ICMM - International Council on Mining & Metals

CASE STUDY

Identifying and assessing hazards and risks

One of the first steps in emergency preparedness is to identify and assess hazards and the associated risks within an operation. There are many ways of achieving this, and an illustration of how it may be done can be found at Falconbridge.

Falconbridge is a leading international mining and metals company employing 16,000 people at its operations and offices worldwide. It is one of the world’s largest producers of zinc and nickel and a significant producer of copper, primary and fabricated aluminium, lead, silver, gold, sulphuric acid and cobalt. Falconbridge is also a major recycler of secondary copper, nickel and precious metals.

The company has set out a series of sustainable development policy statements. One is that all its operations will meet or surpass applicable environmental, health, hygiene, safety, emergency preparedness and response legislation and other requirements to which the company and its operations subscribe. In order to prepare and be fully capable of responding to emergencies, group companies are expected to conduct a vulnerability assessment to identify and assess their hazards and risks.

Potential crises are identified according to groups of different scenarios (process environmental incidents, environmental, disasters of natural origin, societal and political, financial, and health and safety). How the elements within these groups may affect seven different areas (public health, environmental health, environment, market share, production, facility and equipment and outrage) is then considered.

This collection of hazard scenarios is then considered under four likelihood possibilities (remote, rare, occasional and frequent) and four severity possibilities (minor, moderate, critical and catastrophic). From the assignments made, a risk level for each of the areas that may be affected is generated. A summation of the risks for each affected area gives a total risk, and from this a priority ranking may be assigned.

Following the exercise, it is up to individual managements to see that the priorities are addressed first within the terms of risk elimination or reduction and then in terms of emergency management strategies to deal with residual risks.

An Excel spreadsheet is used to capture the results of the analysis carried out by individual companies, and these results are fed back to the Falconbridge corporate centre.

Analysis

The list of crisis scenarios is comprehensive. (See Scenarios below) Potential crises in the plant or mine are included, as are those that may occur outside of the site boundaries. The scenarios include what may happen to employees and also what may happen to the public should a crisis develop. Significantly it allows for public anger and reaction – ‘outrage’. The scenarios deal with business in terms of crisis impact on market share and the financial implications of any crisis that develops. The list does not, however, specifically include transport except as it might involve sulphuric acid; for some people, this would be considered a significant omission.

It would be possible to use a different risk matrix to the four-by-four array used by Falconbridge. A simple three-by-three array would be an easy starting point. This does, however, suffer from too sharp a discrimination between the categories, leading possibly to poorer judgements on the actual levels of risk arising.

A matrix of four effects (catastrophic, critical, marginal, negligible) by five likelihoods (frequent, probable, occasional, remote, improbable) has been used elsewhere and has much to commend it. As the categories grow, however, so too must the knowledge required to make the necessary judgements between one level of effect or consequence and another.

Scenarios

Environmental disasters, tailings failure, major external spills, toxic gas release, sulphuric acid release/spill, marine impact

Floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, fires, ice storms

Civil disobedience, strike violence, bomb threats, sabotage, protests/ demonstrations, disgruntled employees, acts of terrorism

Stock, financial scam, embezzlement, theft, kidnapping, computer virus, security breach and acquisitions/divestiture

Explosion at Falconbridge facility, employee fatality, mine cave in, plane crash (employees and executives), product safety, worker illness/disease, bioterrorism