Coronavirus impact: Social distancing harder on FIFO miners
The coronavirus crisis has thrown up fresh challenges for remote mining sites, for FIFO employees and their families.
The life of a FIFO miner is tough, but the money is good, and fierce competition for labour at the height of the boom taught the industry that the best way to keep skilled workers is to make mining camps as comfortable as possible.
But the coronavirus crisis has thrown up fresh challenges for remote mining sites, for employees and their families, as those comforts have fallen away in the face of the need to stop the spread of the disease and their social distance has been expanded even further than normal.
Faced with the threat of closure in the face of the coronavirus crisis, Australia’s mining industry acted quickly to reassure governments their operations were safe enough to be allowed to operate.
Mining sites have long been paranoid about the impact of a stomach bug or influenza outbreak in the close quarters of a camp. Even visitors to site will find themselves quickly confined to quarters if they start feeling ill.
But a coronavirus outbreak on a remote mine could force the closure of billion-dollar operations and mining companies have been forced to take extraordinary measures to ensure their workforce remains disease free.
WA miner Mineral Resources has added a coronavirus swab test to the traditional alcohol and drug tests required to walk on site at its WA operations, saying on Friday it will have the capacity to screen up to 3000 workers a day by the end of the month. Similar steps have been taken by Rio Tinto and others.
And on mining sites the focus of the crisis has become the mother of invention, as companies work to retain the balance of family connection with safety.
The need to limit contact with people and the physical environment — touching taps used by other workers is one of many potential transmission risk points — has put local mine-site innovators at the forefront of design changes.
Evolution Mining has replaced all of the taps at its Cowal mine site in N SW with levers so that workers can turn taps on without touching them with their hands.
Mining contractor Perenti Global, which has workers across Australia and Africa, has gone a step further at one of its African operations, with the local workshop engineering a “foot handle” that allows doors to be opened by a worker’s foot to reduce the number of contact points around site.
It has also rigged up foot pumps for its hand sanitiser stations, and is providing ice in bags for workers to take underground rather than the traditional ice machines with a scoop.
Rio Tinto has begun making its own hand sanitiser at its Bell Bay aluminium refinery — which for a brief period could well have been a more valuable commodity than the aluminium itself, as prices for the metal plunged this month.
But other changes at Australia’s mines throw up more difficult challenges.
To fit in with 14-day quarantine periods mandated elsewhere in the country, and reduce the mass movement of workers on FIFO flights, most of the industry has lengthened shift rosters, placing a massive burden on families struggling to cope with life under COVID-19 lockdown. Traditional shifts of nine days on and five off, or eight and six for the lucky, have been abandoned as the sector moved to a two-week on, two- week off roster.
Some, including Fortescue Metals Group, have gone further. It has introduced a four-week on, two-off swing for its workers, increasing the time workers spend away from home.
At the height of the boom, WA’s mining camps built in comforts that were the envy of city hotels. Fully equipped gymnasiums, desert swimming pools, barista-made coffee, movie theatres and libraries — anything to entice and keep staff happy in their swings through the camp.
But the need for social distancing has taken many of those comforts away. Gyms are closed, numbers in the mess halls restricted, and other social hubs on sites have been closed down to protect the workforce.
One worker who spoke to The Weekend Australian said she thought the new rosters would be “bearable” for a few months, but said it would be difficult to cope with in the long term.
“It’s OK if we’ve got an end in sight. If this only lasts for three or four months it will only be a few swings, and I’ll get by,” she said.
“I can cope with that, but if it goes longer I think I’ll need to find something else to do for a living.”
Another said he was happy the industry was still open and he still had a job, and the general mood on site “wasn’t too bad” despite the restrictions and the loss of some of the camp’s social life.
“You used to see some of the same blokes in the gym and have a bit of a chat, but that’s a bit harder now,” he said. “Yeah, we appreciate that we’re still are employed but you’re not really living the FIFO dream these days.”
One veteran mining operator was less complimentary.
“The food has gotten worse, they give you these takeaway boxes so you can eat in your donga and they’re a bit crap. You can’t really talk to as many people anymore and there’s nothing to do except watch the telly. It’s like working at Newman back in the 80s, except you can’t get pissed anymore,” he said.
“I used tell the young blokes they couldn’t have hacked it back then. Turns out I don’t like it much either.”
But with workers separated from families in uncertain times, Fortescue chief executive Elizabeth Gaines says the industry is working to help families stay connected.
“The team has worked really hard at maintaining a sense of community around sites. Technology is playing a really big part in people staying connected to their friends and families and also to the workplace. So we’re still having our weekly town hall meeting. That is obviously now being streamed to a lot of people and I think yesterday we had 800 people, including some of our team members’ children were watching as well,” she said.
“We don't have libraries and movie rooms, but we do have privacy rooms that we’ve set up where we’ve boosted connectivity, and put in place more iPads and other technology devices so that people can connect with their family.”
Fatigue management is another major issue with the longer rosters, according to Western Areas boss Dan Lougher, who said it was a key focus of the underground nickel miner. “Fatigue and mental health has always been the topic of conversation, even before we changed to make shifts longer, because fundamentally, all the conversations were to make the roster shorter,” he said.
“We’re certainly going to be pushing the mental health and fatigue front a lot harder because I think that’s where we’ll probably start seeing the first cracks.”
But stress factors go beyond just the work conditions on site, according to organisational psychologist Sandra Lam, who runs FIFO Focus, a consultancy that offers mental health services to mining workers and employers.
Ms Lam says the feedback from her clients is that that one of the major factors in causing anxiety for workers in longer rosters is concern about their families back at home — who are also dealing with a more stressful environment as they are often working from home themselves and juggling work and children with limited support.
That is tough enough under ordinary circumstances, Ms Lam says, but will be exacerbated by longer swings.
“They worry about how they can support their family at home, who have to juggle things on their own without the support they used to have access to,” she said.
“They feel like can’t do anything to help. There’s normally a sense of guilt associated with being away already, so now they’re away for longer and the support mechanism their partner had is less accessible.”
That could exacerbate fatigue issues already built into the longer rosters, she said.
“Fatigue comes from the length of the roster, but also comes from worry. If you can’t sleep because you’re worried about what’s going at home then that makes it worse,” she said.