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In the new report, which released on May 22nd, ICMM revealed that 11 of its 27 company members reported zero fatalities in 2018: African Rainbow Minerals, Barrick, Freeport McMoRan, Goldcorp, JX Nippon, Minera San Cristóbal, Minsur, Mitsubishi Materials, Newcrest, Orano and Sumitomo. Those companies reported eight deaths between them in 2017.
Overall, 50 fatalities were recorded by its members in the whole year, down from 51 in 2017 and 63 in 2016.
The ICMM member companies reported a 16% rise in employee hours worked among the approximately one million workers and contractors. This, the group noted, is because of its newest member companies: Minera San Cristóbal, Minsur, Newcrest and Vale.
"While total fatalities dropped by 2%, the fatality frequency rate dropped 19% from 0.027 to 0.022 fatalities per million hours worked," ICMM surmised.
The injury rate also noticeably fell; the rate of 3.94 for all of 2017 beats out 3.41 in 2018 despite an increase in the number of recordable injuries from 7,515 to 7,751.
"Our annual safety data tragically records that 50 people lost their lives at work in 2018," CEO Tom Butler said. "ICMM and our company members are determined to eliminate fatalities from their operations."
He noted that the single highest cause of death in 2018 was mobile equipment (30%, or 15 fatalities, which is four more than in 2017). He added: "[This] is why we are exploring collision avoidance technology in our Innovation for Cleaner, Safer Vehicles programme."
Another top cause of miner deaths in 2018, at nine fatalities (18% of the total), was fall of ground in underground mines; this is eight fewer than the 17 in 2017.
ICMM data also revealed that, in the six years of safety data it has published, fatalities dropped from 90 in 2012 to 50 in 2018. Over the same time period, fatality frequency rates have dropped by 33% to 0.022 deaths per million hours worked.
The full report of 'Benchmarking 2018 Safety Data: Progress of ICMM Members' is available here. ICMM noted that safety data is for the 2018 calendar year and does not include fatalities from the Brumadinho tragedy in January 2019.
