As the holiday season approaches, most people wind down. Mines, however, do not have that luxury. Production continues, machinery runs, people work underground, and risk doesn’t take a holiday. In fact, this is the time of year when stretched teams, maintenance backlogs and fatigue often converge to create the ideal conditions for something to go catastrophically wrong.

And the truth is uncomfortable: you may have thousands of Critical Controls across your operation, and right now, you have no real-time way of knowing which of them are actually working.

The problem no one wants to admit

Traditional HIRA and Critical Activity Requirements (CAR) processes define huge lists of Critical Controls: fire suppression systems, sensors, interlocks, fatigue monitoring, environmental readings and more. The intent is sound, but the execution is nearly impossible.

Manual inspections are:

• Subjective – dependent on who checks and when.
• Infrequent – offering only point-in-time snapshots.
• Insufficient – because controls can fail minutes after being verified.

Consider this real incident: a scoop’s fire suppression module was found to be powered off. If a fire had broken out, the system wouldn’t have activated; and lives could have been lost. Worse, no one knew how long it had been offline. That’s not a “near miss”. That’s a disaster that simply didn’t happen yet.

And every festive season, similar risks quietly accumulate across global operations.

Read more below.