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Port Hedland - Update on Samuel

Samuel flies out from Brisbane this week to go all the way across Australia to Port Hedland.
Port Hedland is way up in the north, 1761km from Perth.
I’ve had a google about to see what Port Hedland is like and I think Sam is in for an interesting time.
It can be summed up a place where everything is on a huge scale. High temperatures reaching over 40 degrees C for eight months of the year. A huge iron ore industry with long, long trains (up to 3km long) carrying the iron ore to a massive port facility. Large numbers of big tonnage ships coming and going from the port. A salt industry that produces mountains of salt. Ferocious cyclones that visit the area all too regularly. Since 1910 there have been 49 cyclones that have caused gale-force winds at Port Hedland. On average this equates to about one every two years.
Sam will be working a 4 week cycle with 3 weeks on and 1 week off. The company will fly him to and from Brisbane for his week off and he is planning on using his week off to fly back here to Wellington.
Not sure where he will be staying in Port Hedland yet but he may find himself being put up in the detention centre there. This was built a few years back when Australia was getting loads of boat people entering the country along the coastline. It’s not required now and has been converted to accommodation for the mining workforce.

Looking at photos of Port Hedland, you can see that it juts out from the mainland. The original inhabitants, the Karriyarra Aboriginal people, call the place Marapikurrinya for the hand shaped formation of the tidal creeks coming off the natural harbour. Unfortunately its location is not good when cyclones arrive with resulting in the town suffering gale force winds and flooding from storm surges. A new town called South Hedland was built inland to avoid the worst of this weather.

Here’s a tip for Samuel. They say there is a stairway to the moon at Port Hedland. But you will only see it at low tide when there is a full moon. What you need to do is, at dusk, position yourself on a foreshore where there is a view towards the rising moon (i.e. east). A stairway will magically appear as the moon rises. That’s what I’ve read anyway …might have to smoke a little bit of something to make it work perhaps?

The port handles the largest tonnage of any port in Australia. At the port the iron-ore is unloaded, screened, crushed, stockpiled and then conveyed out onto the pier on a massive conveyor system. Huge iron-ore carriers frequent the port, exporting the iron-ore to Japan, Europe, China and South Korea.

I’m not sure where Sam will be working - it may be Port Hedland on the coast or it might be inland at the mines themselves.
Newman is the big mining town in the Pilbara.
It serves the two huge mines at Mount Whaleback and Orebody 29.
The Eastern Pilbara is one of the most isolated and inhospitable regions in Australia. Temperatures in summer time hover around 40°C and the hot winds blow in off the Great Sandy Desert.
Sounds like a fun place.

I found this article from the NewScientist website about the iron ore mines. Fascinating stuff.

Mining the heart of a continent. The scale is staggering, the toil unrelenting and the lifestyle legendary.

NEWMAN, WESTERN AUSTRALIA
IF there were any man-made structure that could begin to capture the atmosphere of the Grand Canyon, the Newman mine in north-eastern Australia would probably be it. Against a flat landscape of parched bush, the sides of the deep open-cut mine rise up in giant steps to form steep red-brown terracing, like the walls of some huge ziggurat. Each terrace is 15 metres deep and dwarfs the steady stream of dump trucks crawling past, each one bearing more than 200 tonnes of iron ore away towards the stockpiles. The trucks in turn dwarf the few humans that wander the site - the vehicle tyres alone are more than 2 metres tall. In the distance the long terraced lines of the mine curve around, following the contours of the surrounding hills, and disappear.

All of the statistics for this mine are incomparable. From this one site comes 3.5 per cent of the whole world’s production of iron ore. The richest deposit is 5 kilometres long, 2 kilometres wide and several hundred metres thick - to exploit it all, the main pit will eventually be sunk around 370 metres. And there are many more deposits besides this one - close to 40 at the last count - in a surrounding 300 square kilometres.

BHP, the company that owns the mine, says that there is an insatiable demand for its iron ore. The year to the end of May set a new record: Newman produced 35.3 million tonnes of ore. But the most astonishing thing about this mine is not immediately obvious - every last tonne of its ore must be shipped out to the coast, 400 kilometres away as the crow flies, across inhospitable, sparsely inhabited terrain.

“Too far from the coast,” said the mining companies when the ore was discovered in the early 1960s. Eventually, however, the lure of one of the world’s richest iron ore deposits proved too great. The company’s 426 kilometres of standard-gauge track, linking Newman with Port Hedland on the north coast, was completed within 8 months by January 1969, the longest privately owned railway in Australia.

Now, the line carries 150 000 tonnes of ore to the coast every day. The line has to be open at all times: even a day’s closure could cost A$5 million in lost revenue. The job of making sure that the trains never have to stop falls to a team of troubleshooters. One of them is Phil Stewart, and a ride with him to see the line is something special.

His Toyota Landcruiser looks much like any other of the 200 road vehicles that serve the Newman mine. But looks deceive, as Stewart soon demonstrates. He drives onto the level crossing, aligns the Toyota’s wheels with the tracks, and presses a switch next to the driver’s seat. Underneath the car a hydraulic arm unfolds a steel frame carrying a set of mini train wheels. They descend onto the track, ahead of the vehicle’s two front tyres, and the Landcruiser is off down the line, moving at 80 kilometres an hour through the bush. Termite mounds line the track, emus stand watching, and young kangaroos race the car. It’s a thrilling sensation, riding a road vehicle on a railway through the vast open spaces of the bush - even when there is no trouble to shoot.

