How are hazards identified?

The first step in risk management is to identify workplace hazards. This means looking for those things that have the potential to cause harm. Harm can be short or long term and may adversely affect the health and safety of personnel, property, the environment, and community relationships.

Hazards can be identified through one or more of the following activities:

• routine hazard and housekeeping inspections and audit activities
• study of information provided by manufacturers and suppliers of equipment and substances
• investigation of incidents and accidents
• accessing learnings from external safety alerts, including the department’s significant incident reports and safety bulletins
• as part of the change management process for introduction of new equipment or processes, and changes to existing equipment or processes
• as part of the review process for existing plans and procedures.

Once hazards have been identified, it is important that they are documented appropriately in order to manage the controls effectively over time.

Mining operations may use registers to assist in maintaining the integrity of the risk management process. The hazard register should serve as a live reference to assist in the development of job safety analyses (JSAs) or other task-based risk assessments.

This hazard register presents the findings from the department's investigations into 64 fatal mining accidents in the Western Australian mining industry over the period January 2000 to December 2015.

This data should be used by employers and workers to assist in the development of safe work practices on mining operations. All responsible persons should carefully evaluate their safety systems and risk management processes to ensure that hazards with the potential to cause fatal accidents are highlighted in training and supervision documents. Precautions and critical controls should then be built into the systems of work.

The toolbox presentations listed below include information on hazard identification.