< Previous30 Follow us on Facebook for current mining news.www.canadianminingmagazine.com 31 FEA TURE IN MODERN DAY MINING, procedure is everything. Enter the mine the correct way. Be vigilant while using machinery. In emergency situations, evacuate in a safe, orderly manner. That last one is key, because as miners are evacuating in an orderly manner, there are often rescue teams racing towards the emergency. These rescuers are rightfully lauded as heroes, though they are almost invariably salt- of-the earth types, equipped with a drive to help others and a deep-seated sense of caring. Traditionally, the first image that springs to mind is brawny men, loaded down with equipment, covered in soot and black dust. But thanks to a growing number of courageous, smart, and hardworking women, that image is changing. Fast forward If you were in Fernie, British Columbia in early September 2019 for the National Western Region Mine Rescue Competition, you might have noticed that not every mine rescuer was male – indeed, female mine rescuers are becoming more common. And if you looked Women to the Rescue By Kent Armstrong, Dräger Canada Canada has carved out a reputation for training top-flight women who excel at the tough job of mine rescue. Jodi Brasch covered in grime after a shift underground. Jodi Brasch decked out in her safety gear.32 Follow us on Facebook for current mining news. closely, as some of them took off their gloves, you may have seen the subtlest hint of nail polish under the grime. That fingernail polish might have belonged to Jodi Brasch, a one-time hairdresser who took the reigns as captain of the Diamonds in the Rough mine rescue team hailing from Denare Beach, Saskatchewan. Brasch captained the team for the competition in Fernie. Diamonds in the Rough is an all-woman mine rescue team that has members from across Canada. It competes internationally against top mine rescuers from around the world. “The stigma is that being all women puts us at a disadvantage,” says Brasch. “I guess that’s kind of the whole purpose of the team – to show diversity and inclusion in the workplace.” These women compete in all the same events as the men: firefighting, first aid, practical skills, underground, and donning (putting on the equipment). And the equipment is no joke, adding up to an extra 70 lbs. of gear. That doesn’t count the sled full of rescue equipment they have to carry with them. Not to mention, what goes down must ultimately come up (as in uphill) after working in difficult conditions for up to two hours. It’s no walk in the park, but for Brasch, who describes herself as “five-foot-eff-all,” it’s no big deal. “After a while you get used to the weight of the gear. It’s comfortable. I find it comfortable anyway.” Brasch grew up in a mining family in Snow Lake, Manitoba, which has always been a mining town. But when she was ready to start work, mining wasn’t even on her radar as a potential career. Instead, after being a hairdresser, she worked in the local hospital for 13 years. It wasn’t until the mine manager paid her a visit at work that she started to think about the possibilities. “The government was pushing companies to put women underground,” she explains. “I was raised in Snow Lake – my last name’s pretty well known, my grandfather was a mine captain and my dad a manager.” After a few weeks of deliberations, Brasch quit her job at the hospital and went to work underground, where rescue quickly became a point of interest. “I decided I really didn’t want to let the skills I learned in the hospital go to waste, so I chose to get into mine rescue, which was a big challenge for everybody. It was harder for them to adjust than it was for me,” says Brasch, who recalled it felt a little like stepping into the boys’ club. “I’m kind of a small thing, but I’m always very careful about what I say. Instead of telling you, I quietly just show you. I find I get results out of that – I feel that’s part of the way that I integrated and made the transition with them.” The transition took a little time, but worked out in the end. “There would be small things where they’d be like, ‘Okay guys and Jodi,’ or ‘Hey guys and girl,’ and I just said not to single me out like that. You can say guys and I’m okay with it.” Turns out the rest of the “guys” are okay with it too. When Brasch isn’t working at rescue, she and seven other women now work as miners underground. Wait, mining is cool? Brasch isn’t the only woman who discovered mining after beginning her professional journey down a different path. Jill Newel, who grew up on Vancouver Island, was not born into a mining family, but lived in a region that depended on it. With Myra Falls and Quinsam Coal operating in the area, Newell was no stranger to mining. The one- time geology major grew up really liking rocks (and still has a comprehensive rock collection). It was her education in geology that exposed Newell to the world of mining. “I really thought it would be way more fun, with more to see and cool machinery, so I changed my degree and went into mining engineering,” says Newell, who is currently finishing her fourth year at the University of British Columbia (UBC). In 