Health & safety
fumes. Not that the Land Down Under is unique here. According to work by the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), 150 US miners suffered from ‘nonfatal heat-related illnesses’ in 2014 alone. In a grim way, the toll is unsurprising. Both due to the regions where mining often occurs – hot, arid places like Australia and South Africa – and the specific conditions of mining as an industry – underground and physically demanding – ensuring miners stay cool has been an industry focus for decades. How you actually manage it, however, is another challenge entirely. For if technology, in the form of cooling and refrigeration systems, can certainly help keep workers safe underground, it hardly helps people like Fogarty. No wonder, then, that keeping miners genuinely secure means much more than staring at the thermometer, instead requiring careful teamwork, strict work policies – and even an understanding of a person’s specific health vulnerabilities.
Cool it It’s hard to overstate how hot mines can get. Temperatures of 38°C are not uncommon, even as indicators can sometimes soar to over 50°C. And if Fogarty succumbed largely thanks to an Australian heatwave, dangers also lurk elsewhere. As Kristin Yeoman explains, that’s true even if the conditions “might not be considered excessively hot” – for instance, depending on the wind speed, or the location of the sun, or even if an individual is standing near an active piece of machinery. “Additionally,” continues the medical officer in the Spokane Mining Research Division of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), “the metabolic heat generated by mineworkers conducting work tasks of varying physical intensities, as well as clothing and personal protective equipment, will add to their heat load.” In theory, sweating is the way the body copes with such strain. But push it too hard and things start to go wrong. In the first place, you’ll start to get dehydrated, even as your heart rate rises and your blood pressure falls. That, in turn, can quickly lead to more serious problems. Fainting and muscle cramps are two of the milder consequences here, the latter perhaps explaining Fogarty’s complaints the day before he died. From there, heat exhaustion and heat stroke can sometimes follow. Neither bodes well. Heat exhaustion brings a range of symptoms, including headaches, nausea and vomiting. Heat stroke is arguably even more worrying, not least given it can lead to confusion and fainting, hardly ideal around heavy mining equipment. At worst, these illnesses can permanently damage the heart and kidneys, and ultimately cause death. Nor are these necessarily remote threats, especially in developing countries.
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According to one 2018 study by the Annals of Global Health, for instance, 78.4% of underground workers at one Tanzanian mine suffered from ‘moderate’ heat illness, with nearly 70% of their open-pit colleagues struggling too. With these statistics in mind, mining operators have obviously felt obliged to act. Click on the BHP website, for instance, and you’ll soon find promises to deploy a range of ‘heat management strategies’ to ensure workers stay safe. In the first instance, that involves machines to physically keep underground tunnels cool. Simple air conditioners are one option here, as are cooling towers that dissipate excess heat via water evaporation. But such solutions come with problems all their own. For one thing, they obviously don’t help people struggling with temperatures out in the open. For another, says Glen Kenny, are the environmental impact of such devices. As the professor of physiology at the University of Ottawa puts it: “From a greenhouse gas emission side of things, it certainly raises a lot of questions about using refrigeration to cool [mines].” Fair enough: air conditioning already accounts for about 20% of the electricity used in buildings today, resulting in 4% of all global emissions.
Buddying up With these technical limitations in mind, it makes sense for operators to develop robust work policies. Especially with the impact of climate change – experts warn that mine-heavy regions like Northern Australia could have dangerously high temperatures most days by 2100 – that increasingly encompasses a whole list of regulations. At BHP, staff are expected to take regular cool showers, while the MSHA encourages miners to drink a cup of water every 15 minutes. That’s echoed by the need to take strenuous tasks slowly, even as workers should gradually increase their tolerance to extreme temperatures.
The human body sweats in order to cope with heat strain, but this can lead to dehydration, raised heart rate and reduced blood pressure.
78.4%
The percentage of underground workers at a Tanzanian mine that suffered from ‘moderate’ heat illness in a 2018 study. Annals of Global Health
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