Yesterday daughter Helen and I drove to the Newmont Gold mine at Boddington. We, and about 500 other people, were guests of the company which was opening the minesite to family, friends and partners of workers at the site. The mine is 130 kilometres from Perth in Western Australia. Boddington is an open pit mine,
Everyone was outfitted with safety gear and we boarded buses for a guided tour of the complete site. Blasting was suspended for the day, but the mine was otherwise working. There are two main pits, three crushing plants and a processing plant where the flotation method extracts gold and copper from the final finely crushed ore. It was a great day. I cannot remember all the figures of production, so I suggest you watch this YouTube presentation.
The campsite has much to occupy off duty workers which on average total around 1200. Sports, gymnasium, a wet canteen and a very nice dry canteen (mess) with plenty of nice food. A couple of stats that I did remember were that the canteen did 300 pies per day and 1000 chickens a week. Watermelon was talked of in tonnage.
We were invited because James, Helen’s husband, works there on a two week rotation (one week on; one off) The tour ended with a BBQ and salads and drinks. Good day!
Unfortunately there was a plague of bush flies. They don’t seem as smart as city flies and were easy to slap down.
Click photos to enlarge them
One of two pits
Dump truck
Helen in front of Dump Truck wheel
Water truck
The initial crushing plant which reduces the rock to football size
Trucks tipping ore into initial crusher
Massive cable shovel
2.5 kilometre conveyor belt
1 comment:
Welcome to my world Lockie.
Soph xx
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