2015, she joined the UBC mine rescue competition team and in 2017 she helped put together the school’s first group of girls for the International Student Competition, where her team finished first against seven other international teams consisting solely of men. Like Brasch, Newell enjoys the intensity of mine rescue, running a kilometre underground into the unknown. “It gets your adrenaline going. I mean, you never know what you’re going to find,” says Newell. “But thanks to all the training, you know what you need to do when you get there.” Most people would not find this fun, especially after a description of what it’s like once you enter the smoke-filled abyss. “You can see a little bit at first, but as you get closer to the fire, you can’t see your hands in front of your face,” she says, describing a competition event at the Edgar Mine in Colorado. “It was probably a good hundred meters of just trying to feel around to find a wall so we didn’t get lost.” Newell led a team of four other women into this morass, each wearing about 70 lbs. of equipment and carrying a “basket,” which Jill Newell from UBC being graded on the jaws of life.Jill Newell entering a smoke-filled drift at the Edgar mine in Colorado.www.canadianminingmagazine.com 3334 Follow us on Facebook for current mining news. is essentially a stretcher filled with whatever equipment the rescuers may need. All five women, connected to a line with a lanyard so they don’t get separated, carefully followed the plan as they descended. “We’ll all take one side of the drift, so I’m usually on the left side and then my vice- captain is on the back of the basket. They’ll take the right side of the wall and we just kind of slowly make our way. If one of us stops feeling a wall, that means there must be a side drift or something, so we kind of know where we are.” “Kind of” is an overstatement. Competitors at Edgar got a whole 10 minutes to memorize a section of mine they have never been down before. And it was on fire. “When I joined the team, I saw that of course women can do it. It’s actually pretty basic stuff, so I really wanted to make this girl team at UBC to show we are fully capable,” says Newell. “We don’t want to displace men; we want women to know that they’re accepted. And it’s a lot of fun. I don’t want women to miss out because they think they can’t do it.” “I thought they used lasers” Eleanor Magdzinski admittedly didn’t know a whole lot about the mining sector when she was earning her master's degree in inorganic chemistry at the University of Western Ontario (UWO) in London, Ontario. That’s when she accepted a summer job at Kirkland Lake Gold (at the time the operation was known as St. Andrews Goldfields). It was the summer of 2010 – also the summer of recession – and Magdzinski had already decided her career options were better if she added an engineering degree from Laurentian University, in the great mining town of Sudbury, Ontario. During the summer, the chemist-by-trade landed a job at a mine’s assay lab, where analysts determine the contents and quality of ore samples to help the company decide where to dig. “I had a roundabout way of getting into mining,” says Magdzinski. “I was able to complete the degree in three years instead of four because I already had credits from chemistry. It really helped me that summer when I was working in the assay lab because I just kept seeing all this alloy come in and we were processing, sampling, using all these chemistry techniques.” What she didn’t know, however, was what happened to all of this ore before it got to the lab. Her curiosity got the better of her and she requested a tour of the mine to see what was going down…or coming up, in a sense. “I had a tour underground and I was blown away. I didn’t really think that we still mine stuff. That sounds silly, but I didn’t know that was still a thing. I thought that it was a really advanced technology and maybe they use lasers or something, not still people working the rock face,” she says. “It brought me back to one of those Indiana Jones movies – The Temple of Doom.” She was hooked. Magdzinski had many questions following that tour: How do they know where to put a ramp? How do you know how steep to make it? “Then I saw explosives and blasting in the curriculum versus mass transfer and heat transfer for chemical engineering – it just can’t compare to blowing things up!” After her first summer in the assay lab, Magdzinski spent the next summer at the Holt mine ferrying materials, supplies, and people through the mine. Her third summer of working was spent in the downtown Toronto, Ontario office of California Gold Mining. She is now back in Sudbury, in the lab at a copper and nickel mine. This is when she decided to tackle mine rescue. www.canadianminingmagazine.com 35 “I did a test to make sure I was physically fit and I already had my basic training. Because I maintained refresher sessions, I was able to become an active mine rescue first responder in Sudbury.” For Magdzinski, the first attraction was that she simply cared for people’s well being. But it was the skillset required for mine rescue that really caught her attention. “You