BHP Group Ltd. CEO Mike Henry is "gutted" by three fatalities at the diversified miner's sites in the past year and promised to ensure increased safety measures are applied consistently across operations.

BHP and Queensland's resources sector safety regulator have both launched investigations into the Jan. 15 death of a 27-year-old contractor at BHP Billiton Mitsubishi Alliance Pty. Ltd.'s Saraji coal mine. The worker was pinned between the tray of a moving light vehicle and the bull bar of a stationary truck, the regulator said.

The Saraji incident was the latest fatality at one of BHP's mine sites since April 2023, when a 25-year-old worker for BHP contractor Exact Mining Services died after being struck by a vehicle on a surface access road at Olympic Dam in South Australia. In February 2023, a 51-year-old BHP employee died in a shunting incident at the miner's Port Hedland rail yard in Western Australia.

BHP CEO Mike Henry says responsibility over safety leadership starts at the top, with himself. Source: BHP Group.

BHP's operated assets had been free of fatalities for four consecutive years before 2023.

"I have to say I am personally gutted by the fact that three people haven't gone home at the end of a shift in BHP under my, or our, watch. It's something that we take super, super seriously," Henry told a Feb. 20 analyst call for BHP's half-year results.

"I've mandated certain requirements for the team in the coming weeks and months as to how much time [people work] and what we do when we're in the field, and that includes full night shifts, full day shifts and so on."

BHP is "paying particular attention" to the fact that all three incidents involved moving equipment, the CEO said.

"We need, starting with me, more consistency and better consistency in how we're leading safety," Henry said. "That's a key area of focus. We also need to be continuing to uplift culture when it comes to safety."

Henry maintained that BHP does have "the right systems and tools in place to manage safety well."

"Where things like field leadership [and] the BHP operating system are deployed well, we find that those operations are running with better safety and [with] better productivity. So this is probably about us simply reinforcing those things. We already know what they deployed well throughout the business."

During recent visits to the company's operations at Port Hedland and the Jansen potash development project in Saskatchewan, Henry said he gleaned from "teams on the ground, both employees and contractors, by and large, that the safety culture and our approach to safety management has improved over time, and we see that coming through in many of our underlying statistics."

Fellow Australian large diversified miner Rio Tinto Group lost four team members in January, after reporting earlier that month that it had reached five straight years of being fatality-free at its managed operations. The employees from its Diavik diamond mine and two airline crew members died in a plane crash in Canada's Northwest Territories.

BHP's attributable net profit for the first half of its fiscal 2024 plummeted 86% year over year to $927 million while revenue rose 6% to $27.2 billion.