Patterns in mining haul truck accidents

To help develop ergonomics audit programs for mining, one source of data on both work tasks and their failures is accident reports. These are available in most industries and are often used in human factors engineering, but typically to justify and evaluate interventions rather than to provide task details and failure mechanisms. Because fatal accidents in particular contain considerable detail resulting from thorough follow-up investigations, they are thus a useful starting point for analysis. A set of 40 detailed fatal accident reports for mining haul truck accidents were analyzed to develop repeating patterns of accidents. This paper examines the accident patterns found from the initial sample, the refined pattern analysis developed from a subsequent larger sample, and the task analyses used later to help develop valid audit programs.