Luzenac - Rio Tinto

In 2002, our Rodoretto mine in Italy
installed a guided man-hoisting system
in its ventilation and emergency egress
shaft. The system enables the quick
evacuation of injured people.
In 2002, Luzenac Inc., based in Ontario,
Canada, won an award of excellence for
safety from the Mines Aggregate Safety and
Health Association, as a a result of having
the lowest lost-time and medical aid
frequencies of member firms in Ontario.
In 2003,we are continuing to
strive for lower accident rates companywide,
and have set a target of less than
0.65 LTIFR for the Luzenac Group as a
whole. Part of our preparation to meet
this target has been the achievement,
mostly in 2002, of compliance to a strict
safety standard, which is now common
throughout the Rio Tinto Group. We are
dedicated to the proposition that, in the
mining industry, everyone should be able
to go home after a day’s work in the same
physical condition as they were when
they arrived.
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acquiring self-knowledge of their strengths and
improvement areas, followed by an individual
career discussion;
• Quarterly HR reviews both within Luzenac, with
other Rio Tinto companies and with Rio Tinto HQ
on management and professional development of
our talent pool;
• A policy of internal notification of vacancies and
internal sourcing of personnel prior to external
recruitment, and a job vacancy section on our corporate
website;
• Externally run sessions for selected participants
to identify competencies and career orientations.
In the event of a site closure, transferable skills
increase the person’s marketability and open larger
sectors of the job market to them. This means they
are equipped to look for jobs and identify alternative
occupations outside Luzenac or our industry.
Luzenac considers that the acquisition of transferable
skills opens up career opportunities and
enhances personal motivation both within and outside
the group, and will continue efforts to encourage
competency development.
Safety - our number one priority
Safety in all aspects of our work is our first priority.
This not only applies to our mines and plants, but to
people performing technical service work at the customer’s
plant, sales people driving to see customers,
and our lab and office staff. We encourage people to
be safety conscious in their life outside of work too.
In 2002, one of our Australian colleagues was tragically
killed in a car accident while on a
technical visit to our operations in
Montana, USA. He was driving at the
end of the workday from the mine to the
hotel. His passenger, from the same
Australian operation, narrowly escaped death. The
official investigation showed there was no fault with
our colleague’s actions or with our travel policy and
practice, and that the fault lay with the driver of the
other vehicle. Nevertheless, we have completely
overhauled our whole system of foreign travel to take
this tragic event and other possible scenarios into
account.
In last year’s social and environment report (webbased
only), we reported that our 2002 target for
reduction of Lost Time Injuries (LTI) was a frequency
rate of less than 0.7. We failed to meet this. The
result was 0.9, virtually unchanged from the previous
year.
However this bald statistic disguises five real
advances in our safety performance:
• The severity of the accidents, measured by the
number of shifts lost, was halved across the Group
and was cut by factor 10 in Europe.
• Several of our operations reported zero accidents
in the year. These include Spain, Italy, UK, Mexico
and Texas, USA. Our Spanish operations (a total
of five locations) have now gone almost seven
years without a single LTI.
• At 0.63, our European operations (22 locations)
had their lowest accident frequency rate on record.
• Our Yellowstone mine was awarded the prestigious
Rio Tinto Chief Executive Safety Award for
12 years without an LTI (see opposite).
• Following a terrible accident in 2001 in which a
colleague lost fingers in a screw conveyor, we systematically
modified equipment and procedures
across the Group so that moving parts are inaccessible
when a machine is running.
Our approach to safety continues to be focused on
improving behaviour. This goes hand in hand with
improving equipment and working conditions.■