Health and safety
Resolute is committed to achieving the highest performance in Occupational Health and Safety to create and maintain a safe and healthy workplace.
Resolute’s Occupational Health, Safety and Security Policy provides the objectives for the management programmes to be achieved by its operations, as:
- Seek continuous improvement in its Occupational Health, Safety and Security performance taking into account evolving scientific knowledge and technology, management practices and community expectations
- Comply with the applicable laws, regulations and standards of the countries in which it has workplaces
- Train and ensure individual employees and contractors understand their obligations and are held accountable for their area of responsibility
- Involve all employees and contractors in the improvement of Occupational Health, Safety and Security performance
- Communicate and consult openly with staff, contractors, government and the community on Occupational Health, Safety and Security issues
- Implement risk management systems to identify, assess, monitor and control hazards in the workplace
At every site the health and safety of personnel and local communities are of primary concern to Resolute. The Company seeks to conduct operations in an efficient and effective manner whilst providing:
- a safe and healthy workplace
- information on the hazards of the workplace and training on how to work safely while caring for the environment, and
- consultation, at all staff levels, on safety, health and environmental matters
No employee is expected to carry out work they reasonably consider to be unsafe.
Implementation of the Company’s Safety, Health and Environment Management System is ensuring that Resolute and industry standards are consistently met at each site.
Golden Pride Mine – Tanzania
During the year the Golden Pride Project continued to enhance its reputation as one of the leaders in the safety and accident prevention fields within the Tanzanian mining industry. This is achieved through a combination of selective recruitment, training and establishing within its workforce a high level of safety awareness and attentiveness.
Development of the training programmes was achieved by adding modules to the already successful competency based training programme. The number of Tanzanian employees being promoted to supervisory and managerial positions continues to grow.
A robbery in April 2009, where three security guards were injured, accounted for all three of the Lost Time Injuries (LTI’s) incurred in the 2008-2009 financial year.
Even so, the Lost Time Injury Frequency rate was 1.06, a 10% reduction on the previous year, which in turn was a 40% reduction on the year before that. As a further reassurance of risk management all the corrective actions were completed from the investigation into a drowning at the process water dam last year.
On 26 January 2009 a transport company moving the reagent, sodium cyanide, for gold extraction was alleged to have ineffective conformance with the Tanzanian requirements for safe transport of hazardous chemicals. The supplier has since moved to a different transport company and one that it considers aligns well to legal requirements. Resolute has been assured that it’s supplier and the supplier’s transport companies for this reagent presently follow legal requirements and best practices in this field.
Syama Mine – Mali
Focus for this year was the development site documentation for the Safety, Health and Environmental (SHE) Management System. A SHE Operations Manual has been developed to describe the system and 20 procedures have been completed for the 20 Resolute Standards. SHE and occupational health risk registers were developed. A baseline SHE Audit was undertaken by independent consultants in February 2009.
At year end the 12 month moving average Lost Time Injury Frequency rate was 2.53.
Ravenswood Mine – Australia
Following a systems audit in 2008 a number of actions have been addressed to improve alignment to the system at the Ravenswood Gold mine. The site management team also strives for a common approach to this system.
Safety Management
A site wide focus has been applied to incident reporting and investigation with an emphasis on improving the quality and outcomes of incident investigations.
The corrective actions register at site was modified to allow improved recording of incident details and more analysis of incident data and trends to proactively manage key risk areas.
The lost time frequency rate increased to 7.90 with 6 lost time injuries for the year, and with our goal of zero harm, indicates the need to strive for further improvement.
OH&S Monitoring
The OH&S nurses carried out a systematic health monitoring programme for site which dealt with dust and noise. Workforce awareness presentations were provided on fatigue, influenza, personal hygiene and dengue fever.