Quarry Southern Africa January 2018 | Page 18

areas). This is also an issue that needs to be addressed on a site-by-site basis, as environmental and operating conditions may differ significantly. Sites situated in hot regions, for example, need to ensure that the PDS is heat-resistant, particularly if it is inside a closed vehicle where temperatures may rise significantly higher than those outside. There is also a level of uncertainty surrounding what, exactly, is required in terms of legislation, with opinions differing even among DMR inspectors as to what sites are expected to do to assess and minimise risk. Hopefully, this is an issue that will be addressed before next year’s deadline. Safety by design Working with large, heavy equipment is inherently risky, and companies spend a lot of time and money trying to manage risk and recovering from unwanted incidents. One of the primary ways to ensure safe operations is to ensure that equipment – and associated technologies, such as PDS and CAS – is designed with potential hazards in mind. To this end, the Earth Moving Equipment Safety Round Table (EMESRT) was established in 2006 Anton Lourens, managing director of Booyco Electronics. to work closely with mining industry OEMs to continually improve the design of equipment at the source, making machines safer to operate and maintain. There has also been considerable progress in standardisation for PDSs since late 2013, when collision avoidance systems diesel machines; and surface mining plants like refineries and smelters. It is the latter two that affect quarry operators and, for now, the law stipulates that for surface diesel machines, only a warning system is required, while the requirements for surface plants are not clearly defined. For equipment that is identified as having a significant risk, the minimum requirements for open cast operations are equipment-to-equipment PDS technologies, while surface operations will require reasonably practicable controls to reduce the risk from significant. Following the risk assessment process, other forms of mitigation may be implemented to lower any significant risk before moving to PDS and CAS technologies. For example, one of the simplest – though not necessarily quickest or easiest (or cheapest) – risk mitigation strategies would be to separate people from machines. One of the primary considerations for quarry operators looking at implementing PDS systems at this stage is to ensure that the technology does what it is supposed to, minimises risk, rather than introduce potential additional hazards (such as multiple blaring alarms in relatively small TECHNOLOGY The deadline for the implementation of PDS at quarries and other open cast sites is drawing nearer. 16 _ QUARRY SA | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018