We awoke to a wet and windy day…. Very disappointing as we were booked on the Mt Whaleback mine tour and the person at the Visitor Centre yesterday indicated the tour would be cancelled if there was rain….

However, we did not receive any cancellation advice, so we drove down to the visitor centre… to find the bus waiting…. And were informed that the tour would go ahead in a modified version – we would be unable to go up to the pit lookout as the road would be too slippery and the tour would be entirely on the bus – not getting off…

We were glad that it was going ahead as we would not have had another opportunity to do it… and apologies for some of the pics – not easy to take quality images through a bus window in the rain!!!

The tour group was given the mandatory safety glasses and hi-vis vests and then loaded onto the bus for the short drive to Mt Whaleback Mine.

Our tour guide was a very talkative ex-clinical psychologist who was on a motorbike trip around Australia with her husband some years ago… when they reached Newman they loved it and so stayed….

Mt Whaleback is run by BHP and is the largest single open cut iron ore mine in Australia… the pit is 5 x 2.5 km in size and produced its first load of iron ore in 1969. The ore is mostly high grade at 68.8% – the main ore produced is Brockman Haematite. 70 million tonnes of iron ore are produced at Mt Whaleback per year.

There are approx. 800 employees on the mine site at any one time – many of them FIFOs… and the mine truck drivers are made up of 80% females. There is a resident emergency service on site with a doctor, nurse and also firemen…

We drove past the crusher plants where the ore is crushed into increasingly smaller size depending on what grade and product is on order… either Newman blended lump or Newman blended fines.

The crusher spindles were huge!!!

The mine is a mass of conveyor belts moving ore to the crushers, then on to beneficiation plants, sorting areas,

storage stockpiles……

or then loaded onto the lengthy trains that carry the final product to Port Hedland for shipping. The trains from Mt Whaleback are 2.7 km long – each carriage contains between 100-130 tonnes of ore. A trainload of ore is approx. 42 000 tonnes, and 9 trains go to Port Hedland each day. It takes 3 hours to load each train.

In addition, there are trains coming into Mt Whaleback from outlying mines with raw ore from processing in the crushers… altogether there are 23 trains loaded and unloaded each day at Mt Whaleback.

We saw the huge mine trucks – there are 40 in use at the mine to move the raw ore from the pit to the crushers or stockpiles – each truck weighs 165 tonnes empty and has a 240-tonne payload. They travel at speeds of 15 km per hour up the hill to the top of the pit – taking 30 minutes to get from top to bottom – max speed possible 60km per hour.

Tyres for these trucks cost $40 000 each…

There are quite a few autonomous trucks at the site – driverless and controlled by the big operations centre in Perth – there is a move to make more of the machinery autonomous as the concept is it is cheaper and safer… (?? Who knows – technology can be a real issue as we all know firsthand with the Wells BMPro issue😊)

There are onsite workshops to repair the mine vehicles….

The ore is obtained from the pit by blasting – they do 9 blasts per month using ammonium nitrate mixed with diesel as the explosive device.

It would have been amazing to actually go up to the top of the pit lookout – below are some pics from Matt and Sharon who did the tour a couple of weeks ago – you can see just how enormous the pit is…. And how big the mining operations are here at Mt Whaleback…

There is an estimated 20-30 years left of productive mining at Mt Whaleback. The company has been investing in regeneration of the site – first strategy was planning local natives in pockets on the slopes of waste (product with less than 50% iron content is considered waste and used as fill) but this has met with average success as erosion is still an issue.

It has now been discovered that a slope of 19 degrees graded then planted out is ideal – plants are growing well with minimal erosion….

We arrived back at the Visitor Centre and Gordie could not resist a further chat with our very friendly tour guide who also loved a chat (being a clinical psychologist 😊) …

The Dome Café was nearby so we walked over and had some morning tea….

The weather was very unpredictable that day with sunshine starting to break through at times during the afternoon… everyone had some chores to do… washing….

Filling tanks with water…

The caravan park here was actually great – they had been planning some gardens which will look fantastic when established… It had a lot of features that indicated it had been used to accommodate itinerant mine workers – and the washing machines were really cheap per load… and the dryer was free!!!

The amenities were good with a recreation room adjacent to the kitchen – we took advantage of this, and Gordie set up his coffee machine, so we did afternoon tea and played some Monopoly Millionaire while the weather outside was bad….

Dinner that night was at a local restaurant “Mia Mia” which had been recommended by one of the shop owners in the mall…

Rose, Kerry and Dave were ahead of the game and had raced in first….

Gordie looking for Kerry thought he’d found her… and yes, we could see the resemblance, but the woman raced off – we think Gordie scared her when he approached her with “honey can we go inside now??”

Anyway, much to his relief Kerry appeared at the door…

We enjoyed the meals – the lamb curry was delicious – then went back to camp to prepare for our departure the following day….