Port Hedland

Port Hedland is a shipping town for BHP and Fortesque Metals with Gina Reighardt building docks and facilities that will be operational early next year. The mining companies are planning to double the number of docks over the next 5+ years. I wonder if these plans will continue given the significant price drop of iron ore over the past 6 months.

Fortesque Metals use 4 trailer road trains, known as quads. Over a 24 hour period, 630 trucks come into the docks and unload their precious iron ore load which is loaded directly into the ships. Mining is a 24/7 business so that means that the shipping towns like Port Hedland, and Dampier (Rio Tinto) operate 24/7.

A man from the permanent caravan site behind me told me he was made redundant today. A sparky at BHP. He was not happy about it and many were laid off that day. However these small 50-100 lay offs don't make the news. He said he will still stay in Port Hedland and find other work, but not as good paying. I suspect his wife is still working for BHP and she will now be bringing home the bacon. A lot of it.

Salt is also shipped from Port Hedland. There are huge evaporation meadows outside Port Hedland and once they can harvest the salt, it is road trained to the docks.

The tides in this part of WA are huge. Check out the jetty. It has three layers for people to get on/off boats. I took a seafearers boat trip. I thought it was a tour of the harbour, but it was working at the same time. This boat goes to all the foreign tankers and brings sailors ashore. The sailors have a place to stay and the seafairers group transfer them around Port Hedland so they can do their shopping, socialising etc. Typically a sailor will have 24-48 hours in each port, whilst the ship is being loaded / unloaded, so rather than go stir crazy, they go ashore.

Look closely - lower deck completely under water

Lower deck dirty but usable.

Sunset takes about 20 min and is a beautiful site.

I have almost run out of data on my Telstra phone, so I am doing todays post at Broome MacDonalds. It is painfully slow, so I will upload more photos in 4 days time when I get alocated with abother 3gb.