Eltirus founder Steve Franklin explains how quarries should change the way they look at the risks to their resources.
Risk management is a critical part of the management of any quarry business. It manifests itself in many ways. We take specific note of this subject in regard to safety considerations, where the ability to identify potential safety hazards, assess the risk of them and put in place appropriate controls to manage (and if possible) eliminate the risk entirely is a critical and non-negotiable function in any business.
Likewise, we also ensure that the people we have running quarries are competent to do so and, particularly, understand how to identify and manage risk.
Most companies have in place well defined systems to manage financial risk – budgets, purchase requests and capital expenditure processes to name but a few are examples of these types of systems.
Some companies also use this approach to assess environmental and reputational risk (to name but a few). But it got me to thinking as to why it doesn’t also include quarry resource risk?
Resource risk
When you look at a quarry resource, you can risk-assess it. Though probably a new idea, it makes sense. For example, if you have a large, consistent resource with a low stripping ratio and stable faces, it’s likely that your risk is low and, beyond ensuring that you are extracting within your boundaries, there is not that much to go wrong.
At the other extreme, if you had a resource that had unexpected pockets of low-quality material in it, variable stripping requirements and severe geotechnical issues, there is a lot that can go wrong, and you would assess the risk as very high.
Resource risk reduction
So how do you reduce resource risk?
In the first instance, you should do a risk assessment of your resource and list out all the different ways that your resource could cause you safety and business risk. Some of the risks to consider:
- Low or variable material quality
- Majors slips and wall failures
- Loss of ability to supply key customers
- Loss of access to an area required later
- Digging outside extraction limits
- Extracting through protected vegetation
- Breaching a depth limit
- Unexpected overburden removal requirements
- Lack of geological logging standards
- Lack of quarry designs standards
- Quarry planning in someone’s head and not on paper
- Prior technical work not available for planning
- Technical work conducted by people not qualified to do it
- Managers within the business not sufficiently trained to understand resource risk
This list is not exhaustive and like any risk assessment, should be conducted relevant to your site and operations. With the risks identified, you would look at the likelihood of them happening and the consequences to determine what should be done.
The cost of not doing it
No one ever said, “money’s no object” to understanding a quarry resource. In fact, quite the opposite.
Oscar Wilde famously wrote, “nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Perhaps he was having a bad day, but on reflection, he has a point.
Our long-held view is that determining whether to spend money on things like geology, geotechnical and quarry engineering should be assessed based on the risk of what would happen if the risk manifested, rather than the cost of performing the work that would prevent it from occurring.
This said, to take this approach, you would first have to have a clear idea of what the risks are, how they could be controlled and what it would cost to do so. One of the key issues we see is that in many instances, decision makers across the industry don’t have sufficient understanding of resource issues (or the cost of them going wrong) to make effective decisions.
If you don’t know what the potential risks are, it is very hard to identify them, let alone control them.
Because the potential risks are not understood (or risk assessed), then when something does go wrong (e.g. can’t supply a critical customer, unexpected stripping campaign required, a pit wall falls down etc.) these are often not treated with the same level of rigour of investigation as would be occur if someone had been injured. In saying this, I am not trying to equate the two, other than to suggest that issues like those noted above should be investigated thoroughly to get to the bottom of why they occurred – if you don’t then you won’t be able to prevent them in the future either.
Examples
Let’s look at some examples of what can occur when quarry resource risk is not assessed and managed appropriately.
A site with variable geology was struggling to determine a direction to expand into. Stripping was conducted that didn’t yield the material expected and was a waste of money. The site was struggling to find the amount of quality rock that was needed – a geological review was conducted that found that the area that the site was stripping was proven to be unviable at least twenty years previously – yet the manager in charge was unaware of the data and didn’t think to conduct a geological campaign before making the decision to dig there.
A company had for many years had all their geological and mining engineering work conducted by a trusted external one-man-band consultant. At a critical juncture, the consultant became ill and was no longer available to the business. This left the business highly exposed and required an external party to be brought in.
A corporate mandate was passed down that required all documents (other than those legally required to be held) older than five years to be destroyed. This included all the geological, geotechnical and quarry engineering documents relating to the site. This resulted in the loss of critical information related to the management of the resource.
A site with variable geology decided to conduct a diamond drilling campaign. The holes were drilled, but for “cost reasons”, never logged. The diamond core was taking up space in a shed and so was dumped. Result, all that time, effort and cost was lost. The area had to be re-drilled (holes in similar positions to the previous time) and then logged (to Australian standards) and the data modelled to provide a clear understanding of the geology of the area.
An inner-city quarry was nearing the end of its life (or so it thought). A review was conducted of the survey, geology, geotechnical and quarry engineering data available which found that the site actually had some ten years of additional resources that they didn’t know about.
Would you hire a quarry manager who was not qualified?
Dumb question, right? So why wouldn’t the same standards be applied to those conducting survey, geological, geotechnical and quarry engineering services for your site? Yes, a draftsperson or geologist could potentially design a quarry pit, but only an engineer is qualified to do so.
Likewise, anyone qualified can fly a drone, but that doesn’t make them a registered surveyor that can competently sign off on stock volumes or ensure that you are operating within your extraction boundaries.
If you want to improve your resource risk management, make sure that whoever you choose can explain the risk to you in terms that you can understand (a good professional can always do this, no matter how complicated the problem), is a qualified geologist or mining engineer and in some states that the engineer is a registered professional engineer. Also make sure that they provide clear recommendations about what needs to be done, noting that recommendations contain actions to be done (or things to not be done).
Realise also that these competent people come at a cost. The quarry industry competes with the mining industry for surveyors, geologists and engineers. Unless we do more as an industry to attract, train and retain our own resource professionals, this will continue to become a worsening problem.
Lastly, ensure that the resource technical work is made available to decision makers – there are some great ways of doing this with online software such as Strayos, Central, or Deswik.MDM.
Summary
Make sure you understand your resource risk and the cost of getting it wrong. As appropriate, hire qualified people to help you mitigate or eliminate that risk. Ensure that the data they provide is made available to decision makers in the business and is retained for the future. When you find that things are different than was predicted, make sure that the professional team know this and can feed the new data back into the resource risk management process.•
For more information, email eltirus.com or steve.franklin@eltirus.com
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