My name is Joe Selan. I represent a company called Advanced Ergonomics out of Dallas, Texas, and I will be presenting the third presentation this morning. So I will be giving you a little bit more information about myself later on. Suffice it to say that at this point I am the moderator also for the mining break out sessions.

What we are trying to accomplish here is to present to you some case studies, some success stories in the mining industry. In terms of a little bit of background about myself, I became involved with the underground mining industry in about 1981, as far as some research projects that I was doing in conjunction with the U.S. Bureau of Mines.

Back in 1981, if you were characterizing what are the demands of underground mining and what are the ergonomic issues associated with underground mining, I would have characterized them thusly: very significant strength requirement associated with the job, lifting 50 to 100 pound bags of cement or whatever, cinder blocks, trash, timber, et cetera. Very intense, although short duration endurance requirements associated with the job -- the shoveling activities, the cribbing activities, et cetera. Very extreme posture requirements associated with the jobs. Mainly, I think a lot of us think immediately about low coal situations when we think about the awkward postures, but a lot of these awkward postures are prevalent regardless of what the seam height is in our particular mine.

Environmental conditions, you can have things ranging from extremely cold working conditions all the way to extremely hot and humid working conditions in some of the copper mines in Arizona, for example, as well as the vibration issues that are so prevalent in the underground mining industry, which we typically associate with vehicles that the people are riding around in. I know some of you in the room may be interested in surface operations. Certainly the vibration issue is probably the most prevalent or the ergonomic issue that we see in surface mining operations. So you had all of these issues back in 1981.

To fast forward to 1997, how do we characterize the ergonomic issues associated with underground mining today? Sadly, I would characterize them in almost exactly the same way I characterized them in 1981, which is to say that even though we are here to talk about some of the success stories that have occurred in underground mining, the promise and the opportunity of ergonomics really has not yet been realized in the underground mining industry. I think this is borne out just by some of the statistics.

In 1984, the mining industry had the second highest incident ratio for back injuries, second only to the construction industry. Back injuries were the leading cause of lost time injuries in the mining industry. In a NIOSH 1996 study, mine workers were exposed to a higher number of ergonomic risk factors compared to workers in any of the other comparison industries that NIOSH looked at in the '96 study.

So the ergonomic issues are there. The ergonomic issues are evidenced in terms of ergonomic analysis, as well as the injury data that we see in the underground mining industry, and yet ergonomics has really not blossomed in terms of a discipline that has really taken root in the underground mining industry and has served to address a lot of these issues.

So going into the three presentations -- and this is something that we may want to come back to when we get to our question and answers at the end of the three presentations -- I guess the burning question in my own mind is what is it about the underground mining industry? Is there something genuinely unique about this industry that has caused ergonomics to be less well adopted or less well accepted overall in the industry? I think that is a big question that all of us need to leave here with and see what each and every one of us can do to help realize the potential and the opportunity of ergonomics.

THIS PAGE WAS LAST UPDATED ON June 11, 1997