Presentation by Daniel E. Anderson, Consolidation Coal Company
MR. SELAN: Our second speaker is going to be Dan Anderson. Dan has 20 years service with Consolidation Coal Company with positions ranging from project engineer to assistant superintendent, and his current position is chief inspector at the Corporate Safety position. Dan has a BS in Mining Engineering from Penn State in 1976, and an MBA from Pittsburgh in 1983. So, without further ado, let me introduce to you Dan Anderson.
MR. ANDERSON: Good morning. I will tell you a little bit about Consol to start things off. Consolidation Coal Company, for those of you who don't know, is a rather major player in the coal market. The 1996 production was 71 million tons. We currently employee around 8,300 people, operating primarily underground coal mines. We have 18 underground coal mines running right now and three surface mines. The mines are located in West Virginia, Virginia, PA, Ohio and Illinois. We have a joint venture up in Canada.
Back in 1992, the ergonomics effort got started in Consol, and the way it got going was that we have a safety task group that gets together every two months to kind of review what is going on from the safety standpoint of the company. This safety task group was having a meeting in April, and they started looking at the 1991 accident statistics. It became apparent to them when they were going over the '91 accident statistics that we had a problem with strain and sprain type injuries. What we had in 1991 was 170 reportable strain and sprain injuries, which constituted 36 percent of our total reportable incident rate.
We took a look at this and started asking questions as to why this was happening, and this group put together some factors. Some of them have already been discussed, but a) our work force was aging. The average age of the hourly underground worker in Consol in 1991 was 42 years old. This developed primarily because we hired an awful lot of people back in the 70's, and these big, strong 20 year olds that we hired in the 70's were now pushing 50. Two, it is a very labor intensive business. As Joe had mentioned prior to this, we still do a lot of activity that involves a lot of lifting, a lot of dragging and a lot of lugging and tugging. Three, a lot of these activities were repetitive motion type activities, shoveling, crib setting and things that go on underground which you use the same basic muscles and you do it over and over and over again.
Our compensation costs were escalating in the way these guys have already told you. Conditions underground were kind of unique. Crawl under your kitchen table, I believe, was the way Tim put it, and it is a good way to explain things. It is tough to maneuver underground. You are in a confined area, and it is just hard conditions.
Organization-the safety task group decided to go ahead and get things going. They recommended to the Executive Vice President of Operations to put together a formal ergonomics program, and what evolved from that was a fairly simple organization. At the corporate level we got things going: a regional ergonomics coordinator was selected in 1993. The regional coordinators were the Assistant Vice Presidents. From that point, the regional coordinators were in charge of selecting a mine site coordinator for the ergonomics program. The mine site coordinators typically were assistant superintendents, the number two guys at the coal mines. Once again, it was kind of important that you pick a guy at the mine site who could make things happen. The assistant superintendent basically has everybody working under him, except for the superintendent. He was the guy that could get a job done.
Let's talk about training a little bit, and I will go back up to the podium. The regional coordinators were put through a formal training session. We brought a paid consultant up to corporate headquarters and the regional coordinators went through a training session, a two-day training session where they discussed the ergonomic principles, biomechanics, muscle physiology and those kind of items. The mine site coordinators were then brought up to the regional headquarters, and at the regional headquarters they were put through a condensed version of that program. They went over the same type issues.
I will show you a couple of slides that we used at the regional sessions. This one was at our eastern region. It covered things such as the four "E's" of ergonomics: events, employees, equipment and environment. We covered the ergonomic risk factors. Of course it is repetition and posture and some of the ergonomic keys of success. I have a couple of the important ones here in putting together a program and what we found from experience was communicate, don't duplicate. Most of our coal mines are pretty similar operations, and what you find out is that if you don't communicate and if you don't document things when you are doing them, you will find everybody doing the same thing, inventing the same wheel over and over again.
Another one on this list is look for early successes. It is a very important point, and I will get to that here in a second. The mine site coordinators were given a fair amount of flexibility as to how to get things going at the mines themselves. Most of them set up committees very similar to the committees that was discussed with Southern Ohio Coal Company, superintendents, mine foremen, upper management types at the coal mine. A lot of those committees also involved the hourly work force. Another very important facet of getting an ergonomics program started is get the ideas from the guys that do the job, very important. They are the ones that can give you the best ideas.
We did a little different thing. I was a mine site coordinator at the Enlow Fork Mine at the time, and I will primarily discuss what we did at Enlow. It was a little different approach. Having gone to the regional training session, I went back to the mine and talked to the superintendent, and we decided that we were going to try to solicit as many ideas as we possibly could. We did this by going first to the foremen. We held a meeting with all the foremen at the coal mine and talked about the ergonomics program. We talked about why we were initiating an ergonomics program and asked them to take a good hard look at the jobs that their people were doing for them and see if there wasn't some way that we could improve the way they did the jobs, reduce the likelihood of injuries and also pick up some efficiency in the process.