But often enough, there’s plenty. In the semi-arid territory the heat can be intense. Marble Bar, about halfway between Newman and Port Hedland, is one of the world’s hottest places - the town has recorded a temperature of more than 38 °C on 162 consecutive days. Stewart has endless tales to tell of buckled track and derailed trains, of long days and spoiled dinners.

Long haul
The trains are on a scale that makes the 8.20 to Waterloo look like a toy tram. Each train is 2.6 kilometres long, made up of 240 trucks or “ore cars” carrying more than 100 tonnes of ore apiece. Four huge 4000-horsepower diesel- electric locomotives are needed to haul them - that’s a combined power of 12 megawatts, enough to supply a small town. Such massive traction and braking power has to be distributed along the train. Two locos are harnessed as a set or “consist” at the front, with the other two in the middle. It’s important that the two consists perform in unison, accelerating and braking together, to minimise wear and tear of the trucks between them.

To achieve this, the consists are equipped with computers that monitor and control their operations, feeding instructions by radio from the lead consist at the front of the train to the “slave” consist in the middle. “They’re extremely smart locos,” explains Mal Roberts, a senior engineer for the railway. He foresees the day when there’ll be no humans on the train at all.

On a good day, the journey to Port Hedland with 25 000 tonnes of ore aboard takes just six and a half hours. On a bad one, much longer. BHP’s contingency plans allow for a cyclone to knock out the railway system for a fortnight. Delays of an hour or two are more common, when buckled tracks throw a few wheels off the line. The alarm is raised automatically. As displaced ore cars are dragged along by the train’s momentum they smash soft iron bars jutting out from the track, breaking electrical circuits.

Preventive care is the philosophy, however. Maintenance crews spend their days travelling the line, checking on the condition of the sleepers, tamping the ballast and grinding the track back into shape. Infrared detectors in the track monitor the temperature of the ore cars wheels as they pass, to check whether they’re running smoothly. To avoid such problems as far as possible, the wheels are regularly reprofiled in the workshop at Port Hedland. “They’ll come back for turning eight or nine times,” says Bill Walker, the railroad manager. Turning them on a lathe eventually reduces their diameter from 960 millimetres to a minimum of 885 millimetres, giving them a working life of about 1.5 million kilometres, the equivalent of almost 1800 return trips to Newman.

But preventive care can do little to contain the natural intruders that hamper the railway’s operations. Kangaroos and cattle often stray too close, and carcasses litter the line. “School holidays can be a worrying time,” says Stewart. Newman has become a thriving tourist centre. As many as 30 000 visitors a year drive off the Great Northern Highway, attracted by the chance to take a coach trip round the mine.

The mine works 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Once every couple of days an explosion blasts a slice from the opencast pit to yield around 2 million tonnes of spoil for the shovels and dump trucks to clear up. Trains returning empty from Port Hedland run under chutes that fill 13 ore cars at a time.

Rich reserves
All but 30 kilometres of the trip are downhill and, according to BHP, the route has been chosen to run near other untapped iron ore deposits. The region, known as the Pilbara, is estimated to hold nearly 40 billion tonnes of iron ore. The principal deposit at Newman, Mount Whaleback, has been mined for 25 years. It’s a bluey-brown ore known as Brockman, which contains a high ratio of iron, 63.5 per cent on average.

More than 850 million tonnes of Brockman are still waiting to be dug out from Mount Whaleback, making the site good for another 30 years according, to Mal Kneeshaw, BHP’s chief geologist. Kneeshaw’s first job on arriving in Australia in 1966 as an immigrant from England was to confirm whether the deposit was worth exploiting. He hasn’t looked back since. Lower-grade ore from “satellite” deposits around Mount Whaleback are mix-and-matched with the richer material to produce an overall grade that meets a client’s specification.

Much of the mixing is done at Newman. Further crushing and screening take place at Port Hedland, where BHP staff are responsible for the final quality control. The 300-hectare site at Nelson Point is a dense network of conveyor belts carrying ore from below the tipping shed - where ore cars are unloaded three at a time by being turned upside down - to the stockpiles of different grades.

From there the ore is loaded into bulk carriers, ships that typically carry 150 000 tonnes and take 36 hours to load. The largest vessel ever to dock at Nelson Point left with 255 000 tonnes of ore. Before the vessel was loaded at the dockside, recalls one worker, “it was like looking up at a wall of steel.”

The biggest customers are the steel makers of Japan. But more and more Korean and Chinese manufacturers are looking to the Pilbara for their raw material. And many come to see for themselves the slender steel lifeline that keeps the operation running.
You can check out the page here: www.newscientist.com

Weather forecast for PORT HEDLAND today
A shower about early morning with the chance of a squally thunderstorm late afternoon and evening. SE winds shifting moderate NE/NW’ly in the afternoon.
Maximum temperature: 37
That’s gonna be a warm one for ya matey!

Check out the temperatures that Port Hedland gets during the year
Winter temperatures there are hotter than the summer temperatures we get in Wellington.

© 2008 KiwiHyde.