Center of Excellence for Mine Safety Presents a Safer Path for the Future
The Mining Safety Center of Excellence (SCE) is dynamically addressing the most pressing safety and health challenges in the mining industry, utilizing technology and innovative solutions to promote the health and safety of miners across the nation and guiding a future in safe mining practices.
The three pillars of the SCE are safety, health, and data analytics. From this framework, the Center focuses not only on safety at mine sites, and miner health, but also the way data can be used to proactively improve safety and health decision making. Mines generate a lot of data. By analyzing operational data with health and safety data from a mine, timely decisions can be made to protect miners and implement training to mitigate hazardous conditions. Machine learning and artificial intelligence can also be used to track patterns at a mine site to find out what evolving hazards are present at a site and take measures to prevent issues.
SCE Director Dr. Eric Lutz believes the Center is a fantastic resource for their partners, students, and the industry as a whole. According to Dr. Lutz there’s a lot of “momentum building” as this is one of the only mine safety centers in the world that features this degree of comprehensive safety and health education and research translation capacity. The SCE finds its home within the School of Mining and Mineral Resources at the University of Arizona due to Arizona’s strong mining legacy, the San Xavier underground mining laboratory resource and the acclaimed cross-disciplinary faculty in Mining and Geological Engineering, Geology, Environmental Science and Public Health. At the SX mine, the SCE is able to utilize the real-world space to practice mine rescues, training maneuvers and conduct health and safety research.
On top of research, the SCE is building the Southwest Mine Rescue Consortium to provide resources to member companies who may not have enough people to form mine rescue teams. The Center also provides training for companies which seek to promote preventive health and safety measures such as mining-focused industrial hygiene, using data analytics and machine learning for improved outcomes, and self-escape scenarios and evaluation for miners and mine operators.
Mining is a “people business,” says Dr. Lutz. When mine conditions are safe, and miners’ long-term health is invested in, mining companies see better operational performance in their mines.
The Assistant Director of the SCE, Dr. Rustin Reed helps guide the pillar of health for the Center, with a background in public health and industrial hygiene.
“In terms of safety and health, mining is unique because the environment that they work in does change all the time,” says Dr. Reed. An industrial hygienist is concerned about occupational health and works to measure and control any health exposures to promote long-term health and wellness. Examples would be exposure to noise, diesel exhaust, or silica dust.
This is where data analytics become one of the important dynamics within the Center. Dr. Leonard Brown, Assistant Director of the SCE, has two main goals, doing research to analyze data and creating serious safety-focused games to help train mine operators and mine workers. Dr. Brown is creating a comprehensive web-based and app-based dashboards that contain an array of training and data management tools that are accessed by industry partners to understand their health and safety performance and trajectory.
“Safety metrics tend to be reactive,” says Dr. Brown. Instead of only reacting to hazards, machine learning can identify patterns in leading indicators to predict when an issue may occur before it even happens. This will help improve health and safety to be proactive rather than reactive on a mine site.
The SCE hosts through the Department of Mining and Geological Engineering and Colleges of Public Health and Computer Science several mining health and safety focused courses at the undergraduate and graduate level and will be featuring a series of professional development courses in the coming three years, beginning July 2023. Dr. Lutz adds, “forward thinking mine operations recognize the heavy responsibility of protecting our miners; and recognize the value that comes from investing in comprehensive health and safety approaches, resulting in optimized operational performance. In other words, if you want a healthier, more resilient business, then invest in the health and safety of your workforce!”