The situation is messy and the news is unwelcome -- there is no...

The situation is messy and the news is unwelcome -- there is no denying that. I wouldn't be surprised if it takes three or four months before the mine is operational again. And the communication out of South32 has been poor. The hit to earnings will be noticeable.

I don't know how diesel fuel will be sent to the island from the mainland. Hopefully someone does! Presumably there are plans for this which involves GEMCO and the NT government. But fixed, it most certainly will be. Fuel will be brought in as a top priority.

In relation to the post about the road being diverted, I note positive comments to the post, such as, "Wow, that was quick", and "Unreal". Maybe it's a temporary diversion to restore access to the airport. It seems nobody there is sitting on their hands and doing nothing.

There are multiple issues at the site, ranging from the wharf, to flooding of the mine, generators being lost, and a road being washed out. I imagine that as bad, individually, as these issues are, they will be fixed concurrently, not one-by-one. In other words, there won't be a wait of one month to fix a road, another month to fix the flooding, another.... etc. And I've already read somewhere (hardly authoritative!) about the possibility of loading the cargo ships some other way. I don't know. I don't need to know. Again, I imagine South32 and the NT government has people working on this right now and there will be teams of people working on the problems at the same time.

In the interests of fairness and objectivity, I visited the GEMCO Facebook page referenced above. It seems to be a page for workers and/or employees of the island, and either administered or followed by the South32 corporate Facebook account. Here is what was not included with the picture of the diverted road above:





I am more interested in the company's willingness to keep the site operating, than basking in the short term doom and gloom news. There is a finite resource at the GEMCO mine. It's supposed to be completed in 2030 unless South32 extends it. Assuming it shuts down in six years (and hopefully it doesn't), maybe a short term delay just means we'll be extracting the last of the metal in 2031 instead of 2030.

A quick disclaimer that I don't know what I'm talking about. And I'm not pretending any of the news is good. I'm just a HC contributor in another state, who has never visited the NT. I mean no disrespect to anyone here on the island or who has knowledge of the situation. This is just my simplistic interpretation of what I've seen online.