Ontario Aggregate Industry and Ministry of Natural Resources Continue to Ignore or Trivialize the Notoriously Dangerous and Potentially Deadly Consequences of Flyrock from Blasting (Detonation of Explosives)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aggregate extraction is one of the most noxious, toxic and destructive uses of land, and one of the uncontrollable consequences of blasting rock is flyrock, which is a health and safety risk unknown to the general public. Flyrock is the dirty little secret of the Aggregate Industry and its Explosives Engineers. They have been remarkably successful in concealing the potentially deadly consequences of flyrock from the public while continuing to engage in reckless blasting practices based on theoretical guesswork (iterative trial and error process) and inadequate permanent onsite setbacks (excavation limits) and permanent offsite separation distances. An independent analysis of a running total of 240 (known) documented flyrock incidents as of August 2024 in various jurisdictions, in which 45 of the incidents resulted in the death of 49 individuals and injury to another 49 individuals, revealed an incident “kill” rate of 18.8% (45 ÷ 240). In Ontario, anyone can engage in blasting (detonation of explosives), as there are no statutory requirements (academic or practical) to demonstrate competency, as mandated by other jurisdictions. Government advisories about the dangers and health risks of detonating explosives incorrectly, in the wrong location or under inappropriate environmental conditions are frequently issued in several jurisdictions other than in Ontario, Canada, where oversight of the aggregate industry and its explosives engineers is ineffective or non-existent. When it comes to flyrock, the only aspects of a blast in doubt are how far flyrock debris will launch from the blast site, and whether it will damage equipment, vehicles or property, or injure, permanently disable or kill human or non-human life forms. Governments bear a fundamental duty to protect their citizens’ health, safety and welfare from all the adverse effects of aggregate extraction operations, not just flyrock.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".