Tackling risks to health and safety for individual miners

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Individual services for individual miners

Carroll provides a range of personal safety products that can be specialised for specific mine operations; from hearing protection to helmets, and eye protection to gloves, Carroll stocks products and visits operations to ensure safety equipment is being properly used and to replace any damaged items.

Carroll Engineering president Allen Haywood said: “Carroll has dealt with these product lines for more than 35 years and we personally cater to the customers’ needs because these units are dated, they have expiration dates, and there’s planning that needs to take place to work with the customers to make sure that we have products on time, when they’re needed. We provide a personalised service for date-sensitive products.”

Carroll also offers a range of training and education services to ensure mine workers and operators are confident using equipment safely and effectively. “We not only stock and sell the products, but also offer a factory-authorised warranty service to those products and offer training in the use of the product to calibrate the equipment,” said Haywood.

“This is another example of not just providing the product, but also the services.”

All of the products Carroll provides are also approved by the US Mine Safety and Health Administration, part of the US Department of Labor.

Carroll Engineering President Allen Haywood.

Tom Bannister, CEO of Carroll Technologies Group.

Self-contained self-rescuers and hand-held gas monitors

Haywood elaborated on two of Carroll’s products – self-contained self-rescuers (SCSRs) and hand-held gas-monitors – as examples of the company’s personalised and effective service. The former is a portable device which provides a supply of breathable oxygen to miners should they become trapped underground, or poisonous gases leak into mineshafts.

The standard SCSR features an oxygen scrubber, which can chemically remove impurities from the atmosphere to provide a miner with breathable oxygen, but Carroll also offers an oxygen-producing unit for more specialised operations. This device is rarer in metal/non-metal mines, but is becoming increasingly widespread, said Haywood; the device consists of a small tank filled with oxygen to which a miner has immediate access, rather than oxygen produced underground using chemical processes.

The latter device tacks the quality of the air around the individual. As Haywood says: “The hand-held gas detection units are personally worn. They are units that are continuously running and monitoring the quality and the contents of the air and the atmosphere that the miner is in. These units detect methane and carbon dioxide, and can also give the level of oxygen that’s in the air; these are some of the gases that these units can be catered to detect and monitor.

“The units will also alarm to let the miner know that they’ve entered into an area or a certain type of leak of gases has taken place, so tell the miner to take a closer look at his environment.”

Many of the most significant mining accidents occur due to a lack of oxygen or the presence of poisonous gases, and Carroll is tackling both dangers directly with its personalised services.