The good news is that the mining industry has been steadily reducing its number of recorded injuries over the past decade. The bad? For a second consecutive year, fatalities have risen among member companies of global industry body ICMM; the organization reported that 42 miners lost their lives at work in 2024, compared to 36 fatalities recorded in 2023 and 33 in 2022. Just this past July, six miners died at Codelco’s El Teniente underground copper mine in Chile due to a tunnel collapse following a magnitude 4.2 seismic event that may have been induced by mining activities.

Gordon Winkel, chair and industrial professor at the University of Alberta’s faculty of engineering, said the safeguards, controls and barriers meant to protect workers are of little use if they are not effectively applied. “It’s sad to say that many of the fatalities we saw in 2024 were very much due to controls not working or not being executed as intended,” he said.

He pointed to four key areas that continue to contribute to mining fatalities: human interaction with mobile equipment, fall of ground, working at height and falling objects. “Imagine if we could increase our focus in those four areas, half of tragedies we saw could have been avoided,” he said.

Winkel noted that while advances in technology, combined with technical controls and procedures, will continue to make mining environments safer, experts agree that these are only part of the solution. The other key factor is honing a strong safety culture in the workplace. In fact, many believe it is the strength of an organization’s safety culture—the shared values, behaviours and attitudes that shape how people approach safety, risk and compliance within the workplace—that will ultimately enable a zero-fatality future in mining.

Dana Cartwright, senior manager of innovation at ICMM, pointed out that more than a quarter of fatal mining incidents among its members in 2024 were linked to not following established rules or procedures. Yet only one fatality was officially recorded as involving “safety culture” as a contributing factor. “This suggests that the deeper cultural issues driving risky behaviour, rule-breaking or lapses in discipline are unrecognized in incident investigations,” she said.

Further long-term analysis by ICMM also showed that contractors are more likely than employees to be involved in a fatal incident, suggesting that they may not receive the same level of site induction or safety training as permanent employees. Cartwright noted that critical controls can be less frequently verified in contractor-led work, especially when oversight is fragmented or accountability for controls is unclear between site owners and third-party supervisors.

Culture drives safety

The potential of new technologies to substantially improve safety in mining environments is already showing great promise, from real-time fatigue monitoring and collision avoidance systems to autonomous equipment that removes workers from high-risk environments. ICMM’s Innovation for Cleaner, Safer Vehicles initiative is bringing its members together with some of the world’s largest manufacturers to accelerate a new generation of mining vehicles and improve existing ones.

Still, Cartwright said the challenge will be in integrating safety into the very design of these technology solutions and then pairing it with a culture of leadership, learning and care. “It’s as much about mindset and behaviour as it is about systems and metrics,” she said. “While new technologies offer huge benefits, they also bring new risks that we need to understand before using them.”

When people start to rely on technology to do the safeguarding, there is a risk of complacency, said Mike Parent, president and CEO of Workplace Safety North (WSN). “What we found is that operators started to move faster on the ramps because they thought the technology would advise them if there was another vehicle or person in proximity,” he said.

He cited one incident at a mine where, by the time the technology alerted the operator, there was no time to decelerate and a collision ensued. “There were no injuries, but it was a lesson on what can happen if a person starts to rely too much on technology,” he said.

Parent, who has experience working in underground mines, said engaging employees at all levels of an organization in the process of implementing new safety-driven technologies is essential to increasing overall “buy-in” and ensuring that controls are effective. He said the Climate Audit and Assessment Tool, available through WSN, is a good way for organizations to see where there are gaps in the implementation of safety policies and procedures based on workplace culture.

“We’ve done a number of these now in and outside of Ontario and found a correlation between the best health and safety performance and a strong climate audit,” he said. “You could see a tight line between what was expected and understood between senior management, middle management, front-line supervisors and workers.”

Along with a commitment to safety among a company’s leadership, Parent said audit data shows that engaging employees and working collectively to identify and mitigate risks proves most effective. “If, as an employee, I’m involved in the decisions as to why certain controls are in place, I think the likelihood of conformance is much higher,” he said. It is ultimately about creating an environment where every worker—from the haul truck operator to the mine manager—feels empowered to speak up, stop unsafe work and take responsibility for their own safety and that of their colleagues.

In working to further reduce fatalities in the mining sector, Jon Treen, president of consulting company Automate Mining, stressed the importance of striking the right balance in how resources are allocated to preventing serious injury and fatality (SIF) events. While investigating injuries and near misses is always valuable and the overall goal is zero harm in the workplace, Treen said ensuring there is sufficient focus on SIF events is critical.

“It’s like the triage in a hospital setting where the most effort goes towards the most serious cases,” he explained. “There also has to be that level of compassion and caring from leadership for all injuries, even if they’re not giving two incidents the same amount of importance.”

Treen sees technology playing a key role in strengthening safety culture by giving employees instant access to safety policies and procedures. “Organizations are getting to the point where every individual in the workplace who carries a tablet or phone can have every procedure at their fingertips,” he said, noting that the next step would be ensuring these same employees have access to videos that demonstrate how to work safely in any scenario.

By engaging seasoned operators to determine the best way to complete procedures and then sharing these practices across the organization through technology, he said employers can ensure “everyone is on the same page” when it comes to safe work practices. “Even if people read and retain a procedure, they’re not going to have the same picture in their mind about what they read, and this is where technology can help.”

A team effort

Beyond improving safety-related communication and SIF reporting within organizations is the importance of collaboration and transparency on safety issues across the industry. To that end, the Health & Safety Society of CIM, in conjunction with CIM Magazine, has produced several webinars focused on SIF prevention. The society has also appointed a SIF prevention working group to work with industry to develop a national Canadian SIF database over the next two years that companies can access and contribute to.

John Doyle, managing partner at SolutionStream Performance Improvement Group, has been consulting on strategy, leadership and organization culture for the last 25 years and is on the working group alongside Treen and Winkel. He said the database will be a place for all mining companies in Canada to cite SIF incidents, collaborate and share learnings on a timely basis to get better at preventing fatalities and serious injuries in mining.

“Right now, each province has its own standards, statistics and reporting structure and there is nowhere where we tie it all together,” he said. “When a fatality happens, we often know about it, but we don’t know exactly what happened. The sooner we can learn about it, the sooner we can look in our own backyards to see if we have a similar situation going on.”

While there has been tremendous progress in mining over the last 25 years to broadly reduce injuries, Doyle said the industry has “flatlined” on the serious injury and fatality side; the challenge still lies in fully understanding how to change that. “It’s about how to create a zero-fatality mindset and a belief across all levels of the operation that we’re not going to lose people or send them home debilitated from serious injuries,” he said.

Even with the best safety plans in place, Doyle said organizations need to recognize that a safety culture will not happen overnight; it takes consistency, visible leaders at all levels willing to listen and workers who feel empowered to speak up and act. “There are some mining operations that are already well on their way because they had inspired leaders who understood the important role of leadership, and then there are others that still have a lot of work to get there,” he said.

As ICMM’s Cartwright noted, leadership is still central in turning safety culture from aspiration into reality. “When leaders consistently model safe behaviours, empower people to speak up about hazards and tie decision making to risk awareness, safety becomes embedded in daily operations and resilient—even as technology, processes and risks evolve,” she said.