Working Inside Australia's Mega Mines | Big Australia | Spark

Australia an island a continent and a country the sixth biggest country in the world with the largest coastline on earth a landmass of over seven and a half million square kilometres Australia lies at the bottom of the globe surrounded by the Pacific Indian and Southern Oceans isolated beaches border a landscape vast and varied from coastal beaches to farming claims to deserts and snow-capped mountain ranges Australia is divided into states and territories its major cities are contrasted by wide open spaces of Central Australia there are major engineering maritime and agricultural projects underway in outback Australia and mines in the middle of nowhere exporting minerals all over the world this is big Australia 3000 kilometers from Sydney in Australia's remote northwest lies the spectacular Pilbara region its striking harsh and unforgiving it's also the center of Australia's unprecedented mining boom [Music] [Music] it's massive it definitely biggest rally up here [Music] if you were to think of an area that has an endowment that's just worth more than anything else it's got to be the Pilbara [Music] [Music] Atlas ion has a growing slice of the mining pie there's a major expansion underway at its watchin assay 120 kilometers south of the nearest shipping port port hedland they're digging Brian or it's like red gold when you see iron ore it's quite amazing it's it's a bit like discovering gold and when people discover gold that can kind of get a fever because you just get so excited about it that online or it's a rock but um it's a pretty special rock this is where or is blasted crushed and sorted into lucrative piles of dirt it's more than two I guess I feel that that it's an important contribution to the local communities here in the pilgrim that's an important contribution to Western Australia and Australia [Music] [Music] the red stuffs all got mean indefinitely and it does remind you that the cars that we drive the houses that we live in all of that is born of the earth and we're here at the industry at the forefront of producing it [Music] [Music] it's everything it's cars its bridges its schools its hospitals its roads its mobile phones its electricity wires you know it's it's it's everything that we need in our society [Music] david flanagan risked everything to start atlas iron one man a geologist with big dreams has led a company into a position where it competes head-to-head with the biggest mining multinationals in the world at Atlas at the moment we're running to mind sites and we're commissioning commissioning an additional two months at mount dove and Abydos and we'll be bringing on a further mine or the end of next year to make it five the market capitalization is must be around about 1.7 1.8 billion dollars [Music] we're a minnow in the Mafia our industry is swimming with sharks but but we don't mind you know swimming below the radar it would be really nice to be a large company but what's more important to us is to actually be a great Australian company [Music] one that embodies the values that we have and presents the same opportunities for growth you know sustainable for the foreseeable future yeah [Music] you have permission to fire when you're ready got B blast controller before [Music] [Music] Australia is the largest exporter of iron ore and in the middle of Australia's isolated Pilbara region they're digging up billions of dollars of iron ore from one of the most remote locations in the country all this activity is to meet a hungry demand and a growing desire by industrialised nations to modernize you can't look past the fact that that what's happening in China is an amazing story the economic growth that's going on there is dragging people out of poverty and and I'd like to think that we are in some way contributing to that iron ore is the principal ingredient in the steelmaking process so when everything's mixed in the recipe the iron ore itself is the most important thing and to continue to build the sorts of structures that are required to set up basic infrastructure through the Asian region it all requires that key ingredient fence steel and therefore iron ore is a really important part of it [Applause] we're actually mining stuff that's going onto ships which is going to China to build houses for people it's going to it's going into steel which is building bridges it's lifting people above the poverty line [Music] [Music] there's a new kid on the block in the Wild West of Australia it's Atlas iron entrepreneur David Flanagan spotted the potential years ago and he hasn't wasted any time when I was 15 I had to decide what I was gonna go and do for work experience and I actually hung out on a drill rig I thought that was unreal I love the idea of coming up with a theory going into the bush and testing it I really loved the discovery and I just love being out at the bush I love the bush [Music] you know we started our first mine for about thirteen million dollars and we were shipping within eight weeks of environmental approval that first million tons was very hard it was almost torture to be honest there was just everything stacked up against this we were taking a new iron ore model the iron ore market was collapsing the share price was collapsing the debt markets were disappearing the customers were disappearing Gaussian and we're going to do an execute an iron ore business which hadn't been executed before [Music] no we were told that the oil was unsaleable basically the Truckee model wouldn't work there was no port capacity you wouldn't find the funding the mine life was too short that the contracting model was all wrong well we proved the mocking that it worked we started mining at the pardhu mine in the depths of the global financial crisis in September 2008 we hung in there and and I think at the time made a bold decision to give the Monica it's the best decision that we could have