Off to See the Wizard - Port Hedland Part 1

As I said previously, Port Hedland is fascinating and everything is BIG!

A few days ago, we had a better look around the place.  Stats can be boring, but some to do with this place are mind blowing.

This plan gives you some idea of the scale of the port.

I mentioned the salt earlier, but that is only a very small part of the operations.  The main products exported are iron ore, salt, lithium, manganese and scrap metal, with iron ore being by far the largest percentage.  There are three main players in the iron ore industry - BHP (by far the biggest), FMG (Fortescue Metal Group (Twiggy Forest)) and Roy Hill (Gina Rinehart). Each of those companies have separate designated berths at the port and their own private railways that come from their mines.  You can see them all colour coded on the diagram.  The Port Authority has four berths that the salt, lithium, manganese, strap metal and smaller iron ore mines use. Their product is delivered by road train.  Fuel is also delivered to those berths.

Both FMG and Roy Hill are preparing to add additional berths to their operations.

We went on a couple of tours.  The first was conducted by “Seafarers”.  We assumed it was just another tour company.  How wrong we were.  Seafarers is the “Seafarers Mission”.  They are a worldwide organisation through the Anglican Church which started in the early 1800s to support seafarers, regardless of colour, race or creed.  There operations here in Port Hedland consist of ferrying seafarers from their ships to port to do some shopping or visit the Seafarers centre.  They will take them to medical appointments, they have a little shop in their centre where they can purchase items not readily available on board, such as chocolates, more luxury foods, toiletries, Aussie souvenirs etc.  There is a chaplain available for support.  Seafarers are usually on a nine month contract and they can be away from home when important things occur - births, deaths, marriages.  They may need support due to loneliness, bullying or with pay issues.  The current chaplain is a retired navy man, so he understands their issues and his wife, who also works at the Mission, understands from a family at home perspective.  As most of the seafarers are from Asia, they have staff from the Philippines, China and Indonesia, to assist with communication.  The centre has a bar and social area, including billiard table, piano etc.

COVID has severely affected all of this, so their main role has been online shopping, where the seafarers put in their order and the little boats take the items out to be winched up to the ships.  Only in the last month have some seafarers been able to come ashore for a few hours at a time, but not all companies or countries allowed this as yet.

As you can gather, we knew nothing about the Mission and were really impressed with what they do.  There is another organisation, “Stella Maris”, which is similar and run by the Catholic Church.

Back to our tour…..

We watched a short video before being popped in their bus to take us to the port, where we donned our life jackets and boarded their launch.

Those ships are huge when you are right beside them on the water.  So how big?  Generally they are 345 metres long and 60 metres wide.  Imagine seven olympic swimming pools long and two of the pools side by side!

Here is the ship we saw coming in the previous morning , now well on the way to being loaded.   By the time it is fully loaded the Plimsoll Line will be at water level and the ship will be sitting 18 metres lower in the water than when it arrived.  Each of those ships holds between 170,000 and 260,000 tomes of iron ore.  That is the equivalent of the enough ore to make the steel for between three and five harbour bridges.

The ore is loaded by a contraption on the end of a conveyor belt.  More on that later.

We just cruised around looking at everything. The ships come from all over the world, including our favourite place, the Isle of Man.  This is for you Lou.

One of the main things we had to do was to drop off a couple of seafarers to their ships.  It’s a long way up those stairs.  They had been very happy to have some shore leave, if only for a couple of hours.

It was a fascinating tour.   I think that is enough for one post and will share the second tour separately.