learn a lot about the tools used to save people, move obstructions, things like that. Coupled with the first aid training, I figured at least I would have a skillset to get myself and someone else out of a potentially hazardous situation,” she adds. At first, Magdzinski had doubts. She had no practical experience with mine rescue and little experience with first aid. With the doubts she faced from others about her ability to handle the physical rigors of the job, there were some nervous moments. “You’re carrying a basket with people and all this equipment. And I’m in pretty good shape, but I’m not 6’8” and 250 lbs. I can’t pull someone out physically myself,” she admits. But she also learned that those were not the only demands placed on rescuers in a mine – they need brains as well as brawn, and in equal supply. “There’s a lot more to mine rescue than being able to physically move someone. You need to be skilled with the tools and know what to do in different situations. Those can be learned. I chose to focus on the actual practice of mine rescue and first aid, understanding problems, and how to solve them.” What Magdzinski discovered is that being able to think and learn, rather than being able to lift heavy things, was at the heart of mine rescue. With greater access to the right tools and training, more women are discovering mine rescue as an exciting career that gives them a chance to make a difference in the lives of others. What could be more fulfilling? M KENT ARMSTRONG IS THE GLOBAL BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER FOR MINING AT DRÄGER CANADA. Eleanor Magdzinski with a gas sensor outside her Fraser mine location.36 Follow us on Facebook for current mining news.ZERO HARM. THAT IS a mantra any leading organization should have when it comes to safety. But to reach that state, companies must go far beyond their current practices to eliminate incidents and accidents in the workplace. What more do they need to do? What additional tools and training are needed to reduce hazards? Are there certain combinations of workers and supervisors that lead to better safety performance? How do they create environments that encourage safe behaviours and cultivate a zero-harm culture? Fortunately, the insights needed to answer these questions can be found in data that already exists. “Good” is never good enough when it comes to safety Many organizations have mature and robust safety programs that rely on industry-leading processes and controls to prevent incidents and injuries on the job. Established practices for reporting, investigations, inspections and audits, equipment and signage, and training and hiring focus on managing known risks and reducing the potential for harm. But any incident, regardless of its severity, can leave a lasting mark on an organization: extensive downtime and fines, loss of talent and skilled labour, reduced productivity and increased operational costs, and eroded shareholder confidence. The need for pursuing continuous improvement in safety is abundantly clear. The road to great safety goes through analytics There is often a significant time lag between a safety incident and the availability of insights into its root causes and triggers. And often those insights lack certainty or detail, limiting their value for informing useful safety program changes. Investments, therefore, continue without objective validation of the benefits or the identification of new and emerging risks. Properly managed, however, analytics helps improve how people make decisions and interact within the organization to manage safety- related risks. It can reveal patterns of repeated behaviours or conditions that contribute to incidents, which have typically been viewed in isolation. A risk-based, data-driven approach to safety management opens up the possibility of uncovering hidden factors and designing specific mitigations. Exposing hidden risks and advancing safe behaviours Improving safety begins by increasing the awareness of risks, influencing behaviours and attitudes toward safety initiatives, and building an organizational culture that can sustain safe practices. To achieve these goals, safety analytics enables organizations to identify obscure causes of high-severity accidents and target high-risk operational scenarios and employee groups for interventions before these incidents occur. The key objectives of a safety analytics program include: • Generating lagging and leading indicators based on all available data to provide a comprehensive and objective view of current safety performance and key trends; • Driving visibility and communications between management, supervisors, and employees to enhance the safety culture, encourage safe behaviours, and attract top talent; • Providing a quantifiable and risk-based approach to identifying practical program improvements and optimizing return on investment; and • Defining actions and interventions by predicting the attributes of future risk scenarios with the ability to generate real-time alerts of unsafe conditions or behaviours. Generating value Deriving the most value from analytics requires progressing from descriptive to prescriptive