Platform costing less than $2000 could have saved two men at Mt Lyell Copper Mine, Burnie court told

THE purchase of a compliant temporary shaft platform costing less than $2000 could have saved the lives of two miners who plunged to their deaths in the Mt Lyell Copper Mine, a court has heard.

The Mt Lyell mine site at Queenstown where two workers died in an underground accident in 2013.

THE purchase of a compliant temporary shaft platform costing less than $2000 could have saved the lives of two miners who plunged to their deaths in the Mt Lyell Copper Mine, a court hearing has been told.

It is almost three years since Alistair Lucas and Craig Gleeson went down the historic mine to do maintenance work on underground machinery which feeds ore into skip bins.

The men were standing on a suspended wooden platform on December 9, 2013, when a piece of the flask linkage in the Prince Lyell shaft they had been sent to fix fell onto the platform. The structure then collapsed and the two Copper Mines of Tasmania workers fell 22m down the mine shaft onto broken rock below.

Mr Gleeson, 45, who had worked underground at Mt Lyell for 13 years, was pronounced dead at the scene.

Phillip Lucas, the father of Alistair Lucas, leaving the Burnie court yesterday.

Alistair Lucas, 25, who had worked at the mine for 2½ years, was found alive but suffered a cardiac arrest and died on the way to hospital.

Both the men’s names are engraved on a plague at the entrance to the mine which has been on care and maintenance since April, 2014.

In August, CMT pleaded guilty to a charge of failing to maintain a safe workplace in relation to the deaths of two underground employees.

Magistrate Tamara Jago yesterday heard facts and took submissions and is due to deliver her sentence on December 13.

The maximum fine is $1.5 million. The mine was closed for 10 days after the deaths.

During that time, a new $1787 platform was designed, built and delivered, a new job hazard analysis system developed and CMT was then given permission to resume mining.

Prosecutor Sam Thompson said the fault was “solely with the company”.

“A job safety analysis before the men went underground that day would have revealed that a cheap, safe system of work could have been implemented at a cost of less than $2000,” Mr Thompson told the court.

“It was a high-risk task they were undertaking that should have been assessed by an expert. The company instead relied on workers passing information up the chain of command. The company had accepted use of the temporary platform in the past simply because there had been no incidents in the past.”

He said CMT had committed a very serious break of workplace safety laws.

The family of Michael Welsh leaving the hearing.

Victim impact statements from family members of the dead miners were tendered but not read out in court.

Mr Lucas’s father, mother and stepmother were in the court along with members of Mr Gleeson’s family.

Mr Thompson said CMT had previous workplace safety convictions and in 2006 had been fined $10,000 after a labour hire contractor worker’s arm was stuck in a conveyor belt. In its submissions to the court, CMT’s defence counsel Chris Gunson asked the company receive a 25 per cent discount to any fine issued for pleading guilty to the charge.

The court was told that since production stopped at Mt Lyell in 2014, CMT had not generated any income but had spent $85 million paying redundancies and keeping the mine on care and maintenance.

“The practical reality is CMT survives on the benevolence and loans from its parent company Vendata,” Mr Gunson said.

“CMT remains optimistic about a recommencement of mining operations at Mt Lyell but that largely hinges on the global copper price rising to a level where a mining operation is economic.

“If that happens, CMT will need to obtain a fresh workforce and carry out a number of steps, including safety procedures, before mining could start again.”

The court heard the company had given $15,000 to both families to pay for the men’s funerals and the $16,000 raised by colleagues and others in Queenstown to help them was matched by the company.

The men’s wages were also paid for two years after their deaths, in accordance with worker’s compensation laws.

Emergency crews at the scene in 2013.

Originally published as Platform costing less than $2000 could have saved two men at Mt Lyell Copper Mine, Burnie court told