Safety early warning for underground hard rock mining

Safety is an important consideration in underground mine design and operation. Safety assessments, detailed analysis and routine monitoring to understand the performance of underground openings and provide early warning of safety issues is considered to be critical to the optimization of a mining operation and to prevent mine safety accident. This paper provides a discussion on safety assessment theory and safety assessment and early warning methods for underground hard rock mining. Four factors that have dominant potential to impact on safety are identified in the first instance. At first, the paper deduces their influencing functions and the weights of each influencing factor base on the analysis of their influence mechanism, and then advances the stope safety comprehensive assessment method and its assessment criterion. After that a method of safety early warning and prevention is put forward based on each influencing factor index. The Tonglushan copper-iron mine in China is then used as a case to demonstrate the benefits of a comprehensive and structured assessment of safety.