risk mitigation
A series of recent mine safety incidents in New South Wales and Queensland has reinforced ongoing concerns about worker safety in both underground and surface coal operations.
Queensland’s Coal Mines Inspectorate has warned that coal mining operations are continuing to report repeat safety incidents, with fatigue, dust exposure, fires on mobile equipment, and falls from plant access systems among the most common issues identified in its September 2025 incident periodical.
When Jeff Samuels took the stage at the NSW Resources Regulator’s 33rd Mechanical Engineering Safety Seminar, he didn’t mince words: excavators roll over, people die, and the only way to ensure real protection is through ISO-certified rollover and falling object protective structures.
When Barry McKay walked into Ashton Coal and saw machines cutting stone instead of coal, he knew something had to change.
In mining, some of the biggest risks don’t come from broken equipment or unstable ground - they come from the way our brains are wired.
When mining operators are faced with the challenge of dewatering a live tailings storage facility (TSF) under 30 metres of cover, conventional engineering approaches often buckle under pressure - literally and figuratively.
When a digger operator says a new system lets them “see trucks in blind spots you don’t see,” you know it’s more than just another safety add-on – it’s changing how mining crews work.
As mining companies increasingly operate from hundreds, sometimes thousands, of kilometres away from the pit or plant, one challenge has remained constant – how to give remote teams the same operational context, detail, and situational awareness they’d have if they were standing on site.
What do Formula 1 racing and tailings storage have in common? More than you’d think - especially when AI joins the engineering crew.
Contractor safety in Queensland’s coal sector isn’t just flawed—it’s dangerously broken, and one veteran risk expert is calling time on the whole system.
