Search

Abstract: In Malaysia, there has been rapidly increasing usage in amount of explosives due to widely expansion in quarrying and mining industries. The explosives are usually stored in the storage [...]

The conditions in coal mining industry with the worst health and safety performance and the causes for the high level of accidents are investigated. Until China's rural population has other better and safer ways to increase family incomes, the problem of coal safety will not be solved, thus risking their lives.

The Bureau of Mines (BOM) was an agency narrowly focused in the issue of promoting safety in Eastern coal mines and over time the Western hard-rock mining industry succeeded in shifting the focus of the BOM from Eastern coal to Western hard-rock mining. The BOM's transformation from Eastern coal to Western copper thus provides a revealing example of how one early 20th-century federal agency came to work in close concert with the needs and desires of Western business.

Many mining power systems utilize ineffectively grounded sources to restrict the residual current of single-phase earth fault in order to reduce outage and shock hazard. In practice, with the system expansion, topology changing, and insulation aging, the potential residual current and zero-sequence voltage for earth fault vary dynamically and some arcing earth faults can easily cause over-voltage and induce multiple faults. In order to improve the system safety, on-site condition monitoring, safety evaluation, and preventive maintenance for earth fault are proposed in this paper. Some techniques for online parameters measurement based on resonance-measurement principle are presented. Power system operation states are classified into normal secure state, alert state, incipient fault state, and fault state. Some security enhancement methods (preventive action and remedial action) for each state are implemented. The prototype for safety evaluation has been developed and installed in industry power systems for several years. Index Terms--Condition monitoring, earth fault, mining power system, preventive maintenance, safety evaluation.

Byline: Kathleen M. Kowalski, Audrey Podlesny The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) was administered and scored for 154 Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) employees from the US Department of Labour. These employees serve as accident investigators for serious accidents and fatalities as part of their job duties. During a workshop on stress designed for them, subjects volunteered anonymous written anecdotes, confirming and illustrating the findings. The subjects represented locations across the USA and all mining commodities coal, metal, non-metal, stone, and sand and gravel. The Maslach Burnout Inventory assesses three aspects of experienced burnout emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, and reduced personal accomplishments. The average results of the scores for each of the three subscales for the study group of MSHA accident investigators fell in the moderate range. These scores show that the subject population was at some risk for emotional exhaustion and depersonalisation, tending toward burnout. The group evidenced a lower sense of personal accomplishment in their jobs, indicating a higher risk for burnout. From this outcome, accident investigators may be at moderate (note this does not mean average) risk for burnout. The authors recommend follow-up with this population, specifically in training to work with grieving families, and greater organisational support for the accident investigators in this area would be appropriate.

Issues are presented concerning the dangers of subsidence, toxic gases and fire which are associated with abandoned mines in Centralia Borough, PA. The prevention and control of nascent abandoned mine fires is discussed.

This article uses a labour process approach to understand the impact of formal health and safety programs on day-to-day risk-taking within an underground mining company. While the analysis recognizes the critical role of market conditions and institutional relations in shaping the application of worker participation programs and other health and safety mechanisms, it also emphasizes a detailed examination of the politics and ideologies which characterize everyday social relations in the mine as workers, supervisors, and managers work out the terms and conditions of risk taking. The contradictory and shifting natures of worker and employer interests in health and safety are also recognized as critical factors. Index Terms: Canada, Coal Industry, Health and Safety, Mining Industry/Work Organization, and Process/Worker Participation, OSH., Introduction Since the 1970s, reforms in a number of industrialized countries have provided new legal rights and protections aimed at giving workers more control over their health and safety conditions [...]