WHAT DOES MINE RESCUE MEAN TO ME?... A short novel and journey. In 2000/01 it was a condition of my employment to join the Mine Rescue Team at Pasminco Rosebery. Many great mentors and trainers through that time, MINES RESCUE SERVICE NSW Peter Hatswell & Roger Cameron TAS FIRE Steve Webster, Eric Braithwaite RIP & Browny, PT HYDRAULICS ROAD CRASH Garry Muldoon & Rod Wells. We were a motley crew, known for our humour and antics. We were green but the old guard at that time had lost faith in comps due to them focussing on points rather than operational safety. @Phil Smith (Gouger) our ER Coordinator and Safety Manager, organised the best trainers to get us up to speed. Operationally we were a functional Mine Rescue Team, proven at multiple Mutual Aid Responses to underground fires at Avebury and Rosebery, the Beaconsfield Disaster also occurred in this time. Some special mentions at this period, Graham Cowan, Craig Lawler, Marcus Cook, Joshua Berryman, Shane Youd, Brendon Fitzpatrick, Douglas Ralph RIP, Tom Pfund and Terry Pedder. We represented our company and state annually, in the Victorian Mine and Tasmanian Rescue Competitions. We got better at our craft; we learned the lessons of operational incidents and crisis management. We even had Tasmanian teams compete in national and international mine rescue and road crash competitions. Unbeknownst to me at the time, it was a joke amongst the trainers to guess what Chicken's real name was, when introducing new trainers to our group. Andrew Hunter seemed not to be the one that looks like a taxi driver and rides a pushbike, even after wearing BG174 for hours. Circa 2003 we lit the last underground training fire at the 4 level adit at our then decrepit underground obstacle course, soon after condemned. A drum of foam fell over in the creek that sent VW Beetle sized balls of foam all over town. We were banned from lighting fires there from that day and only fitting to bring live underground fire training back in 2023. I was directly involved with putting the refuge chamber system in at Rosebery at 1400m spacings and Oxygen Self Rescuer Station at the halfway mark. This was to comply with the 750m WA Refuge Chamber Guidelines and also ensure our rescue teams had a contingency in case our Fresh Air base (FAB) was compromised. We developed composite construction refuge chambers with Penguin Composites, modelled from their Antarctic proven shelters that put up with +100km/h winds and helicopter lifts. penguincomposites.com.au/...... We also developed built in Refuge Chambers retrofitted with scrubbers, oxygen, air filters and battery back-up. We had Victaulic air lines which could cause a venturi effect and Carbon Monoxide to be delivered directly to a refuge chamber. Along with Tony Farrugia from Shairzal we developed an automated CO diversion valve and alarm, to ensure this did not affect the occupants. We developed automated fire doors, refuge chamber siren and start-up all via a signal over our UHF leaky feeder system. We installed aerosol extinguisher systems on our light vehicles. We could not fight fires safely in blind headings ventilated by secondary ventilation, so we engaged MinVent Solutions and started R&D on the E-Pass vent stop balloon so we could pressure fill drives with high expansion foam and our Turbex. m2pengineering.com.au/... A dream of mine at this time was to become to be the secretary of the Tasmanian Mines Rescue Steering Committee (TMRSC) and put back into the mines rescue community like Jason Clarke, Rex Johnson, Leigh Spilsbury and Bob Casey to mention a few. Circa 2005 I departed Tas for Fosterville Vic, due to using my rope rescue skills with a crane rather than just grabbing a ladder. I returned to Tas in 2007 for the construction of Avebury Mine site working as an ESO and Mine Health Monitor for John Campbell (Wombat). Lessons learned from the past where there was no ESO to call for help at the previous underground truck fire, leaving 3 men trapped below a fire and the cross shift finding the portal full of smoke. John had employed 4 ESO's 24/7. Shane Youd, Jeremy Weller, Paul Edwards and myself. We had a good rescue team and were successful at the comps especially in ropes, being the safest and most efficient. Marcus Walmsley fitting our team out with the first Biomarine 240R Rebreather sets in Australia, a lot cooler than the BG174 we were accustomed to. Unfortunately, the Avebury dream bubble burst in early 2009 due to the global financial crisis and falling Nickel Price. I took a year off and travelled part of the world in a mankini raising money for Prostate Cancer. facebook.com/... Finally I was given an opportunity as an ER Coordinator at Henty Gold Mine, working under Darren James French. We rebuilt a then defunct Mine Rescue Team up to the usual Tassie core group of 14 members, with reserves (ex-members that could not commit the time). Nathan Boag, Mitchell Oliver, Bill Bradshaw, Daniel Cunningham, Simon Enman, Mark Filleul and Steven Reading deserve a mention here. COAL SERVICES NSW Andrew Burt, Dean McHardie, SPANSET Ashley Campbell, EMT QLD Liam Shields, SAFETAS Hamish McGovern all trained this team injecting up to date practices. We would travel to Coal Services Lithgow annually to train in real irrespirable atmosphere, hot and humid atmosphere, underground coal, mountain rope rescue and the Virtual Reality room. Also compete in Tassie and Victorian Comps annually. Again, the Henty refuge chamber system needed work to bring it up to the Rosebery Standard. Upgrading the built in chambers with battery umbilical systems to keep cells cool, fitting