Conveyors are the essential arteries of mining operations, transporting thousands of tonnes of material every hour. Yet despite their critical role, many conveyor systems are designed without sufficient protection from fire, which is the leading cause of conveyor-related property losses, and mining losses in general, according to extensive research from property insurer FM.
It’s an often-underestimated vulnerability with serious consequences. Most mines have at least one conveyor that represents a single point of failure. If it burns, production can halt entirely, with typical rebuild times stretching to three or four months. That level of downtime could lead to hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue and even cause long-term reputational damage to under-pressure mining companies.
Fires in conveyors don’t simply damage the belt itself. They can destroy entire enclosed galleries, which must often be completely rebuilt. And despite the common misconception, FM’s analysis of mining losses shows fire risk isn’t tied to what’s being transported. Whether it’s magnesium or iron ore, the hazard lies in the belt itself, which is usually made of rubber and synthetic materials capable of sustaining intense, self-propagating fires.
But prevention efforts begin long before an ignition source ever appears. Effectively reducing this risk requires a considered, data-driven mitigation approach, starting at the design stage. FM’s recommendations, informed by decades of loss investigations and dedicated fire testing at its Research Campus, emphasise how proficient planning can reduce a multi-month downtime event into just a few hours.
Reducing risk early to build resilience
Conveyor fires often have complex causes. While hot work activity, such as welding or grinding, is the most common ignition cause, the constant movement of minerals in hot, dry Australian climates creates multiple sources of friction, heat, and flames.
Fire incidents are difficult to prevent entirely, but conveyor design – including placement of protection systems – underpins how far and fast a fire spreads, and whether it can be controlled at all.
FM’s loss history data shows fire is the single biggest driver of losses, accounting for more than a fifth (21 per cent) of incidents. Conveyors present a major fire risk due to the prevalence of hot works activity and a range of design and maintenance factors that significantly amplify risk, including:
- Enclosure design: Fully enclosed galleries trap heat and smoke, shielding fires from hose streams and making them nearly impossible to fight manually. Without internal sprinklers, fires can spread their entire length, unchecked.
- Stacked or multi-tier layouts: These save space but can shield lower conveyors from overhead sprinkler coverage, enabling flames to jump between lines.
- Housekeeping and maintenance strategies: Excess build-up of materials in galleries creates friction points and ignition hazards. Poor housekeeping can overload gallery structures, increase collapse risk, and make them more vulnerable to wind damage.
- Climate challenges: Hot and dry Australian climates increase the likelihood and severity of fire events, while climate-related weather events like bushfires, flooding, and cyclones can cause extensive damage to conveyor systems and sites, particularly if they’re damaged or overloaded. In colder regions, water in sprinklers can freeze without proper design, necessitating dry-pipe systems that only activate on fire detection.
- Sprinkler system spacing and design: Decades of FM research, including full-scale burn tests on conveyor galleries, show that sprinkler placement and spacing are crucial to controlling conveyor fires. In many cases, effective protection can be delivered with fewer sprinklers and less water than previously thought, reducing weight, supply requirements, and cost without compromising safety. That might free up capital for the protection of more infrastructure.
Integrating fire protection at the planning stage
While maintenance schedules and emergency response plans are important risk management activities, the best strategies have safety baked in from the outset. The most reliable way to mitigate conveyor fires is to identify and address risk before an event occurs, starting with design.
That includes selecting non-combustible or fire-retardant belts where feasible, ensuring layouts are accessible, avoiding any shielding from suppression systems, planning for climate events, and integrating reliable, tested sprinkler protection inside enclosed galleries.
It may be difficult to provide adequate fire protection for all conveyor systems on a site, given cost and resource limitations. That’s why it’s crucial to work with engineering experts who can provide objective assessments of infrastructure risk and guidance over which systems to prioritise.
FM’s research shows that properly designed and protected conveyors limit fire damage to a single belt section, cutting downtime from months to as little as four to eight hours. FM has consolidated these findings, and decades of expertise and real-world loss experience, in its data sheets, which offer mining operators evidence-based strategies to safeguard their most critical infrastructure.
FM’s data sheet for conveyor systems, which provides insights and best practices derived from extensive testing, along with a video overview of findings, is available here.
Conveyor fires are hard to predict and mitigate completely. But by taking a proactive, evidence-based approach at the design stage, mining operations can significantly reduce the likelihood and severity of catastrophic fires and the costly downtime that follows.
AIMEX 2025 kicks off today in Adelaide. Register for the free event here.
AIMEX 2025 kicks off today in Adelaide. Register for the free event here.
