Two contractor employees died after separate accidents on September 3 at Kinross Gold’s Bald Mountain mine in Nevada, according to preliminary reports from the US Mine Safety and Health Administration. Newt B. Wakefield, 22, was injured while changing truck bed liners when rigging broke and a liner struck him, and died on September 18 from complications related to his injuries. Brandon D. Wheatley, 31, a leadman joining pipes, died after a pipe he was underneath slipped off a jack and struck him.
Both men worked for TJS Welding of Spring Creek, Nevada. The incidents were unrelated, MSHA cautioned that its preliminary reports are not final determinations, and Kinross said company wide safety stand downs were held afterwards to reinforce procedures and controls. Chief executive Paul Rollinson opened the company’s results call by addressing the deaths and extending condolences.
The disclosure came inside a weaker quarter. Kinross’s attributable production fell 16 percent to 424,693 gold equivalent ounces and all in sustaining costs rose 20 percent to 1,947 dollars an ounce, while revenue slipped 2 percent to 1.77 billion dollars despite a realised gold price of 4,249 dollars an ounce, up 23 percent. Paracatu in Brazil and Tasiast in Mauritania remained its lowest cost operations and supplied more than half of quarterly production.
The investment question and the human one are different, and the order matters. Two fatal contractor incidents on one day at one mine is a safety systems finding before it is a cost line, and the final MSHA determinations, not the preliminary notices, will establish what failed in the rigging and the pipe work.