air-conditioners, sealing the walls with TekFlex a rubberised grout and inventing long life water for chambers were some major innovations. We even had a built-in chamber that could hold 48 people for 48hrs. We had an underground charge-up machine catch fire during these years, thankfully self-extinguishing and everybody being evacuated from the mine, it did take some time for the Mine Rescue Team to safely verify extinguishment. During the Henty years, Tasmanian Mines Rescue Steering Committee (TMRSC, the boys club) moved under the umbrella of Tasmanian Minerals & Energy Council (TMEC), becoming the Tasmanian Minerals Emergency Response Committee (TMERC). I was voted in as the secretary of this committee also performing duties of Competition Manager and Seminar Coordinator. It was a pleasure to be able to work with the committee at this time, with John Lamb as our Chair. We achieved a lot of standardisations at this time, Adoption of NSW Mines Rescue Guidelines as our own (until we wrote our own), 555 or 5555 emergency number state wide, standardised fire fittings compatible with Tas Fire, standardised mine rescue horn signals and route marking, mutual aid training calendar, standardised captains paperwork to ensure our mutual aid responses were streamlined. Ensuring a combined Mutual Aid Team comprising of members from all sites at every comp. We changed the criteria in which the annual competition was scored, the focus now being team safety, first aid and operational response to incidents. Rather than comp w*nk and forcing teams into points shopping just to win a trophy at the end. This criterion is what forms the Tasmanian Standard for Mutual Aid Mines Rescue and enables a Mutual Aid response for protracted underground events like equipment fire. 1912 North Mt Lyell Disaster still remains one of the worse underground mining disasters in Australian mining history, killing 42 men. Lucky we now have TMERC and don’t have to rely on breathing apparatus to travel over Bass Straight via boat and then steam train down to the West Coast. Mutual Aid is available within half the duration of our long duration 4hr sets. Early 2014 I was made redundant, due to Henty going into a care and maintenance mode and having to wait for gold royalties to expire. I was lost I had no mine to attach myself with. Environmental extremists had slowed the progress of new projects, we were in a commodities downturn. I recessed into a dark place; I was a month away from being bankrupt and put in for 500 mainland jobs without getting many bites. It was soul destroying, finally living my dream and no easy way to get it back. One Sunday Tony Hinkley rings me and lets me know of a place 500km north of Kalgoorlie called Duketon Gold. It was a group of three plants, two camps, aerodrome, and multiple open pits. One of the main large pits just recovering from a full flooding event and massive pumping operation. During the next 7.5 years this project expanded to 12 operational open pits, 2 underground operations and 100-seater jets at the aerodrome. The directives here in the early days were quite simple, you can do anything you like as long as it does not cost money and lowest All In Sustaining Costs (AISC) was the goal, constraints I become accustomed to but if money needed to be spent it was granted. I had half a day at either end of the project weekly to train the ERT. It was a challenge only having 5 hours running through the operational documentation and then completing all the cuts required on a car, checks on rope, donning BA or fighting fires. We come up with a system to ensure enough underpinning theory and practical could be achieved. We had a team averaging between 66-70 members across the board, albeit poor attendance and non-release of members due to operational priorities. We only had opportunity to get some of our members through the nationally accredited block training, but we had to take the wins where we could. Some lifelong friends from this period too many to mention Adam Rapson, Michael Mallozzi, Scotty Hayfield, Clinton John Clark, Clint Cummings, Pedro, Scott McCarthy, Ben McNamara, Kyrie Lewis-McNamara, Michael Donnelly, Mark Proud and Kye Cassam. There were many real responses during this time, three wheel hub fires on explosives MMU's, Dozer burnt to the ground, 500 ton road train fire, Runaway vehicles, dump truck crashes (one resulting with the cab and wheel hanging mid air, over a pit wall) and a Sodium Hydroxide road train fire and subsequent 7 day HAZMAT recovery, only spilling one drop to ground. Also multiple Aerodrome exercises. Then we had to go underground and having mutual aid in place was a DMIRS requirement for the project management plan. I got in contact with the neighbouring mines, met with resistance at first and mutual aid having to be mutually beneficial. I told the story of TMERC, also how our surface mine Savage River burnt their plant down, TMERC embracing them and eventually them developing into an operational underground, comp winning team to the TMERC Standard. We finally got our onsite training program up to 2 days in a row every week allowing a 2:1 workforce to attend once per swing. This allowed the team time to get our underground breathing apparatus skills and procedures up to scratch. I learned that the members of the WA Goldfields Mine Emergency Response Competition Committee were trying to do more than just organise the annual surface and underground rescue competitions. This unfortunately ended with the comps being cancelled for a few years and this resulted in a separatist group. Things may have been