Human Factors and Error in Mine Safety

Abstract

Human factors is an important field whose reason for existence is the various types of errors that people make in performing their tasks. The history of the human factors field may be traced back to 1898, when Frederick W. Taylor conducted various studies to find the most effective designs for shovels [1]. By 1945, human factors engineering was recognized as a specialized subdiscipline. In 1958, H.L. Williams pointed out that human reliability must be factored into overall system reliability predictions or else such predictions would be unrealistic [2].

Human factors and error in the area of safety have become an important issue because each day approximately 9,000 workers sustain injuries on the job and about 140 workers die from work-related illnesses in the United States alone [3, 4].

The first formal human factors-related study in the area of mining was performed in 1971 [5, 6]. This study was specifically concerned with identifying human factors problems in underground coal mines. In 1982, two studies concerning the identification of human factors problems in surface mining were conducted: one dealt with the mining process itself and the other with the processing plants [7, 8]. These three studies directly or indirectly considered human error and safety.

Over the years many publications on various aspects of human factors and error in mine safety have appeared in published literature [6, 9, 10]. This chapter presents various important aspects of human factors and error that are either directly or indirectly concerned with mine safety.