Grosvenor mine fire: How Anglo American 2020 disaster may affect 2024 investigation
A 30-year record has been broken after Grosvenor mine went through two major fires in five years. But how will mining safety law changes after the 2020 explosion affect Anglo now?
Mackay
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Mining can be an inherently risky job, but it is hardly common for the same mine to have a second significant fire in less than five years.
An underground fire at Anglo American’s Grosvenor coal mine ignited due to a methane incident last Saturday which wrapped Moranbah in thick smoke left residents with dejavu from a nearly identical incident less than five years ago.
Sustainable Minerals Institute director Professor Maureen Hassall is an expert in industrial risk management at UQ and said it had been “over 30 years” since there had been a reoccurring disaster at the same mine or those close by.
“It’s foreseeable when you’ve got a mine with gas that you can have ignition of that gas, it’s foreseeable when you’ve got a mine with coal that that coal can burn,” she said.
“The industry has worked hard over the last 30 years to identify ways to effectively control and manage these risks.
“The fact that we’ve had an event twice in the same mine in a relatively short period of time does warrant an investigation of why this happened, so it doesn’t happen again.”
On May 6 2020 an explosion fuelled by a methane leak left five miners seriously burned and trapped in darkness 390m underground, according to the Queensland Coal Mining Board of Inquiry report.
Injured and only able to see by the light of cap lamps, they helped each other out of Queensland’s largest underground mine as emergency services rushed to the scene.
Shearer driver Wayne Sellars would later describe how he didn’t realise he was still on fire until a colleague rushed to pat him down, suffering burns to 70 per cent of his body and requiring more than 10 surgeries.
Anglo American would face no prosecution for the incident and reopen, with Mining and Energy Union Queensland president Stephen Smyth slamming the announcement as “deeply unfair” in 2022.
However the incident led to the creation of the Queensland Coal Mining Board of Inquiry and, in June 2024, parliament passed a host of reforms to the state’s Resources Safety Acts as informed by the Board’s recommendations and the Brady report into mining fatalities.
But will the lessons of Grosvenor 2020 affect the investigation into Grosvenor 2024?
Professor Hassell said it was unlikely, due in part to a five-year transition deadline to implement new policies.
Yet she said the reforms could shape regulators’ options “post-investigation”, which will determine whether an enforceable undertaking with Anglo could be enacted.
The reforms include new requirements for engineering and safety roles, including examinations and new certificates of competency, which will be progressively implemented.
Each of the four acts comprising the Resources Safety Acts will now be able to enter into enforceable undertakings with mine operators, where an EU is an alternative method to resolving a charge through the usual court processes.
Entering into an EU is not an admission of guilt, and will not be available in circumstances where the alleged contravention has resulted in a fatality.
Lessons from Hazelwood
While the legalities shift, Professor Hassell said Moranbah residents on the ground could be right to be wary of the smoke in the air.
In 2014 the Hazelwood coal mine in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley burned for 45 days after a bushfire got into a brown coal reserve, with plumes of smoke and ash smothering the area.
Just last year researchers analysing the hospital records of Latrobe Valley residents concluded that those few weeks of smoke exposure resulted in respiratory impacts and increased risk of cardiovascular diseases.
Australian Associated Press reported in the days after the Hazelwood mine fire then-Victorian public transport minister Terry Mulder offered return train tickets for those wanting to escape the smoke, with post delivery, schools, and courts all closed or relocated.
While how many may have taken him up on the tickets is unknown, no similar notion has yet been proposed in Queensland.
Complex challenges ahead
Professor Hassall said it was still “pretty early days” as the effort to smother the Grosvenor fire continues despite the difficulties.
Unlike open-cut Hazelwood mine, Grosvenor’s underground longwall tunnels are able to be sealed and pumped with nitrogen to starve the blaze of oxygen, but Professor Hassall warned it would be “quite complex”, describing the mine as a “rabbit warren”.
Fears of another explosion at Grosvenor continue to grow as the fire burns into its fourth day, alongside worry the mine could be shuttered and closed up to smoulder underground.
It is yet to be seen what future its 1400 employees, not to mention the 9000-odd residents of Moranbah, can prepare themselves for.
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