Hi guys as I’ve returned from my few days at Pilgangoora. I got...

Hi guys as I’ve returned from my few days at Pilgangoora. I got an overwhelming response when I mentioned I’d be going a few days ago and give a review, clearly many are thirsty for more knowledge about the goings on.

Right so ill start from the beginning and I’ll get everything down that I can think of their may be a follow up later

First thing is they fly Virgin which is my non preferred airline as Qantas is the one I hold my gold membership with but it beats alliance which is the bare basic carrier. However, they did pre-pay for 2 luggage bags which is really helpful when you need to bring things up with you.

Its roughly 100km’s to the turnoff to the site on the well-travelled great northern highway from Headland then perhaps 20 or 30kms on a dirt road to the mine. You do cross rail lines on the dirt road which I believe belong to Roy Hill but they are not marked. Potential tie in perhaps?

The camp wasn’t nice but it wasn’t bad either, there isn’t any grass or plants around (I assume this will change once money starts flowing in from this first ship). My rooms door had a 1” gap at the top and if I had been trying to sleep during the day it would have been akin to sleeping outside. But the air-conditioning works well and that’s the main point.

The Isolation and general induction processes are still handled by RCR as I suppose the commissioning is still going on and Pilbara haven’t implemented their own yet. Was good to see a few familiar faces from RCR (RCR get some bad rep mainly from the top end but they have a good bunch of core tradies at the bottom and they do a good job)

On site I was lucky enough to catch the managing director while he was out there and he seemed in good spirits. The safety superintendent was my main contact and a few of the Pilbara supervisors. As the plant is so new they haven’t written in any SWMS (safe work method statements) which is a structured plan for every maintenance task but it just means they haven’t done the tasks enough to get it down to a procedure. These procedures save valuable time (and time is money) because you can account for exactly how many items you need, the blokes you need to do the job, tooling and all the variables.

I did a good walk around and they have used good quality branded products for the main part but there is a lot of equipment such as gearboxes that are Chinese no name. I checked all the structural steel and it isn’t Australian made unfortunately.

I did a lot of talking with the Pilbara tradies and operators and theirs mixed opinions about how the place is ran (this is in reference to how organised maintenance is) time will improve this though they haven’t had long to get it together. There is a lot of talk about stage 2 and they all say it’s not a matter of if but when, the plant has obviously been built in a way that the stage 2 can tie into it while stage 1 powers on.

You can see the stockpile of uncrushed ore they have waiting on the ROM there is clearly a lot of good quality material out there.

Altogether it looks like a well built plant and its running properly, we did a lot of checks in chutes and there is no un expected damage or wear. Its much better than what I saw at Wodgina when I went there and that’s just across the road