In an emergency, knowing where changes everything.

MHSA regulation 16.7 requires that no person goes underground without an intrinsically safe device capable of determining their last known location if they go missing. addanode delivers person location that closes the gap between "paper certainty" (who signed in) and location certainty (where they actually are) — so rescue teams narrow the search instead of combing kilometres of workings.

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What we deliver

Tags, readers and a control room that's ready.

Intrinsically safe tags

Personal tags — often built into the cap-lamp — certified for the atmosphere they go into. Intrinsic safety is a gate, not a feature.

Reader network

Readers at shaft stations, intersections, travelways and working places build last-known-location, with coverage matched to the risk of each area.

Control-room view

Who's underground and where they were last seen, with an instant per-person query for emergencies — plus headcount and evacuation records.

How we scope it

Coverage matched to risk, on a backbone that survives outages.

Confirm intrinsic-safety certification for your specific environment first — everything else is moot without it.
Match coverage to risk — zone-level last-known-location meets the core duty; denser reader placement where the risk is highest.
Plan the communications backbone — leaky feeder, fibre or mesh suited to your workings; person location depends on it.
Make the control-room view emergency-ready — an instant, unambiguous "where was this person last seen," not a report exported later.
Integrate and maintain — on the addaNet platform, sharing the backbone with collision prevention and occupational hygiene; with tag, charging and reader upkeep planned in.

Regulatory references are for orientation; confirm current requirements against the latest Mine Health and Safety Regulations and your appointed advisers.

What “coverage” resolves to, from a headcount to a place. This is the distinction worth writing into a specification: a reader count describes a purchase order, a resolution describes an answer — and the difference between the second and fourth rows is the difference between directing a search and sending help somewhere.

Where person-location deployments fall short — and the fix.

A person-location system is judged on one day you hope never comes. These are the ways installations quietly fail that test, all of them found long before an emergency if you go looking.

What goes wrong	How you notice	The fix
Readers placed to a map, not to travel routes	Last known location resolves to a shaft station rather than a working place	Walk the routes. Readers belong where people change level or direction, not spread evenly across a plan
Tag carried on a badge	Headcount reconciles but location does not	Tie the tag to something nobody works without — the cap lamp — so carrying it is not a daily decision
Backbone sharing a supply with everything else	The system is unavailable during exactly the event it exists for	Give readers and backbone their own protected supply, and prove it in an outage drill rather than on paper
Readers not time-synchronised	Reconstructed movement makes no sense after the fact	Synchronise the network. Without a common clock the order of passes is guesswork
Tag health invisible	A flat tag looks identical to a person who never went underground	Treat tag battery and last-seen as a first-class alarm, not a line in a monthly maintenance report
Issuance not tied to access control	Contractors appear as employees, or not at all	Reconcile the tag register against the access system daily; a stale register is worse than none
Emergency query is an administrator’s task	In a drill, people reach for the phone instead	The per-person query must be one action performed by whoever is in the control room at 03:00
Never drilled against a physical roll-call	The data exists and nobody trusts it under pressure	Run the drill, compare the system’s answer to the roll-call, and fix the difference — that comparison is the only real commissioning test

Two of these decide whether the system works when it is needed. Power is the first: a person-location system that depends on the same supply as everything else is unavailable in precisely the scenarios — fire, inrush, power failure — that make it necessary. The drill is the second, and it is the only honest commissioning test: until the control room’s answer has been compared against a physical roll-call, nobody knows whether the coverage matches the way people actually move.

What to insist on when you specify it.

Most person-location tenders are compared on reader counts and unit prices, which tells you very little about whether the system will answer a question at three in the morning. These are the clauses worth writing into the specification instead.

Certification for the atmosphere you actually have — not a general approval. Intrinsic safety is a gate: confirm the certificate covers the gas group and conditions of your workings before anything else is discussed
Coverage expressed as resolution, not as hardware — ask which places resolve to what granularity — shaft station, level, travelway, working place — because “forty readers” describes a purchase order, not an answer
Independent power, with a stated and tested runtime — the system must outlive the event that makes it necessary; ask for the runtime and then ask to see it demonstrated
Network time synchronisation — written in as a requirement, so that the sequence of passes can be reconstructed afterwards
Tag health as an alarm — battery and last-seen reported like any other fault, not buried in a monthly maintenance export
A one-action emergency query — specify the response time and who performs it — then test it with a person who is not an administrator
Data retention long enough for an investigation — agreed up front, because retention is cheap to specify and impossible to add retrospectively

Frequently asked

Person-location questions.

For the full regulatory background, see our MHSA 16.7 guide.

A tag board confirms a person is somewhere underground — "paper certainty." Person location tells you where they were last seen, so in a fire, fall of ground or inrush, rescue teams narrow the search area instead of combing kilometres of workings.

Many underground environments carry explosive-atmosphere risk, so any device a person carries must be incapable of releasing enough energy to ignite a flammable atmosphere. Certification appropriate to your environment is a non-negotiable gate — consumer devices can't go underground.

The core duty is satisfied by reliable last-known-location at zone level, achieved with readers at strategic points. Denser placement gives tighter resolution where the risk is highest — match coverage to the risk profile rather than over-engineering everywhere.

Closing the 16.7 gap?

Tell us about your workings and existing underground comms. We'll help you specify an intrinsically safe person-location system with coverage matched to your risk — and a control-room view that's ready when it matters most.

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