different if the CME could have engaged this group under their umbrella. A Mutual Aid model like TMERC seemed to be exactly what the region required. They had a Code of Practice but no Standard Operational Guidelines, except what was in the manuals from different training providers. Dan McCall from Dacian was our first break through, we organised our first Mutual Aid Induction Rookies course at Dacian. Subsequent courses Paul Lindsay from Sunrise Dam, Rob Buchannan & Russell Brown from Granny Smith joined. Even though most training was similar, WA does not have a set of standard operational guidelines to follow, and we needed our Mutual Aid teams on the same page. Born was the Northern Goldfields Mutual Aid Group (NGMAG) our guidelines built on the foundations of TMERC and NSW Mines Rescue Guidelines, with a WA flare. I was invited down to the CME WA Golfields Mine Emergency Response Competition Committee meetings and agreed to help as an adjudicator for the underground fire event. This is where I met a mad scientist by the name of @Tobias Byrne, wearing a blue hat and curly dark hair, who looked like Dickie Knee from the rear. Tobias and the comp committee had developed a relatively cold, fully controllable liquid LPG fire to simulate an underground fire in a safe and repeatable way. Previous years they had used tyres and diesel, which produced far too many BTU's, resulting in a ground failure one year as the backs were exposed to too much heat. Some more lifelong friends gained at this stage David Segui, Todd Smoker, Jessica Kinnersly, Alex Fincher, Brendan Tritton and Jake Benson. I was voted in as one of the Chief Adjudicators for the CME along with Jake Benson and Chris Ellum. The focus was having the ER Coordinators at member sites running the events with assistance from training providers. Making the scoring system fair and creating plausible events for teams to test their skills at. I remember at the SMERC one team had not even trained with real fire. Marty Keates, Daniel Goss and Flash come to mind here. A chance introduction by Flash with Mike Walker from Queensland Mine Rescue Service (QMRS) was enlightening and I got involved with their guidelines review. I was always told they were similar to NSW, this was not the case refreshingly different. Daniel McMahon took the NGMAG document set over to Victoria and put the Central Victorian Mine Rescue Group (CVMRG) together. I reminded him they had already signed a mutual aid agreement in 2008 and gave him a copy of that as well. Lesson here to any mine rescue group is always keep the lines of communication open, never stop trying to improve and learn from each other. COVID hit, NGMAG and CVMRG teamed up and created the "Mutual Aid Response COVID Interim Guide". This was something new and unknown, but we knew we needed to do something, and that response still had to occur. We had to put our heads together, DFES WA provided some resources, but Queensland Health was a great resource, they reviewed our decontamination procedures and ensured we were best practice. During COVID I was working 6 weeks on and 4 days off and close to a year away from the family. I hit burn out and barely functional for the 7 weeks I was home. I had had enough of the site politics in WA, it was time to come home. I found a way back home as Senior HSEQ Coordinator for Lottah Mining, I managed to maneuver myself like a chess piece back to Avebury as the Senior SHER Coordinator. I was finally back home, at the mine site I wanted to work at, back with my childhood friends and close to living my dream again. Only problem we were being used by the Chinese owners as a Ponzi Scheme, mining bitcoin rather than ore and far from becoming members of TMERC. Fast Forward a year John Lamb and the Mallee Resources team come in and now we are producing ore. We bring Tobias Byrne over and re-introduce live underground fire training to Tasmania linkedin.com/... We also get a functional mine rescue team up and running within 6 months linkedin.com/... WHAT DOES MINE RESCUE MEAN TO ME?... - Mine Rescue is a way of life, not just a job. - We are an extended family, no matter which state we are in it is familiar. - QLD and NSW have mines rescue services born from underground coal disasters also run standard guidelines for operations. - Metalliferous mining is a bit of a mixed bag, some mines working in an independent silo, providing all the resources and training within themselves. - Some mines working together to share resources and training at a reduced cost. - If we all work together Metalliferous Mining can have the same standardisation of the Coal Industry. - One thing we all do is train our people to run towards the fire not away. - It is a rare group of people that can get through an 8-day underground course, wearing closed circuit breathing apparatus, while lugging a 100kg+ stretcher up a decline day after day. - Team safety is imperative to the point we may have to make that call "NOT" to save someone as it is too risky to the team. - We know our job is most likely going to result in body recovery, rather than rescue. Unfortunate facts with the energy involved in mining. - We all know the psychological effects not only on the rescue community but the communities in which we live in. I AM LIVING MY DREAM! - There is a group of us that have etched a pathway and know what we are trying to achieve. We will get there, one step at a time. - I know I have a mine rescue family right across Australia, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all. Rescue Connect captures the ethos of my Mines Rescue Journey perfectly.