigate high-risk tasks.
Management, employees, contractors and visitors at a Westmoreland Coal site have stop work authority.
“That gives everybody coming on our property, if you see something that looks unsafe, or somebody doing something unsafe … the authority to stop them before somebody gets hurt,” said Trombley.
He believes employees understand the value of safety on the mine site. One video they watched depicted a worker who narrowly averted a serious workplace accident, and then went home and spent time with his wife and children. It had an impact on a lot of people who watched it.
The local mines are a charter member of WorkSafe Saskatchewan’s Mission: Zero campaign, which wants to eliminate all accidents.
“In January we had a Mission: Zero Family Fun Night where we invited all the families out, and we had people come and speak,” said Trombley. “We had RCMP, we had EMS, and we had the fire chief come and speak at this with all the families. It was really good.
“Then we had activities for the kids that were geared around safety. We handed out these watermelon bicycle helmets to all the kids.”
The Estevan mine wants to have more events with an emphasis on safety in the future. A family picnic this summer will be geared around Mission: Zero.
“We just want to take this into the community and spread it around, and reach everybody so they’re safe all the time,” he said.
An eight-minute video has also been produced that is shown to visitors, vendors and contractors when they arrive on site. It offers instructions on what to do in the event of an emergency, shares hazards that people might face, and discusses how to be incident-free while on the site.
Visitors have been receptive to the video, because they understand that Westmoreland wants them to be informed when they enter the mines.
