The hazards of driving at speed whilst distracted and not maintaining safe separation distances from other vehicles when operating equipment in open-cut mines resulted in a near miss between an operating grader and haul truck.
The incident details indicate that the truck operator was not paying proper attention to the task at hand, and may have been distracted by something resulting in the operator failing to reduce speed on approach to the grader and maintain required mobile plant approach speed or safe passing distance
The investigation of this incident identified the importance of sites having procedures in place for the safe watering of roads and for workers to correctly apply those procedures, which reduced the severity of this incident.
Mine operators need to review the Resources Regulator’s technical reference guide (TRG) Surface ROVOA (PDF, 4.77 MB) as part of their consideration of this incident, in particular layers 4 and 6 of the vehicle interaction 9-layer defence approach.
Read the Safety alert (PDF, 286.89 KB) to see all the findings and recommendations and watch the accompanying video.
