Employees or Subcontractors work on mining sites 

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Plant shutdown maintenance risk assessments

Plant shutdowns are essential for many mining operations. Whether for corrective, preventative, periodic or predictive maintenance a planned shutdown is required to prevent any unforeseen shutdown in the future.  Usually this work is done entirely by contractors or a combination of contractors and maintenance crews. 

Corrective maintenance addresses any defects found on the equipment by the user and is generally on an as-needs basis. The contractors generally used are trades, engineers and specialist consultants. 

Preventative- Periodic maintenance is completed to ensure a level of serviceability of the equipment and this may require multiple items of plant to be fully taken offline at the one time. These projects can be time consuming and extremely expensive for the owner, so to ensure that the shutdown runs smoothly the owners need to employ a variety of staff and contractors (10-800 people) to carry out maintenance works. Owners and contractors should also ensure all workers are fully trained in shutdown procedures to prevent anything risky from happening. Due to these projects being time driven, work schedules may be designed to accommodate shutdown activities around the clock 24/7, the shutdown project may also span over a number of weeks, therefore contractors need to have procedures to manage employee fatigue. If work activities are scheduled at times when the mining site is not fully supported, then the contractor needs to have procedures to manage employee security, first aid and emergency procedures. If predictive maintenance is carried out plant can partially or fully disassembled for service and/or tested beyond normal operational limits. Contractors need to ensure that employees are fully trained in any different or additional procedures outside normal operational procedures. Contractors generally used for preventative and/or predictive plant shutdowns are labourers, trades, engineers, specialist consultants (environmental/occ hygiene), project managers, work schedulers, plant operators, trainers, shutdown/maintenance superintendents, hospitality staff. 

Shut down work can be complex and high risk so risk assessments will need to reflect critical controls to manage this. The mining and resources industries differ from other industries in that they focus heavily on material and fatality risk and the critical controls that keep them from occurring. Every contractors work brings a variation to how these fatality risk present. All contractors need to be able to demonstrate that they have documented the potential fatality risks associated with the work they are performing on site. Additionally, they will need to have identified critical controls (those controls that prevent the outcome). Most owners will have critical risk and control protocols/standards - contractors need to be able to demonstrate how their system maps to the standards of the principal miner.