Barrick Gold drives site safety with in-car devices

Barrick Gold has invested $16 million in fitting driver safety devices to vehicles on its mine sites worldwide.

The devices, made my inthinc, can alert drivers "with a voice message if a vehicle operates unsafely or outside a set of parameters", the miner noted in its annual responsibility report.

Unsafe behaviour might include excessive speed, unused seatbelts, hard turns and abrupt starts or stops, the latter two being signs of a vehicle being operated "in an aggressive manner".

Once warned, drivers have "up to 15 seconds" to correct the vehicle operation, before an alert is forwarded to a supervisor.

More than 80 percent of the inthinc device rollout was completed by the end of last year. A spokeswoman for Barrick Gold confirmed the rollout, as originally scoped, is now completed.

The exceptions are Barrick's Lumwana copper mine in Zambia and the Jabal Sayid copper-gold-silver project in Saudi Arabia. Both sites were acquired when Barrick bought Equinox Minerals last year.

"The inthinc system is yet to be installed in vehicles at these sites," Barrick Gold's spokeswoman said.

700 inthinc units have been fitted to vehicles in the Asia Pacific region, under the global project.

The system has already had a major impact on site safety.

"Since the installation of the system and when we compare our current results to our regional benchmarking, we have seen over a 90 percent reduction in speeding and a 40 percent reduction in aggressive driving," the spokeswoman said.