Coal Age

JAN-FEB 2018

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30 www.coalage.com January/February 2018 safety training THE ABCs of KSAs Assessing the self-escape knowledge, skills and abilities of coal miners by cassandra hoebbel, michael j. brnich and margaret e. ryan What simple step can help to prevent a mine emergency from becoming a mine disaster? Preparation. Mine emergencies can happen at any moment. Although all mines and mine emergencies are unique, being equipped with an easily adaptable set of knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs) can help under- ground coal miners prevent a dangerous situation from becoming a tragedy. The Mine Improvement and New Emergency Response Act of 2006 (MIN- ER Act) strengthened existing safety and health training regulations and intro- duced new measures aimed at improving emergency preparedness and response in underground coal mines. Although the MINER Act also required non-specified as- sessment of the self-escape KSAs of miners, there is no standard protocol dictating how to teach or evaluate these competencies. Now more than 10 years later, the Na- tional Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) expanded its research to answer these important questions: • What are the critical self-escape com- petencies that all miners need in or- der to be prepared to respond to an emergency? • In light of training regulations that are now a decade old, how confident are miners in their ability to self-es- cape in the event of an emergency? Identifying Critical Self-escape KSAs Prior NIOSH research, the National Research Council 2013 report, "Improving Self-Es- cape From Underground Coal Mines," and multiple industry reports have addressed the need for improved self-escape train- ing and assessment that emphasizes task mastery over the completion of time-based training requirements. To address this need, under a NIOSH contract, the Group for Or- ganizational Effectiveness (gOE) and Apti- ma Inc. partnered to conduct a formal task analysis to identify the tasks critical for suc- cessful self-escape. The primary goal of this work was to provide detailed descriptions of all tasks critical to successfully self-escape. The protocol was reviewed and approved by the NIOSH Institutional Review Board and found to be in compliance with the Paper- work Reduction Act by the Office of Man- agement and Budget. Assessing Gaps in Critical Self-escape KSAs in Miners To identify gaps in the critical self-escape KSAs among mineworkers, NIOSH de- veloped a survey using 28 of the critical self-escape tasks identified in the task analysis. Because standard self-escape competency and assessment protocols are yet to be developed and real-world perfor- mance is difficult to assess, mineworker confidence was used as a "proxy" to mea- sure competence. Participating miners were asked, "On a scale of 0-100%, how confident are you that you could correctly demonstrate or explain the following (KSA) to a brand new miner?" In late 2016, NIOSH researchers visit- ed eight mines and collected surveys from 895 volunteer mineworkers. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to assess gaps in the critical self-escape KSAs from the perspective of the mineworkers themselves. Key Results Survey results suggest that, despite unit- ed efforts to improve health and safety training by researchers and industry alike, there are still many gaps in critical self-es- cape KSAs among mineworkers. Figure 1 displays the 28 items included on the survey along with the percentage of hourly and salaried mineworkers who re- port they are not fully confident in each of the self-escape tasks. For example, as shown in Figure 1: • 23% of the hourly workers surveyed reported less than full confidence in their ability to demonstrate or ex- plain how to properly don a self-con- tained self-rescuer (SCSR). • 40% reported being less than fully confident about where to report in the event of an emergency. • Less than half reported full confidence in their ability to explain the chain of command for reporting an emergen- cy, or how to read mine map symbols. When reviewing these results, it is es- pecially important to note the wording of the question itself. The question intro- duced no complicating conditions (stress, smoke, real emergency, etc.), so the re- One of 895 underground coal mineworkers who volunteered to participate in NIOSH's self-escape survey study. "Make sure you have a good up-to-date map and know the escapeways out of there right off the bat. . . if the guys . . . that died in the f ire knew their escapeways . . . and knew where their self-rescuers were, they would have made it out." — Jim Behling, from the 2017 documentary, "Remember Wilberg" "Remember Wilberg" is a documentary film produced under a grant from NIOSH, written and directed by Elaine Cullen, and produced by the UTA Film School.

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