Civcon Project Stilfontein: 6 - 10 July ‘09

Civcon Project Stilfontein: 6 - 10 July ‘09

When we arrived on Monday we were once again greeted by cold, the sound of earth works machinery moving and the smell of diesel engines running all over the place. Dokes didn’t arrive and he let us know that he was admitted to hospital with some kind of sickness. But we didn’t let that stop us to get stuck in and finish up the last work that we didn’t finish on Friday. Through out the week we kept doing observations and processing them into the software. Both the old and new software has to be populated as we are basically the guinea pigs to test out the new software and report back to IT what is wrong and what needs to be changed. So from now on, I won’t be mentioning the observations and data capturing anymore as we do this daily on an ongoing basis. For the rest of Monday we did some filing and other admin functions to make the work a little more streamlined.
Tuesday was a great experience. The day started off slowly but just after lunch it gathered some speed and soon we were ankle deep in it… At about half past one an accident occurred at the south side of the site, at an area known as the process water dam. A 10 ton Tipper Truck was hauling a load of backfill over the dam wall and had to make a left turn off the wall and onto the access ramp to continue to the area where the backfill had to be offloaded. According to the evidence, the driver turned too sharply and when the spotter in that area indicated to him to stop, the momentum from the load coming to a sudden halt caused the truck to lose traction, leave the road on the access ramp and overturned one and a half times. The truck came to rest on its right hand side. The driver had his safety belt on at the time of the accident preventing serious injury. In the area where the truck ended up, there were some workers who were doing concrete work, but luckily none of them were struck by the rolling truck as it came to rest a few metres from them. When I arrived at the scene, I started taking photo’s as the driver had already been removed from the truck and placed in a recovery position. The scene of the accident had been barricaded, but the spectator value caused a lot of workers to down tools temporarily and as a result production also slowed to a crawl. For the rest of the week I was exposed to the principles that we learnt in Incident Investigation. The cost of loss (iceberg principle) was also clear in the process of clearing the scene, gathering evidence, medical costs, time spent on the investigation by a number of people, travel costs for the SHEQ Manager from Civcon, accommodation for him and another Safety officer from their operations elsewhere, etc, etc. The cost with just a relatively small incident like this is immense, and I’m glad that I was exposed to it and had the opportunity to experience it!
Wednesday morning was straight forward, as we were on site doing observations and coaching. In the afternoon Civcon’s SHEQ Manager, Hennie Mienie, arrived and asked Leonard and me to assist with the investigation. We accompanied him to the accident scene where we reviewed the physical evidence and the photos. Afterwards we went to the boardroom to review the paper evidence as well. This was a good experience and I am glad that I could assist with the investigation.
On Thursday the debriefing of the investigation took place and I was a part of that meeting too. It was good see how these types of things play out and how people handle the situation. In the afternoon we continued with observations and helped Jack Mthembu, Civcon Site Safety Officer, to compile the final report of the investigation. What is important is to plan well and do your tasks efficiently. If these two aspects are not part of your work ethic when on site, you will most certainly fall behind and have some serious catching up to do before you even realise that you’re behind…