Mining is one of the world’s most hazardous industries, with 8% of global fatal occupational injuries concentrated in the sector despite employing a far smaller share of the workforce (ILO data). The public perception of mining risk focuses on dramatic events — rockfalls, slope failures, methane explosions.
The reality is that most serious mining injuries happen during planned, routine, controlled operations. Not emergencies. Planned Maintenance shifts.
Over 40% of the most serious injuries in mining involve struck-by or caught-in machinery incidents (CDC/NIOSH, 2024). CDC mining data shows a hand/finger injury rate of 6 per 1,000 full-time equivalent miners. Planned Maintenance activities are the second most common activity in which these injuries occur.
Crusher liner change-outs. Conveyor pulley replacements. Ground engaging tool (GET) installations on dragline buckets. These are scheduled tasks, performed by experienced people, with planned procedures. And they still produce amputations, fractures, and crush injuries — because the tools being used to position heavy components were not designed for the purpose.
“Over 40% of the most serious mining injuries involve struck-by or caught-in machinery incidents. Most happen during planned maintenance — not emergencies. The crush hazard during crusher, conveyor, and GET tasks has no standard tool. Until now.”
The Three Maintenance Tasks With No Standard Safety Tool
Crusher Maintenance: A Task With No Standard Tool
A cone crusher or gyratory crusher is the heart of a mineral processing plant. When its liners wear out, they must be replaced. Each segment weighs between 200kg and 2 tonnes. They must be lifted by crane into a confined cavity inside the crusher shell and positioned against the concave frame.
The person doing this positioning is working inside a steel cavity, guiding heavy, awkward castings being lowered from above. The crush zone is defined by the geometry of the cavity itself — the liner on the way down, and the shell around it.
Currently, most operations handle this with chains, wedges, wooden blocks, and direct manual force — workers push, lever, and manoeuvre the liners with their bodies inside the hazard zone.
There is no standard, commercially marketed hands-free tool for crusher liner installation. This is one of the clearest safety product gaps in global mining. HSF RiggerSafe’s 48″–72″ variants allow the operator to push the liner into final position from outside the cavity — without entering the convergence zone.
Conveyor Systems: The Nip Point That Never Stops
Mining operations run on conveyors. A typical large open-cut operation may have dozens of kilometres of conveyor belt. Each conveyor contains multiple drive pulleys, head pulleys, tail pulleys, and hundreds of idler frames — all requiring periodic planned maintenance and replacement.
Conveyor nip points are one of the leading causes of mining fatalities worldwide. The nip point is the convergence zone between a moving belt and a rotating pulley. Any body part that enters this zone is pulled in before the human nervous system has time to react.
During pulley change-outs, the new pulley must be lifted by crane and positioned into the pulley frame. The RiggerSafe tool allows the planned maintenance team to guide the pulley into the bearing housing from a safe standoff — controlling the final alignment without placing hands between the pulley shaft and the frame structure.
Making the Case to Mine Management
Mine management responds to two arguments: safety statistics and production economics. The RiggerSafe case addresses both.
From a safety perspective, the tool closes a documented gap in the mine’s hazard control hierarchy. Hand and body contact with heavy planned maintenance components is currently an accepted but controllable risk. The tool moves that control from administrative (procedures, training, supervision) to engineering (physical separation between the worker and the hazard).
From a production perspective, a crusher that cannot be safely maintained quickly becomes a plant bottleneck. A Planned maintenance team that operates with a hands-free tool works with more confidence, less fatigue, and fewer incidents that halt the task mid-stream.
Mining has some of the strongest EHS procurement frameworks in any industry. Once RiggerSafe is specified into a crusher maintenance procedure or conveyor Planned maintenance SOP, it becomes a standard consumable — ordered regularly, budgeted for, and expected on site.