made because the company has gone from strength to strength since then well just like anything you look at the end goal and say okay what do we want to achieve what are the steps that we need to do on the way from here to there who are the right people to advise us for let's get them into the business then let's get the people the resources the funding the projects and just do it take it one day at a time and that's the way we've run it from the beginning this is the Atlas footprint in the Pilbara in Australian terms these sites are relatively close to the Port Hedland port Waja no lies 100 kilometers south of the port while its sister mine and the first Atlas mine to operate is at par do 75 kilometers east then there's the reserves ready to be mined today including the watch inner and pardhu mines were operating at six million tonnes per annum we have three new mines under development over the next 18 months and they'll take our productions twelve million tonnes per annum we have a substantial footprint here in the pilgrim where we have over a billion tons of resources and our ambition is to see our our production get to forty six point five million tonnes around about 2017 [Music] we delivered to port 17,000 tons of iron ore every single day and we do that seven days a week we run a mining fleet here of four diggers around about 18 mining trucks typically running at any one time and various support fleet dozers graders we run a fleet of four drills and we also run a fleet of 25 Ford Road trains which deliver the material to port [Music] well it's like every person's dream I was saying to someone the other day you came up to sight it's like having your own sandpit with the whole fleet of Tonka trucks to play with it's a lot of fun [Music] twenty-five road trains that deliver material from watching a mine to the port general there's one leaving every ten minutes and they get on average three or four trips a day [Music] that's a whole lot of all going before anything can happen at this mine a blast site must be prepared engineers and geologists determine where the ore is and the best place to drill this specialized team design a drilling pattern to optimize cost amount yielded and size of material once this is done this shot is marked and ready to drill a day and a half later and the explosives team is brought in to load the holes with explosives and connect primer quartz and tie in surface delays depending on how far they want to move the rock the blast team walks the shot making sure it's all ready to blast this specialized bomb crew is quite literally working in a minefield there's no room for cowboys or mistakes here it's always the blast team who are the last to leave the site then everyone waits [Music] [Music] at the heart of the mining boom is Port Hedland it's a town of around 20,000 people housing prices are skyrocketing here and accommodation is at a premium it's a town under pressure to meet expansion and export timetables but it's not all work and no play [Music] miners are just like all Australians they love a day at the races and once a year the buzzing mining town stops for its popular traditional picnic racemate the port hedland car [Music] it's an iconic event which we hold on the first Monday of August every year and this is our 103rd board Hedlund cup so we've been around for a long long time [Music] there's not a lot of things input handling you get to go out and do and gets us in our high heels and let this dress up a little bit which is kind of cool lots of people in town coming for a good hunt a bit of social activity big crowd right there huge crowd every got it you dive it they're here it's one day of the year it's a public holiday in Port Hedland so you'd imagine that's why we get such a big crowd [Music] the only fluorescent uniform belongs to local law enforcers most of the time I'm in my orange my navy you know it's not that attractive this is the day that I get to dress up Monday to Friday a drive a bobcat every other day I'm in work clothes this is the day that I get dressed up heaven cup is such a great time to you know [ __ ] up and dress up the fashions just shows how much finished [Music] [Applause] [Music] there nothing will ever be bigger than a quarter cup this is biggest rally yeah [Music] [Music] [Music] back at the mine site preparations for the blast are reaching their final stages Matt must ensure all checks have been completed three members of the blasting team must confirm the site is ready before any blasting can occur when I was walking the shot before we fired it I was basically just doing the final check making sure that all the loads are clipped in properly is obviously with explosives the Loess and you want to do is have a bit of a mishap basically the process is we have a drill pattern set out by the engineers we have drill rigs come in fill them to a certain depth and then we come along we charge it with piranhas which is a booster and a debt every single one of those different delays there has a different timing to it we're going to pull that whole shot towards the back hopefully it goes off [Music] I adore varies a lot with the the density of the rock of course it can be very very dense in which case you use higher power explosive nothing is taken to chance or luck at a mine like this safety is definitely the biggest aspect of the job yeah you don't want to stuff up with the explosives let's be sure [Music] on all is relatively easy to blast in general if you know what you're doing anyway [Music] the work of the blast team is not just dangerous it's tough searing heat and dust can take a toll here everyone must look out for each other [Music] our dehydration is certainly a huge factor in mourning and more specifically in outback Australia and certainly the north west of Western Australia and as such is something we really have to monitor carefully and we rely on people to keep an eye on their workmates we rely on people