Abstract
Transportation related mining accidents can be tricky and very costly due to their multiple aspects. In addition, they may occur outside of the operation perimeter and miners’ direct responsibility. Based on experience, accidents may involve:
- Ship loader collapse
- Wharves damages due to seismic event
- Concentrate haul truck overturning
- Acid tanker off road
- Personnel bus accident
- Railroad derailment and finally
- airplane accident transporting personnel
Mining companies oftentimes assume transport infrastructure ensuring ingress/egress is reliable and do not consider the full spectrum of lurking hazards and generated risks. They use insurance to transfer transportation risk and rely on Force Majeure clauses. This practice may prove hazardous in these times of rapidly evolving climate change, geopolitical situations, epidemics.
This paper focuses on the characterization of “new normal” and extreme events showing how quantitative risk assessments allow for a better understanding of the risk landscape and to formulate rational mitigative roadmap, including buffer stocks, optimised Force Majeure and insurance contracts.
The importance of the explicit integration of interdependencies and uncertainties is demonstrated using a real-life example which also shows the need to break informational silos hindering balanced approaches. For example, looking at hazard categories such as cyber hazards, natural, and man-made (including sabotage, terrorism) hazards of various types is misleading and leads to squandering mitigative funds. Convergent approaches are needed for a sustainable, rational and profitable future.
Biography of the presenter
Cesar Henri Oboni is currently a risk analyst, consultant and Vice President of Oboni Riskope Associates Inc., based in Vancouver, BC (www.riskope.com). Over the past 15 years, Riskope has pioneered unique quantitative risk assessments for a broad range of organizations across diverse fields. In his current role (since 2014), Cesar specializes in natural and man-made risk and risk tolerance quantification, delivering residual risks landscapes to companies and organizations in order to allow them to better understand their risk exposures, including societal acceptability, willingness to pay, and other social drivers. His team’s seminal work improves an organisation’s social licence to operate and fosters corporate social responsibility across a wide range of operations, including metal and mining, insurance, transportation, harbor, sawmills, and industrial water treatment plants. In his former role (from 2007 to 2014), as analyst and modeller for Riskope, Cesar was instrumental in developing risk tolerances and risk crisis and reputational quantification models for diverse companies.
In addition to his contributions to Riskope, Cesar is also an advisor in the area of risk assessment (in synergy with classic due diligence duties) for an angel investment fund for start-ups. He is an active participant in diverse professional societies (see below).
Cesar has lived on three continents and is thus experienced in multi-ethnic and cross-cultural settings.
Cesar believes that optimization of risk exposures, ethics, and communication bring value and sustainability to his clients and society as a whole. This outlook is presented in the book Convergent Leadership-Divergent Exposures: Climate change, resilience, vulnerabilities, and ethics (Springer Nature, 2021), written with his business partner and father, Franco Oboni.
