On the 7th of February, 2011 three Safescape employees were installing a 136m long Laddertube in a 1m diameter raisebored rise at the Pajingo Gold Mine in North Queensland. The ladders were only about 10m short of the bottom of the rise when the rope sheave which we use to position the installation cable over the rise failed.

The failure of the sheave caused the rope to drop to the ground and the resultant free fall of the Laddertube approximately 7m. When the cable took up, the attachments between the cable and the Laddertube broke allowing the ladders to continue to fall to the bottom of the rise. Approximately 60m of Laddertube crumpled at the bottom of the rise with the rest of the ladders, supported only by the damaged ladders, remained in the rise.

Our installation procedure requires that personnel are not placed in areas where they could have been at risk of injury when the failure occurred and therefore there were no personnel injuries.

An investigation was carried out involving Safescape and Conquest personnel as well as a local Mines Inspector. The findings of the investigation were that the primary cause was the inadequate selection of the sheave (the rope diameter was too big for the sheave, when the rope is loaded over the sheave it flattened out and put excessive pressure on the side of the pulley which snapped and in turn pushed the side plate off the main pin and allowed the rope to fall through).

This was compounded by the ineffective application of our lifting arrangement testing procedure prior to install, which if applied correctly may have identified the problem before starting the installation.

The investigation showed that the incident was the result of human error rather than a problem with either the product or our installation methodology, however we took this opportunity to completely review our installation system and look for ways of including additional controls. Several new controls have been added to our procedures and have been applied to two long ladderways since the incident with great success.

The team at Pajingo were still keen to see a Laddertube placed in their rise and so after sending our guys through some additional training we went back to site with a new batch of Laddertube and completed the installation without incident on the 25th of March 2011.

While causing us embarrassment and financial pain this incident has highlighted the importance of our change management process. This incident has cemented within our young company a culture of safety and a commitment to the use of proper risk assessment and procedural tools to ensure a safe workplace for many years to come.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the engineers, management and safety team at Pajingo who were very supportive throughout this time. I can say with some confidence that if we are invited back to Pajingo in the future, every member of our team will be keen to go back due to the great working relationships that we have built on site over the past couple of months.