to monitor their own levels we actually rely quite heavily on people doing the right thing once we've actually given them the education to know what the right thing is to do working in this climate [Music] a person typically if we look at a given body weight of say 80 kilograms should consume anywhere up to about 15 liters of water in a given day especially in sort of arduous physical conditions as some of the jobs involved in wine and on safety is really strictly regulated in the morning' industry if we were to get things wrong we're not in a situation where we're able to get someone to a local hospital really quickly challenges that we face are actually mitigated somewhat through the fact we have a fully stocked and staffed Medical Centre and site [Music] the summer heat is the is the killer remind each other have a drink if you if someone's looking a bit exhausted or whatever have a bit of a break and catch their breath oh that she experienced temperatures up around 50 50 degree mark it's it's pretty nasty it's tough stuff it's a bit hot when we did our first drilling campaign up here in Christmas 2004 it was the hottest summer for 62 years I came and camped out with the crew overnight it got down to 35 degrees it was really hot really hot the category four storm crossed the coast at 10:00 last night in town at Port Hedland cyclone gorge ripped off roofs mangled fences and pulled down trees and past it was the inland mining community of watch inner cyclones can and do occur here this is not a place for the faint-hearted last wet season we had a cyclone followed by ship load a breakdown in the port and we lost 21 days we call that the ocean experience ride that hurt okay so um we look forward to that not happening again [Music] mining in Australia's outback can be menacing and challenging the irony here is that is also what makes it appealing I think when you look at it from the luxury of an air-conditioned car through a window is beautiful I'm a moment you step out it's dangerous [Music] this is where it all began pardhu was Atlas's first mine to produce iron ore it's a sentimental place for David we came here looking for gold right so we had this packages of tenements we went looking for gold copper lead zinc nickel uranium even got we had a lot of oil and gas prospect diamonds chromite and we had this hit here just behind me over the back 52 meters at 60% in august 2005 and that just changed everything [Music] the first time that we came onto this tenement I had seen iron all before and I knew there was iron ore here and it was just so exciting because that the iron all was associated with the geology which that the incumbents just didn't think was prospective and we found that it actually was we're actually able to go and pick it all up and do a bunch of deals and then and put it all together and build a company we were like let's just say young and naive and and work work quite sure that it couldn't be done and hence we did it at the end of the day David just came up with a fantastic strategy about how the company could grow the idea that we would establish a resource base and mines close enough to the port that we could develop them independent of significant infrastructure was a really important innovation for the continued growth for the company we found a few people tell us that we're crazy over the years but being it you know stupid enough to not believe them it's really special part of it's a really special place we started this mind built our brand here and proved the model I'll always be special [Music] [Applause] [Music] the days are long and hard for mine workers in the Pilbara for many homers two or more flying hours away to West Australia's capital city Perth on shifter Waja nah they get to know each other pretty well working socialising and together living so here at watchin our we have a 600 man care it's located about three or four kilometers from the mine site itself so we can commute backwards and forwards each day it's a nice place it's not for everyone though it's you know it's 600 people living in fairly close proximity it's like living in a big block of flats except we all know each other [Music] this shift season truck driver Leanne Tessa will take control of a 160 ton loaded monster it's a long time since she's worked a nine-to-five city life my background is advertising and marketing going from the corporate world wearing high heels to wearing steel cap boots and pretty gaudy clothes yeah quite different [Music] costas bored and needed a change and someone said oh he can be a truck driver okay sounds like fun yeah it took me about a year or so and well out here I am hotties later on so driving drugs [Music] so you're looking at round 160 150 hundred 60 ton driving around side loaded that's a fair effort when you're coming down a hill you've got to remember that you are driving something that is extremely heavy it's it's not a life piece of equipment these dump trucks unloaded way roughly 100 ton once they're filled they can weigh up to 200 ton that's almost 100 ton of all loaded that's the equivalent of around 40 sedans [Music] I think they like the women cause we're just a little bit gentler but don't get me wrong that there's a lot of really good mail truck drivers a lot of them are very good [Music] [Music] the operation here has to run like clockwork these trucks relentlessly load and haul all from the mines pit to the stockyard all is continually graded and crushed and more tests are done to ensure it's the right product before it's again stockpiled and trucked around the clock to Port Hedland and all personnel morning personal machines clear dragon blast there Matt Andy's explosives team are now ready to blast the area is cleared no one can be inside the exclusion zone we're about to blow up a whole other day [Music] laughs get up on the same position in the area is secure copy that Kobe plus got to e still in position and secure it's complete