Jundee Mine Choose PED for Emergency Warning System
Newmont's Jundee Mine in Western Australia has ordered 220 of the PED version ICCL. Key reasons for Jundee to go with ICCL were:-
- Cost reduction - existing miners cap lamps were failing regularly costing approx $50,000 pa. for parts & labour to maintain. Maintenance history on ICCL's at nearby mines have shown very low maintenance requirements.
- Reliability - ICCL and the use of PED has proven reliable at other mines, whereas the existing lamps were out of service in such numbers that sometimes insufficient lamps were available for all personnel.
- Emergency response - PED is not just an alert (like Stench Gas), but can also send text messages detailing the incident and update evacuation routes
- Potential upgrades - Jundee are also interested in implementing RFID tracking, so a active tag can be added into the ICCL as required. They are also looking to issue more radios to personnel, and the option of doing this by buying the Radio version ICCL.
The emergency communication aspects of the implementation of the ICCL and PED is interesting to note. Emergency notification had been in the form of stench gas, which had proved expensive and unreliable. Due to the complexity of Jundee underground decline system there were several locations that reported no sign of stench gas following a test release. Also with Stench Gas testing costing about $62,000 every 12 months, without factoring in the inconvenience of every one evacuating the mine when a test was performed, it was proving a costly solution. Using PED they can test their emergency evacuation every day without cost or inconvenience.
We thank Newmont, and the Jundee team in particular, for the support of our underground communication technologies.