Canadian oil sands giant Suncor, which now also majority owns and operates the adjacent Syncrude operations, reported a fatality at its Base plant mining operations on January 6, 2022.

The incident occurred when one heavy haul truck rear-ended a second heavy haul truck while they were both driving up a mine haul ramp. The two workers in the moving haul truck that was struck from behind were taken to hospital and released with minor injuries. The driver of the other heavy haul truck did not survive.

Following the incident, Mark Little, Suncor President and CEO stated: “I am deeply disappointed by these events and I am committed to implementing corrective actions, continuing to strengthen our processes and accountability, and to improving Suncor’s performance.”

Then in an analyst call following publication of Suncor’s Q4 2021 results, Little outlined more specific plans: “We’re implementing standard risk assessments across all of our sites versus them being specific to the individual assets so that if we pick up something at one site, we can test that risk across all the other sites as well. And we’re working on our culture and leadership engagement with the workforce at the front line. And finally, we have been working on this plan for a period of time, but it’s just essentially got finalised is to implement collision avoidance mitigation and fatigue management on all our mine mobile equipment.”

He added: “We’re expecting that to be done in the next 18 to 24 months. This is a technology that’s used globally in mining, but it is not used in oil sands. And so, we’ll be the first oil sands company to universally use this across all of the mines. And this is something that Teck has really helped with in providing us some of their insights from their global experience around running the mines.”