analytics. Descriptive and diagnostic analytics allow organizations to quantify and evaluate past performance based on available data sources and identify the root causes of safety incidents. Predictive and prescriptive analytics build on this foundation of insight and guide organizations toward implementing measures that have the highest potential to reduce safety incidents. Predictive models are not always developed to anticipate a specific event but rather to quantify the significance of specific variables. Combined, these variables enable managers and supervisors to identify high-risk conditions, develop suitable interventions, and monitor the impact of changes. As a complement to these analytics concepts, artificial intelligence (AI) presents an opportunity to expand safety programs beyond traditional structured data sources. Recent advances in AI have made it possible Safety Analytics: The Way to Zero Harm Safety Analytics: The Way to Zero Harm By Andrew McHardy, Omnia AI www.canadianminingmagazine.com 37 FEA TUREto analyze text, images, and video to identify risks and generate insights that can be integrated into safety practices, investigations, and training. In combination with mobile digital capabilities, AI enables all levels of the organization to report unsafe practices, hazards, and incidents in near real-time, while also gaining access to alerts of dangerous conditions or other safety risks. Despite the potential for analytics and AI to improve safety performance, many organizations are still hesitant to embrace new insights and capabilities. They often cite deficiencies in data quality or a culture that’s not responsive to change: • Data quality. A lack of data quality, integrity, and completeness can erode user confidence and prevent buy-in to act on data-driven insights. Conversely, exploiting the existing data, however limited, and providing insights that are valued by users inspires stakeholders to take ownership and improve data collection. (This should include the reporting of near-miss events, which is an invaluable source of leading indicators.) Implementing standardized processes, templates, and digital tools to enable incident and hazard reporting can facilitate great strides in safety analytics. • Bias and preconceptions. Incidents often occur since outliers and a one-size-fits- all approach to risk management does not account for these risks. Leading organizations don’t see analytics as a replacement for best practices but rather as an opportunity to capitalize on insights to enhance policies, 38 Follow us on Facebook for current mining news. Discovering the unknown digital attributes of safety incidents using advanced analytics models.processes, and controls. Communicating insights by simply using visual analytics and interactive dashboards compels managers and supervisors to challenge the status quo and generates momentum to expand analytics efforts. This is the type of culture in which analytics can overcome bias and preconceptions. The three keys to success Organizations that are willing to embed data and analytics into safety decision-making should consider the following steps, which are proven to lead to success: • Start with the right questions. Begin the analytics journey with a hypothesis or a plan to discover specific areas (i.e., find known unknowns). Such direction is needed to provide an initial foundation without constraining the analysis and filtering out potentially valuable insights. • Think broadly about big data . Use incident- specific sources of data that aren’t related to safety – including operational, financial, human resources, and training data – as well as open-source weather and demographic data to integrate into a safety analytics data set. The emergence of wearables and telematics also offers a wealth of data that can augment traditional safety incident and hazard reports. An enriched data set reveals deeper insights and connections that could not be otherwise detected, thereby exposing hidden risks that can be managed proactively. • Make it practical . Analytics and AI rely on subject-matter input to validate results and determine what can be implemented, now and in the future. Insights without context are meaningless and will undermine efforts to implement safety analytics. Analytics brings a new dimension to safety management, empowering decision-makers at all levels to better understand the underlying drivers of performance, manage as many risks as possible, and realize the maximum benefit from investments in the safety of their people. Influencing behaviours and building a culture of zero harm begins with unlocking the hidden insights in your data. M ANDREW MCHARDY IS A SENIOR MANAGER WITH OMNIA AI, DELOITTE CANADA’S ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE PRACTICE. HE HELPS ASSET-INTENSIVE ORGANIZATIONS, INCLUDING MINING, USE ANALYTICS AND AI CAPABILITIES TO IMPROVE THEIR DECISION-MAKING RELATED TO SAFETY PERFORMANCE, CAPITAL PLANNING, PROJECT DELIVERY, MAINTENANCE SCHEDULING AND EXECUTION, AND PRODUCTION OPTIMIZATION. www.canadianminingmagazine.com 39 Building safety analytics capabilities, from descriptive to prescriptive.Next >