Then we held general meetings with all the employees at the coal mine. We invited everybody upstairs into our training room and held a big pow wow. The guys rotated at the coal mine. We brought them up on a Tuesday morning and had about a half hour session with all the employees, and we asked them for their ideas also. The third thing we did is we ran an article in the monthly newsletter highlighting the ergonomics program and asking, once again, for ideas.
I was kind of surprised at just how many ideas came in and how fast they came in. We had an excellent early response. A lot of people thought we should have been doing this a long time ago, and they were appreciative of the fact that we were starting this program. So what we decided to do was to get some quick hits, and like I said before, it is very important. (Turned on slides.)
I went down to the belt line one day. Franny was shoveling the belt, and I noticed that the shovel was different than any that I had seen before. I asked her where did you get that shovel, Franny. She said I brought it from home. Now you know you have got a good employee when they bring their own shovels from home. This is a good girl. Anyhow, the shovel that she was using was an aluminum shovel. We have used steel shovels in the coal industry for 100 years. She went to Agway and bought an aluminum shovel, and it was amazing how much easier it was to clean up the conveyor belt line that she was working on with an aluminum shovel versus a steel shovel.
The second important lesson that was learned was I went outside and I ordered six shovels. I had them put in the warehouse. They instantly disappeared from the warehouse, and if you are going to buy something and you have 30 guys using shovels, don't order six of them because I had 24 people in my office the next morning wanting to know where their aluminum shovels were. So we ordered a bunch more. It is simple, easy, effective. It pleased a lot of people, and it didn't cost much money.
Well, I am certainly not going to get an award for photography on this one, but let me try to explain a little bit. Our battery scooper car we use underground for hauling materials, hauling supplies around. What you have when you get in a battery scoop car is kind of a confined cage area. You have to curl down in this thing, and then we have these roll over lids that come back and protect your back area. So when you are driving this scoop car around and you happen to bump into something and you hit the rib, it doesn't roll in and break the neck. Anyhow, getting out of this battery scoop car has always been a particular pain because you have to be a contortionist, basically, to get this lid back up. You have to do one of these numbers and throw this lid up. This rope cage is protecting your back.
One of our mechanics at the mine was a tinkerer. He liked to build things. So he came up and he asked. He said you know, I know a better way to raise that lid. Let me spend $15 and give me four hours and I will show you what I can do. So we did, and he came up with this. You can't see it very well on this picture, but it is a handle. It is a shiv wheel and it is roller. What it does is instead of having to go through all this motion to get the lid up, now all you do is reach out in front of yourself, pull down on the handle and bang the doors up and you are out of the scoop. Once again, it was effective, simple, and it didn't cost much money.
The unique little cart here for those of you that are familiar with the long wall. The long wall can be a 600' to 900' huge piece of equipment, and what you have to do with a long wall is when it breaks down you have to fix it. So you have to get parts up and down this face. You can find basically a walkway that is two feet wide and five feet high. So anything that you have to take down to the other end of this thing, you have to get it through this confined space. One of our mechanics, once again, got tired of all the back breaking work that was involved in dragging parts down to the other end of the long wall and built a cart. This little cart sits up on the hand rails, and what you do when you want to take something down is you put it up on top of the cart. If it is parts or tools or whatever, you strap it onto the cart and then take one hand and push it down. It is nice, simple, quick and easy.
Now, we have these in most of our coal mines right now. It is called a zip mobile, and actually the engineering print that we drew up to have these things manufactured says zip mobile because the guy who invented it his name was "Zip".
How effective has the program been? We can take a look at statistics. It is real simple to look at some statistics and find out where you are. If you take a look at production you know instantly how many tons you have loaded just by looking at the numbers. If you take a look at what it is costing you to mine a tone of coal, it is a pretty easy number to generate. A basic IR rate for safety is a pretty easy number to generate. Some of these projects when you undertake them, it is difficult to identify just exactly how well they are paying off.
A case in point, Frank right there is carrying a cement block. Our mason is underground. Our guys who construct stoppings -- for those of you who aren't familiar with what stoppings are, it is a cement block wall that separates good air from bad air underground. What we used up until we took a look at it was a 53 pound concrete block. A typical mason will handle 250 or 300 blocks a day. It is not so bad when you are stacking this high in our mines that have seam height, a lot of seam height. They get real heavy when you get them up to this area. So we took a look at those cement blocks and decided to see if we couldn't find one that was lighter. We went to a block manufacturer and, indeed, they could make a lighter block for us. The problem with that lighter block is that the aggregate that they use is dug out of a swamp someplace in Louisiana, I believe, and it is an expensive product. So what we got when we switched to the light weight block was a .30 per block increase in prices. That particular coal mine uses 100,000 blocks per year, and you are looking at $30,000 a year. Can you justify that? I believe you can. $30,000, while it is a substantial piece of money, if you save one operable back injury, you have got that $30,000 back. Time will tell.
