Five years without a fatality, and thirty-one reasons not to be comfortable.

The only measure that matters

Mining kills people. It kills them in ways that are well understood, extensively documented and almost entirely preventable: crushed between a vehicle and a wall, struck by falling ground, electrocuted during maintenance, asphyxiated in a confined space, buried by a failed slope. There is very little mystery left in this subject, which is why every fatality in the industry is a management failure rather than an accident.

Quintel has completed five consecutive years without a fatality at a managed operation. That is a fact and not an achievement, because the difference between five years and four is frequently a metre and a second. The group treats the count of near misses as a more honest indicator than the count of deaths, and publishes both.

Critical control management

The group has identified seven fatal risks — the hazards that can kill someone at a Quintel operation. For each one there is a defined set of critical controls: the specific, physical, verifiable barriers whose absence would allow the event to occur.

A critical control is not a procedure, a training course or a poster. It is something that can be pointed at, tested and found either present or absent. A functioning proximity detection system is a critical control. A commitment to be careful around vehicles is not.

Every critical control is verified on a defined frequency by a named person, and verification failures are reported upwards, not sideways. In FY2025 the group completed 41,200 critical control verifications and recorded 1,840 failures, each of which triggered an immediate correction and, where the failure was systemic, a change to the control design.

The seven fatal risks

High-potential incidents

A high-potential incident is an event that injured nobody but that, under marginally different circumstances, could have caused a fatality. The group recorded 31 of them in FY2025. Every one was investigated to root cause by a team including someone from outside the operation, reviewed personally by the Chief Operating Officer and reported individually to the board’s Sustainability and Safety Committee.

Four causes account for all 31: vehicle and mobile equipment interaction (12), working at height (7), isolation and energy control (6), and ground or geotechnical failure (6). The remedial actions are published in the sustainability report with completion dates and named owners.

The group publishes this number deliberately. A company reporting a fatality-free year without reporting its near misses is presenting the outcome of luck as the outcome of control, and the workforce knows the difference even if the reader does not.

Occupational health

The injuries a mine causes over ten minutes are visible. The ones it causes over thirty years are not, and they are far more numerous. The group’s occupational health programme targets four exposures: respirable dust including silica, noise, diesel particulate matter, and manganese fume and dust at the two manganese operations.

Personal exposure monitoring is conducted on a rotating sampling programme covering every similar exposure group at least quarterly. Results are given to the individual as well as to the company. Where an exposure exceeds the occupational exposure limit, the task is engineered, not managed with personal protective equipment as a permanent solution.

All employees receive an annual medical examination including audiometry and spirometry, and exit medicals are mandatory. Records are retained for forty years and provided to the individual on request after they leave, because a former employee developing a lung condition in 2050 should not have to prove where they worked.

No new cases of occupational lung disease have been diagnosed at a Quintel-owned operation since the group acquired each asset. Historical cases inherited with the Mbengwe and Gamagara operations are managed through compensation schemes in the respective countries, and the group funds an annual screening programme for former employees of prior owners.

Contractors

Roughly a third of the people working on Quintel sites are employed by contractors. In this industry contractors are statistically more likely to be hurt than employees, which is a fact about how they are managed rather than about who they are.

The group applies one standard. Contractors work to Quintel critical controls, attend Quintel pre-start meetings, report into Quintel incident systems and hold the same right to stop work. Contractor safety performance is reported in the group’s headline figures rather than in a footnote, and contractor hours are included in the TRIFR denominator.

Contract award includes a safety capability assessment weighted at no less than 20% of the evaluation, and three tenders were declined on safety grounds in FY2025 despite being the lowest price.