Mine Safety: How To Make It Home Safe

Goldcorp, based in Canada, is one of the world’s leading gold producers. With a total of 11 mines across North, Central, and South America, Goldcorp is a proven growth leader in the industry, with an expected 50% growth in gold production over the next two years.

Goldcorp have a reputation for safety and quality throughout their production process and the company produced 2.9 million ounces of gold in 2013. In order to maintain large volumes of growth combined with safe production to ensure their workers go home safe every day, they turn to iAuditor for safety and quality inspections.

“I take care of safety here at Goldcorp, and iAuditor allows me to do that quicker, easier, and more effectively,” Andrew Johnston, Goldcorp Safety Officer.

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The Dangers of Mining

Mining is one of the world’s most dangerous occupations. The hazards are real and ever-present with workers exposed to a variety of risks from cave-ins to explosions, vehicle collisions, crush injuries, and electrocution. It’s a high risk, high reward line of work.

“The most important thing to go down the mine every day is the miner, and the most important thing to come out of the mine is the miner. The softest thing that goes underground is you, that’s literally it. Everything else is rock and steel,” Andrew says.

Safety is the first thing the workers talk about at the start of the day and it is the last thing they talk about before they go home. It has become an integral part of a culture embraced by all Goldcorp workers.

The employees at Goldcorp each carry a notebook titled “The Golden Guide”, which is part of their Personal Protective Equipment and must be on their person at all times.

Inside the guide is a question for each worker asking, “Who am I coming home for?” The workers each have to have a picture of their family under the statement as a reminder for whom they work safely for.

The idea behind The Golden Guide is to cut through the noise and focus on why it is important they come home, and why all workers need to work safe.

Safety can sometimes be associated with a stigma involving too much paperwork and excess systems in place. By having a small booklet like The Golden Guide, it allows the workers to gain some perspective of why they do what they do and iAuditor is the tool that helps them to identify hazards and risks before they become a problem.

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Save Time Save Lives

Coordinating thousands of workers across multiple countries is a challenge. Goldcorp’s workforce hasn’t grown up with smartphones and tablets; their teams are often working in remote, dirty conditions thousands of feet below the earth’s surface.

The problem at Goldcorp was the inability to complete enough meaningful inspections and not having a good way to report them afterwards. Before iAuditor, workers would have to take a paper checklist, take photos on a camera, go back to the office and spend hours drafting up a report. It took time, many man-hours were lost, and fewer inspections were getting done as a result. That process doesn’t exist anymore.

Goldcorp conduct over 1,000 inspections per day. “I can do easily seven or eight times the inspections I used to do. Before iAuditor it would take me three to four hours to do a report. Now, it takes me minutes”, says Andrew. Management have a real time ability to see what is occurring below the ground and what requires attention.

“iAuditor has streamlined that so nicely, you take that software everywhere [sic], it’s in your hand, it’s real time data. When you’ve done your inspection, it now exists in the hands of our senior management.”

With that saved time, and those safety processes in place and inspections signed off, the workers can now focus on the task at hand and make it home safely to their families every day.

iAuditor provides an operational advantage over the traditional paper systems and iAuditor has been built specifically for the worker. It is a tool that workers can pick up and use with minimal training at Goldcorp. The audit templates are centralised and locked down through the SafetyCulture platform ensuring that the workers only need to capture the data and take the photos when they are in the mine.

Andrew says, “The real time hazard recognition capability across our operations wouldn’t exist if we didn’t have iAuditor. It means more people are going to go home safe.”

iAuditor is a real life super power for workers; it saves time and saves lives.

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More iAuditor customer stories: http://safetyculture.io/customer-stories

Author: Jarrod Boyd

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