July 14.... BHP... Garry's First Blog!

Our third day in Port Hedland, and a bit of what is termed in the caravan parlance, "a domestic day"! Washing day! A beautiful day for it...windy, a clear sky and when the wind eased probably our hottest day so far. We had planned a tour of the BHP Billiton port for today. At Tom Price we had seen the (Rio Tinto) iron ore extracted from the open cut mines, processed into smaller and smaller sizes, washed and then loaded onto the giant trains to be taken to the coastal ports.
Now we got to see how the ore is delivered, stockpiled, moved by conveyors and loaded onto the ships at Port Hedland. This is where BHP loads all its Pilbara ore as well as Fortesque and a few smaller miners.
As well, Rio has a huge salt producing facility here that goes by ship, and there are also live cattle and sheep exports through Port Hedland.
Mainly due to the ore, Port Hedland handles the most tonnage of any port worldwide!! And this from a place that has the narrowest of  harbour entrances.

View of Port Hedland

Small wonder that everything in this place is a browny colour...the original town is almost surrounded by huge stockpiles of iron ore, and most of it is like a powder, and when it touches anything it just sticks!! Of course I found this out by picking up a handful. There is currently room for 8 ships to dock and the port is expanding all the time. New wharves are being constructed, new machinery being built and there are plans waiting approval to build a 4 km jetty from the coast to accommodate and load an extra 8 ships at the same time; plus all the infrastructure of railways, conveyors and the like. Each ship carries millions of dollars of ore!
As we have come to expect at these mining projects everything is BIG. In the photo there are also stockpiles of salt waiting to be loaded and in the background are the salt pans. To provide for the growth, since the 60's, a new town/city was built at South Hedland, which is 20kms inland....it had to be that far away as the coastal plain is so flat that the large tides (up to 7.5 metres) inundate all the surrounding land. Crazy place for such a busy port!
Our tour of BHP did not rate as highly as we were hoping. Only a small bus, packed with people, air con not very efficient and a driver/guide with too many statistics and a voice to put you to sleep. But we did get to see all the processes needed to load the ore.

A reclaimer scoops the ore from the stockpile to the conveyor

Part of the conveyor system

A stacker loading the stockpile

Some of the huge machinery

There were some ships being loaded but it was too hard to get any decent photos. It certainly was a complicated place with buildings scattered all over, gigantic machines, conveyors running above, around and below us, work vehicles, trains and ships!! And all a browny red colour.

Despite our initial impressions we have enjoyed our stay here. There have been recent improvements made to try and soften the town's look and feel, and there are plans (a $60 million marina, a $22 million tourist precinct and a $15 million extension to the hotel to make it into a resort) for the future. But it is totally dominated by the mining industry and will always feel like a "working" place. Living here would be a pain...nearly everyone wears bright flouro work shirts and pays up to $2500/wk rent for a nice 4 bedroom house.

Today's dust; tomorrow's car.