Other projects are very simple, very easy to calculate. The lighter block went down to 38 pounds. We went from 53 to 38. The only other problem with that particular light weight block was that because of the way it was designed, the aggregate, we went from about 2,200 psi compressant strength down to about 1,100. So we loss some strength in the deal also.
The scoop works. Once again, we talk a little bit about a scoop. When we set cribs in the coal mine -- and a crib is like a rectangular log looking thing that you stack blocks up on top of one another and put them up on top of the roof to hold your roof up. When we do that underground we unload them in palettes, and a typical process prior to having these extended scoop forks was a two-man job. One guy got up. He wrapped the chain around a set of palettes, drug the rope off of a scoop. The operator in the scoop then drug these two palettes back in. They went and did the reverse process to unload.
We took a look at that process and went out and spent $12,000 on a set of extended forks. We put that onto a front end of a scoop, and what it allowed us to do is instead of unloading two cribs at a time, we can unload three. So we went from delivering 120 crib blocks per trip up to 180. Also we eliminated one guy. He didn't have to be here. He could be doing something else because these things you can operate them from inside the scoop cab. It is very simple. We went in and did time studies with this operation with the industrial engineers. What it proved is that we were getting a 30 percent increase in productivity on this particular operation. If you do the math, those scoop forks were paid off in a matter of months.
There are easy ones and tough ones to justify or to look at or to try to figure out what the results are going to be. Now, has the program been totally wonderful? Well, we have got some things that we need to do yet. Mostly getting that communication thing going from the mine site, back up to the plaza and then back down to the mine site. In my current position, I get to go around the company and take a look at all the coal mines, and what I see as I go around is that coal mine A has already figured out a problem, and coal mine B isn't there yet because we haven't done such a good job communicating.
We are taking a couple of steps to rectify that right now. We are putting together an ergonomic data base. The data base is set up on a data base management system. It currently has about 300 entries in it, and what we are going to do with that is get it dispatched to all the mine sites so that if they are going to do something with a scoop car, they can ask a couple of questions to the d-Base management system and find out what people have done with scoop cars.
The second thing we are doing is we are going to put a picture catalog together. A picture is worth a thousand words, but basically we have taken and documented our ergonomics projects, taken a picture of it, and this is Franny with her aluminum shovel, and we are going to put together a catalog that we are going to distribute to all the mine sites. That should also help in getting the information out there and getting it to everybody that needs it. I brought some other slides with me just to show how simple some of these projects can be. This guy designed a tool that -- we used to do this particular job. It is taking a pin out of a piece of pan line. We used to hit it with a hammer and bang and slam and break things. This guy got tired of doing that. he designed a little tool for popping these pins out. It is simple, easy and effective.
Dragging tubes around the section, it always came with little rings on them, and we did this for 100 years. A ring you could only get two fingers in it. One guy said why don't we put a loop on there. We went to the manufacturer to get a loop put on the tubes so now you grab them and drag them around with your whole hand.
This guy is putting up a roof support. He decided that it would be better if we prepackaged those particular type bolts, as opposed to carrying all the parts around. He was right. We had the manufacturer do that. We saved them money because their palette costs were cheaper, and we saved ourselves money because it was a lot easier to handle.
I will show you a couple of real quick complex projects. That is a belt tailpiece, and somebody had the idea that those jacks that you see sticking up in the air used to sit separate from the tail piece. So when you moved the conveyor belt, you had to tear down jacks to put them on the tail piece and go through a bunch of motions. What we do is we just attach them to the tail piece so now when the tail piece moves the jacks go with them. It is a very simple process.
We have a set of rail trucks for recovering rails. A rib protector that was attached to the continuous miner. It is a fairly expensive project but one that has paid great dividends. We haven't had a guy hit with a piece of rib since we put those on the machine.
What this slide shows is a crane similar to the one Tim showed you on the ergo bus. It is kind of ironic that we use these two particular guys to do this. They are both body builders. As a matter of fact, the one on the back is the former Mr. Ohio. He could pick that whole jeep up if he wanted to, but in handling heavy parts, the crane comes in real handy.
Just in closing, I show you that all projects are not a success. We gave a shift foreman an assignment to try to figure out how to advance tubes through the face a little quicker than what we were doing. He decided that maybe if we put this ring gizmo up we could slide them instead of attach them the way we normally do. I had my doubts when he came to us with this proposal, but we went ahead and tried it anyhow. It didn't work. So not everything is a success. I thank you.
MR. SELAN: Thank you very much, Dan.
