Safety

Barrick’s safety and health policy, management system, standards and practices apply to all employees. They also apply to the contractors who work at our sites. All contractors are required to provide and maintain a safe and healthy work environment and are responsible, at a minimum, for performing work to Barrick’s safety and health standards. There are nine elements in the Safety and Health Management System; they work together to ensure high performance, to measure that performance and to facilitate continuous improvement.

All of our operations have safety and health committees and conduct regular safety meetings that fit the needs and requirements of each individual site. Many of our operations conduct daily safety meetings, while others conduct meetings on a weekly basis. Joint representation of managers, supervisors, and workers on our safety committees ensures that we hold each other accountable for superior safety and health practices and provide the leadership and resources needed to achieve our vision. Ad-hoc safety meetings are also conducted throughout the various functional areas, within each operation, to involve all workers in eliminating unsafe conditions in the work environment. Depending on the requirements of the labour union, sites with union membership often have safety topics included in labour agreements. Activities and actions conducted by site safety and health committees are essential to embedding a culture of safety within the company.

Safety Performance

Safety performance metrics (both leading and lagging indicators) are key measures towards our goal of a zero incident culture. These performance metrics are substantiated by audits and inspections. In 2011, while we experienced a slight increase in our lost-time injury frequency rate (0.198 vs 0.193) we had, overall, a slight improvement in the total injury frequency rate over 2010 (0.923 vs 0.926). Additional improvement was not achieved primarily due to an increase in exploration activities, two major construction projects and the acquisition of the Equinox properties. These additional activities required a stretch on the resources needed to continue implementation of the Barrick Safety Management System. Even with these challenges, we continued an eleven year trend of improving our total reportable injury frequency rate. Since 2001, there has been an 80 percent improvement in Barrick’s safety performance in total reportable injury frequency rates (4.6 vs 0.92); there has also been a 27 percent reduction in total injuries (205 fewer injuries per year), resulting in a healthier workforce and a 52 percent reduction in costs.

Although we feel that the substantial improvement in our incident rate is a milestone, we know we must continue to increase our efforts so that we can improve even further. Our goal remains zero incidents.

Twenty-five reporting locations, including six operating mines and five of Barrick’s eight exploration sites, completed the year with no lost time injuries. Seventeen reporting locations completed the entire year with zero recordable injuries. Other properties also achieved significant milestones: the African Barrick Gold (ABG) and Australia-Pacific exploration groups, Barrick Technology Centre and the Western 102 power plant all exceeded five years with no lost time injuries.

Two fatalities occurred at our operations in 2011. We are deeply saddened by these fatal accidents. Fatalities are unacceptable and an area of great concern to everyone at Barrick. One employee died at Bulyanhulu, an ABG property, when he was struck by a falling rock. A contractor died at our Pascua-Lama project in Chile/Argentina when he lost control of the tractor-trailer he was driving and the vehicle left the road and rolled several times. Teams of investigators were mobilized for these incidents. The lessons learned and many of the corrective actions, including a review of critical systems and critical tasks, are being applied globally.

Any written directive received from a regulatory agency, even those relating to minor housekeeping issues (e.g. rag bin overflowing, inadequate lighting), is considered by us to be a regulatory action. In 2011 we received 568 regulatory actions at 15 sites, including citations for noise control, ground instability, and lack of safety barriers. At the time of this report, all regulatory actions had been corrected or were in the process of being addressed as required. Fines were received for a small number of these regulatory actions; in 2011 we received a total of $689,000 in fines at five properties. We also received a fine of $150,000 at our Kanowna property in Australia related to the death of an employee from a fall in 2009.

Safety Programs

Barrick’s highly successful Courageous Leadership program continued in 2011. This program is a fundamental building block of Barrick’s Safety and Health Management System. Regular training sessions were held in each region for new workers and for all workers at new projects. Refresher training courses continued as well.

Visible Felt Leadership is critical for success and was a focus in 2011. Managers and supervisors are active in the field, coaching and mentoring employees and discussing safety to reinforce the message that “no job is worth doing in an unsafe way”. The focus is making sure things are right and, when things aren’t right, helping people get it right.

Operating mobile equipment remains Barrick’s highest safety incident category. Therefore, we continued our focus on safe driving in 2011. Barrick invested $16 million to install real-time driver improvement devices, called Inthinc, in company vehicles worldwide. By year end, implementation was over 80 percent complete. The driver coaching devices alert the driver with a voice message if a vehicle operates unsafely or outside a set of parameters, giving the driver up to 15 seconds to correct the unsafe behaviour before reporting the activity to a supervisor. The devices also alert a driver if the seatbelt is not in use, as well as if the vehicle is operated in an aggressive manner (hard turns, abrupt starts or stops). The devices have proven to be useful for coaching drivers and encouraging safe driving behaviours. In 2011, sites with the Inthinc device installed had an 80 percent decrease in speeding events in company vehicles. Overall, there was a 65 percent decrease in high potential driving incidents from 2010, after installation of the coaching devices.

We have also identified ground falls as one of Barrick’s top safety risks. A number of fatal accidents from falling ground have occurred in the mining industry, including one within Barrick this year and three at a Barrick site in 2010. A Ground Control Standard has now been developed. The Standard is based on a set of principles and expectations that set the standards all sites must meet. Audits for compliance with the Standard are scheduled throughout 2012.

Risk Management for Safety and Health

Risk management at every level of the organization is critical to our ultimate safety and health success. Hazard identification, risk assessment and management of change are pro-active approaches to managing concerns and issues that have the potential to create unplanned, unexpected or undesirable consequences. We have instituted risks assessments at the individual level (personal field level risk assessment), group level (team field level risk assessment) and site level (annual site level risk assessments). Risks which pose a significant threat to a site or region must be reported to the regional president or vice president for action.