One of Australia's leading mine safety experts has delivered a timely warning to mine operators around the country about the need to not only have comprehensive emergency response strategies and resources in place, but also to test them rigorously to determine their effectiveness under conditions as close as possible to the real thing.

Twenty-five-year coal industry veteran Greg Rowan, who is chairman of the Queensland Emergency Exercise Management Committee and principal of his consulting firm Rowan & Associates, has been involved in annual full-scale emergency exercises – some lasting 14 hours – at five of Queensland's modern underground longwall mines. He told the IIR Underground Mining 2003 conference in Perth at the end of July that the exercises were vital to “finding the holes in the (mine) systems”

“Sometimes we find very significant holes,” he said, “and put in place measures to address them.

“These exercises have been conducted in response to recommendations contained in the Warden's Inquiry report on an accident at Moura No.2 underground mine on Sunday, August 7, 1994.”

A devestating explosion at the mine, following a 1986 incident at the same site in which 12 miners died, killed 13 people.

Rowan said the lethal combination of explosive gases, in an explosive environment in which heat and potential ignition sources were everpresent, made underground coal mines inherently dangerous places to work. While explosions, fires and other causes of disasters often had devastating consequences, the manner in which response systems worked under the full glare of a real emergency and how people reacted under pressure often determined the full impact of an accident.

“No matter how well you may have prepared, if you have not practiced you are not ready,” Rowan said.

“While the focus of this discussion today is on statewide level one exercises, there are four levels of emergency exercise conducting annually at Queensland mines. As the findings from each are disseminated to industry, the level of preparedness can only be further enhanced.”

Rowan said the Queensland level one preparedness tests provided “a most rigorous examination of the procedures, people and expertise in place at a mine”

“They have provided invaluable data to the whole industry that would not have been gained but for the commitment and support of the people and organisations concerned.”

Rowan said perhaps the key finding from the emergency exercises conducted to date was validation of the “self escape philosophy” as a robust and effective means of enhancing the survival rate of underground personnel. Fundamentally, it provided for all underground personnel to have access to adequate supplies of oxygen to ensure they had enough time to travel along designated escapeways to places of safety. “It is supported by an aided rescue strategy that provides for external assistance to those persons unable to reach a place of safety unaided,” Rowan said.

Objective evidence gathered from the exercises had confirmed what the industry had long suspected: reactive responses through surface management control teams, mines rescue teams and emergency duty card systems, had limited impact on the survival rates of underground personnel during the first few hours of an emergency.

“A robust, proactive, integrated and well-rehearsed self-escape strategy is their single best chance for survival,” Rowan said.

“Aided rescue can rarely impact on events within the first critical hours. Its function is the recovery of survivors unable to reach safety unaided. Inherently, such a strategy requires time.”

Rowan said it was the integration of fundamental aspects of these two strategies that led to an effective emergency management system. To best address the issue of integration and assess interaction of the various elements comprising an emergency response, assessment tools and criteria had been developed across “process rather than sectional lines”

Rowan said examination of the elements during the emergency exercises showed up flaws in widely used tools and processes – which still had legitimate and important roles to play in responses – and underlined the need for contingency planning and preparedness. Duty cards, for example, were “critical memory prompts”, but “what they cannot do, and are not designed to do, is exercise control over the event itself”

“Belief that an emergecy will be controlled by following a set of duty cards is unfounded,” Rowan said. “Control is exercised by trained, experienced and competent people.”

He said many emergency evacuation procedures also contained latent flaws due to their algorithmic nature and “inflexibility to circumstance”

Mine managers had to recognise that problems would arise from the interaction of different elements within a system, and had to plan for contingencies when they arose. “Incident managers/controllers must understand the integration of these diverse components to understand the whole,” Rowan said.

“And focus must be given to the underlying structures of these interactions when devising solutions.”