Mining presents health and safety risks, particularly for those working underground. Protecting the health and safety of our workforce is essential. Our primary objective is Zero Harm.

Our policy

Our health and safety policy is based on the following principles:

• employee safety is our top priority
• preventing accidents and injuries benefits everyone
• every worker is responsible for observing safety rules
• every worker is responsible for observing safety rules
• our management is directly responsible for preventing accidents and injuries
• health and safety targets must be clear to all employees

Managing health and safety

We have established an extensive health, safety, and risk-management system, in order to:

• understand the risks
• learn from incidents
• implement risk mitigation processes and technologies; and
• encourage appropriate behavior

Each mine has a team of specialists focusing on compliance with the law and our own objectives. We also have three specialists operating at Group level who oversee all of our health and safety operations and undertake regular inspections.

Our highest priority is to prevent fatal incidents. While we have made progress, the safety of our employees will remain our core focus until we achieve a zero incident rate. Every incident is subject to an in-depth investigation and analysis, so that we understand the causes and can prevent a recurrence.

We have implemented training initiatives to promote improved safety performance among workers. Managers at our operations also strengthen our safety culture through regular safety visits, to observe employees at work, and discuss operational and safety issues with them. We have put in place behavioral-based safety programs to improve hazard identification and risk awareness, and encourage employees to take personal responsibility for managing these risks.

To help us continually improve, each of our sites sets targets for certain actions, such as the number of internal audits or inspections, training sessions, and one-on-one coaching to increase safety awareness. Our mines provide occupational health services to our employees and we continue to improve our preventative occupational hygiene initiatives. The primary areas of focus are noise-induced hearing loss and occupational lung diseases, which include pulmonary tuberculosis in people exposed to silica dust. Nordgold’s occupational health programs include pre-employment, periodic, and exit health examinations for all employees.

Malaria and a wide range of infectious diseases pose significant health risks to our employees in Burkina Faso and Guinea. We have comprehensive malaria control programs at our sites in these countries. 

Our performance

Following several fatalities at our mines, Nordgold quickly moved to address this issue. In particular, we hired a new safety manager to oversee our Russian sites and moved High River Gold's safety coordinator to our Buryatzoloto operations.

We then developed an action plan to:

• upgrade the quality and quantity of training on work procedures, hazard identification, and safety;
• reinforce workplace design specifications, for example to emphasize roof and ground stability;
• upgrade risk management programs
• increase compliance monitoring, and
• make sure all employees understood their responsibility for safety.

We have also put in place numerous specific measures to rectify issues we identified when investigating incidents. These included:

• disciplinary measures for safety violations;
• stopping work until violations are eliminated
• unscheduled briefings on safety
• changing suppliers of gas cylinders at Neryungri, and
• improved measures for storing and retrieving gas cylinders.

The lost-time injury frequency rate (LTIFR) is the number of incidents per million hours worked. Our target is to reduce it by 1.45 by 2016. There was a 34% drop in the LTIFR from 2.9 in 2010 to 1.9 in 2011 across the company, as broad-ranging safety initiatives made an impact on the majority of activities outside of the underground operations.

In Burkina Faso, we continued to achieve excellent standards, with no lost-time injuries incurred since July 2009. This represents more than 3m hours without an injury, which is a world-class performance.

We acquired control of Crew Gold and its LEFA mine in August 2010. Its LTIFR was 4.4, but we are already improving performance by implementing our safety standards and reporting procedures, with no lost-time injuries in November and December 2010.

We have implemented a number of health and safety training initiatives to promote improved safety performance among our workers. This includes communicating the lessons learned from incidents or near misses, to help prevent further incidents.