Trip to the Mine and Mill – Saturday 18th September 2010
Just because it is Saturday, doesn’t mean you can sleep in. During the week we organised permits to go and visit the mine and the mill and Alex and Steve from Gerard’s class picked us up at 7.30am. You have to get up there early to get a good view before the clouds and fog roll in. The mine and mill are 18kms from town, but you can only travel at 40kms and in some places 25kms.
We were extremely lucky that when we got to the mine it was a beautiful sunny day and we had an amazing view of the whole thing. What used to be a huge mountain is now a huge hole in the ground. Alex and Steve were excellent escorts: as Alex is a full-time mine worker, he could take us right down in to mine and Steve is a full time mill worker so he took us all over the mill.
They mine copper and gold, and we were taken all over the buildings at the mine, training centre and workshop and then into the open cut where they load the haul trucks. Various sections of the mine have names like New York, Moscow, Paris, Townsville and Vancouver etc. So we did a tour of the world while we were there. We saw the haul trucks empty their load into the crusher and then the crushed rock travels by conveyor belt to the mill.
At the mill the crushed rock goes through the slag roller and the ball roller which grinds the rock into sand-like stuff. Then this material goes into flotation tanks where they pump air into the water and it makes the copper and gold rise to the top of the water and it gets scooped off and is like a paste. The paste of copper and gold is pumped to Koyuga and shipped out. (about 250km of pipeline carries the paste).
This is a very brief explanation, but you will see what I mean from the photos. We had lunch at the mess up at the Mill and visited the workshop and the conveyor splicing areas before we came home. One of my students, Francis from Bougainville, saw us at lunch and came over and offered to show us through the conveyor belt workshop. He had to have a photo taken with me. He is the blackest man I have ever seen, he is so black he is kind of purple and you can pick the people from Bougainville by their skin colour.
We had a great day and we were back here about 12.30pm. We had seen and done so much it felt like 4.30pm.