and it's all clear of any personnel permission to stay to the firing toy and activate the revived Covey bomb crew the area is still secure you have permission to proceed to the flooring point and activate the remote copy grass controller three before [Music] [Music] [Music] it's been a successful blast with plenty of dirt moved work recommences as soon as possible the pit is back in business [Music] [Music] yeah I had a bit of a pipe blowing things up when I was younger they always been into all sorts of things that yeah bang I've just been lucky to follow my aspirations I suppose and go into a field that I enjoy getting paid to play with Bom a lot of things that go bang [Music] [Music] this is Australia's outback the Pilbara region in the country's remote Northwest is spectacular stunning landscapes red earth and vast mineral deposits the main objective in my role here I'm at Allis is just um looking after this beautiful environment that we get to work in and yeah it's just taken care of it maintained as best we can while we're here to do what we're doing as an invited wise it's probably one of the best jobs on the mind obviously we get to spend a lot of time out here in this beautiful country Pilbara is home to some of the Earth's oldest rock formations the first to inhabit this region were ancestors of today's Aboriginal people traditional land owners belong to the yandy era people this is what they are indigenous to so this is their land so certainly make sure we identify areas that are potentially culturally sensitive and ensure that we don't damage them or intrude them in any way to be disrespectful towards those people I'd like to think that our mind companies in general are putting a bigger focus on the environmental management this is our country and we need to make sure that we're relieving it in a good condition for future generations every day workers tackle new problems and develop ways to minimize new ones new parts are needed to be trucked in sometimes from the nearest major city per almost 1500 kilometers away we maintain the trucks every 250 hours I come in for service I also do daily checks on them it's actually cooked a bit easier working on the bigger gear and you don't have to squeeze your hand into small places you got plenty of room pipes we get those from all over the world generally if we have a breakdown the main problems are cook me wheel bearings hoses blind hoses leaking cylinder heads everything is big at an Australian iron ore operation including price tags these dump trucks cost more than one and a half million dollars each each tire is worth around 20,000 and go easy on the clutch a gearbox is a whopping 135 thousand to replace but a new engine you'll need two hundred and fifteen thousand dollars to replace one of these each mechanic can have a tool kit ranging from three thousand dollars to up to fifteen thousand dollars [Music] that's big industry and we know you big machines and [Music] [Music] the dirt is shifted from the pit to be crushed and sorted into different grades of ore [Music] if the blend is wrong or the truck collects from the wrong stack it's a multi-million dollar disaster we have this single type of iron ore but we have various grades or concentration of iron within the material that we mined as it goes through the crushing plant we sample it again just to make sure that everything's still in line with what we predict out of the lock model and then once we get those si results back from the lab it's good to go to port [Music] [Music] then begins a 120 kilometer journey on the long straight great northern highway to Port Hedland on the more inside of was another port hedland Street horns shift the truck doesn't six so I get six trips a day 24-hour period [Music] [Music] [Music] Atlas iron accesses the Port Hedland Port Authorities Utah Point port to export its valuable iron or trucks dumper your transported from Wadena to stock piles at the poor [Music] other miners transport the or by rail something Atlas expects to do down the track [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] the Pilbara is a beautiful place it's it's on this it must say destination list I reckon for not just Australians but that sound or people around the world ion or absolutely crucial to the continued growth in in China and and as a result the Pilbara has a really important part to play and continuing to grow iron ore production and just generally contributing really strongly to growth here in Australia they said Atlas iron couldn't do it david flanagan and his team no different who knows what's next for Atlas the new kid on the block in the West's billion-dollar iron ore industry [Music] you know that's one of the things that I'm proud of stove it Atlas is is the way that I've seen groups of people achieve amazing things and I think it's because they realize that in building Atlas to be what we think it can be and we're making a contribution to the country and the state and the community and we love it even that whole mountain behind us that you can see there that's actually iron ore in itself a different type of iron ore called magnetite and that's what sustains the entire iron ore industry in China and their iron ore industry is actually the biggest in the world so I'm you never know that that mountain which can potentially sustain an iron ore mine for 40 or 50 years may still be operating in in 40 or 50 years you never know [Music]

Channel: Spark

Views: 520,321

Rating: 4.6788969 out of 5

Keywords: Spark, Science, Technology, Engineering, science documentary, science photography, science explained, science experiment, mining, mining australia, mining australia 2019, mining australia documentary, gold mining australia, underground mining australia, coal mining australia, longwall mining australia, underground coal mining australia

Id: 4pUXPYZa9u0

Length: 47min 54sec (2874 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 17 2020