Calculator determines whether initiatives have improved mine’s rating
The U.S. Department of Labor has created a new online tool for the mining industry to gauge how successful any newly implemented safety measures have been.
The online calculator gives mine operators who have executed a corrective action program the ability to determine if their mines are successfully reducing significant and substantial (S&S) violations, according to the Department of Labor.
An S&S violation of a mandatory health or safety standard is one that “significantly and substantially contributes to the cause and effect of a coal or other mine safety or health hazard,” the Department of Labor said in a blog post on its site. It is the mine operator’s responsibility to track its violation and injury histories to determine whether it needs to take action to comply with mine safety laws and protect miners, the department said.
In January, the Department of Labor's Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) published a final rule revising the pattern of violations regulation. The rule provides mine operators who may be approaching pattern of violations (POV) status the opportunity to implement a corrective action program. As a result, the MSHA may consider a mine operator’s effective implementation of an MSHA-approved corrective action program as a mitigating circumstance in its POV review. Mines in POV status that have S&S violations will receive a withdrawal order for violations until a complete inspection finds no violations.
The calculator is an “enhancement” to MSHA’s pattern of violations monitoring tool, which allows mine operators, miners and stakeholders to measure a mine’s performance against MSHA’s specific screening criteria for violations. The calculator allows users to determine a mine’s rate of S&S violations for any specific date range using the mine’s seven-digit identification number to find data.
