COMMUNITY
MINES RESCUE PERSONNEL PLAY AN IMPORTANT ROLE IN PROTECTING THE COMMUNITY
Mines rescue personnel play an important role in protecting the community. Due to the remote locations of many mines sites, it is common practice for them to have mutual aid agreements with their local shires, other sites and the state emergency services. This means rescue teams attend emergencies outside the mine perimeter to assist the local community in situations such as road accidents, medical emergencies, fires, floods and much more.
This is an extremely important role as quite often these volunteers are the first on scene and can be pivotal to the outcome of an emergency situation. Many emergency response team (ERT) members are also volunteer fire fighters or SES members within their local communities.
The MERC has a strong community focus, the event caters for young and old with with plenty of free activities for the kids such as getting up close to fire trucks and ambulances, rock climbing, face painting, bouncy castles and colouring in competitions.
Kids’ Cancer Project
As a not for profit event excess money raised at MERC, from sponsorship or raffles, is invested back into the community via donations to charities. Each competing team nominates the charity they would like to support.
Many of these charities are small and the investment MERC provides can be of enormous assistance to their worthwhile cause.
The 2014 winning team chose to support the Kid’s Cancer Project, an independent national charity dedicated to supporting childhood cancer research. Representatives from the MERC committee were invited to attend a dinner where we were able to present a cheque for $8,000 on behalf of MERC and the winning team from Newmont Boddington Gold.
The team from Newmont had chosen this charity as they had the pleasure of meeting some of the families when they visited the mine site for a tour. This was just one way they were able to demonstrate their corporate social responsibility.