Safety a priority: alert systems notify workers of underground danger.

• Author: Kelly, Lindsay
• Position: HEALTH & SAFETY

Sudbury's Hard-Line is introducing a new product to the mining industry that will increase safety for workers, with the aim of preventing injury or death on the job. The Prox Proximity Detection System, launched in August, is designed to alert workers when they get too close to a piece of heavy equipment while working underground.

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"There have been incidents in the mining industry where these sorts of things happen because people become complacent with using a remote control." said Max Gray, Hard-Line's director of sales North America and global marketing. "They get too close to it, they make an error, and all of a sudden it's too late for them to react. This system will warn them so they can react."

Prox, which is integrated into Hard-Line's Muckmaster Radio Remote Control System, detects when a remote operator enters a zone around the piece of machinery being operated. When a zone is breached, the system emits an audible and visual warning alert and can be programmed to slow or stop the machine automatically.

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While other proximity detection systems are on the market, they run as separate wireless systems, Gray said. But because both run on radio signals, it creates the potential for the two systems to interfere with each other, and both could fail.

Because Prox is integrated into Hard-Line's system, it eliminates the opportunity for interference and, by extension, failure.

Vice-president Ryan Siggelkow said the company has been researching the idea for about four years, but hadn't been able to find a system that met the company's standards.

"We've seen many systems where they're just not predictable," Siggelkow said. "It'll stop within 30 feet one time and within 15 feet the next time, and that, to us, wasn't good enough. So we finally found one that actually was very predictable and repeatable, and we finally found a product that we want to launch."

The system Hard-Line eventually chose was originally developed by Hard-Line's partner company (which Hard-Line prefers to keep under wraps at this time) to be used in coal mining, so it had to be adapted to hard-rock mining. Because of the nature of the rock, radio signals react differently underground in a hard rock environment than they do surrounded by coal, a softer material.

When tested at the NORCAT test mine, "it performed perfectly" Gray said.

Gray said customers have been asking for this type of system for the last two years; already the...