A message from your leaders, Oct '22

The winner’s spirit is strong amongst us! In the same day, we won both the Monos’ Footy Cup and the WorkSafe WA Health and Safety Excellence Awards 2022 for our Poly Weld Stand innovation. We love winning, and these feats are no exception! Big congratulations to everyone involved in the wins, these achievements take teamwork, collaboration and strong dedication.

The year end is fast approaching, and we’re focussed on finishing strong and starting stronger through our annual safety forums and campaign, particularly as we head into the hotter period, wet period in some areas, the holiday calendar fills up, and we’re presented with an increased level of distractions.

On the safety front, our performance continues to be very good, and that’s the way we’d like to keep it. The Finishing Strong, Starting Stronger campaign, which will be rolled out on a site near you, is about ensuring we’re extra vigilant and focussed as we move into the notoriously more challenging holiday period.

Our active projects are making solid progress. At Iron Bridge, we’re looking to peak at approximately 400 people on site and the team are making good safe progress. While at Talison Lithium’s Greenbushes the team working on the Mine Services Area (MSA) are increasingly mobilising.

The Tronox team have successfully completed a challenging shutdown with lots of additional works and are preparing to demobilise in the coming weeks. Well done to the team for their safety performance throughout the shutdown and really bringing the standard up a notch.

Another stellar effort over the last month by our Recruitment team working through all of the project demobilisations, remobilisations, redeployments from one project to another, as well as responding to ever changing project requirements with limited lead times.

Overseas in Mongolia momentum continues to build on the project front at Oyu Tolgoi (OT), we have a number of people on the ground to deliver works on the surface conveyors and transfer station. We also now have a number of subject matter experts in Mongolia to support an early tender involvement (ETI) for the construction of a concentrator.

We’re heading back to BHP’s South Flank Project with a mid-November Inflow shutdown, followed quickly by a shutdown at Rio Tinto’s Western Turner Syncline 2 in Tom Price.

Innovation is an ever-growing focus for us, we’ve seen several successes from the field to date which have been acknowledged internally and externally. The Monadelphous MD Safety Award saw our Tinny Time program take a win, and as mentioned above, externally, the Poly Weld Stand took home a win in WA and will now go into the national WorkSafe awards. 

At the MSA project the team have recently implemented a trial on a pedestrian avoidance system for telehandlers. While it’s new technology and it takes time to adapt and change behaviours, the team are doing a fantastic job incorporating it into the way we work.

We’re always keen to hear your ideas for how we can improve safety, productivity or decarbonisation, no matter how big or small. We have to start somewhere, and sometimes one small idea can spark another and another. So please reach out to us or your supervisor with your improvements – we want to hear them!

Further on tendering, activity remains very strong across iron ore, lithium and oil and gas and we’ll hopefully be communicating new contracts with many new opportunities in the not too distant future.

Stay informed, stay focused – the safe way is the only way! Until next time.

Paul and Brett