MONDAY 13 NOVEMBER    NORTH POINT CAMP

Temp felt well into 40’s today.

The genset problems seemed to be ongoing, and had been creating electrical voltage issues. As FMG were responsible for this installation, not us, they had been informed.

Refuelling the gensets and pumping out the sewer pit occupied 5 of our staff hours today.

The cementers were working at night again, so a light tower had to be fetched from Hedland again.

R thought the dishwasher coil blew out when it was first started due to the voltage problems – that was, not our fault! Nor cost for repairs.

Brickie took a tip truck load of rubbish to the tip. His semi still in Hedland being repaired.

Last week, I had phoned the Shire and arranged for inspection. Today, the Shire Inspector came, and passed the kitchen as usable. So it was now able to be occupied, officially.

So that was Stage 1 completed – on 13th, as earlier thought. I was amazed.

Spotless would be catering for people tonight, for the first time – they planned to move their staff in. We would like to move in there too! But the FMG lady in Hedland said none of our staff could move to RV1 until she said so. Bit of a power thing, I thought. The men were annoyed. It would be so much more comfortable there. For starters – rooms with their own bathrooms!

R was due to go out on his week’s break, in a few days. He got me to change around the booking that HO had made for him, and book him out of Broome on Wednesday. That would mean he would need to drive up there tomorrow afternoon. Seemed like he couldn’t wait to get out of the place, and I didn’t blame him. He had been under so much pressure here, and there were ongoing ructions at home too.

R drove into Hedland for various supplies.

While he was away, a couple of people from BHP arrived, to “investigate” that fire that had happened a few days ago. One of them was an environmental officer. They were making it out to be a much bigger issue than it really was, and I couldn’t actually see what business it was of theirs – apart from looking for yet another way to make life difficult for us. But I was polite, explained some  (slightly edited) facts and allowed them to go and inspect what was only a few square metres of burnt spinifex. AFTER making them go through the formal site induction process, of course; two can play at that game! I did hope this was not going to become some sort of major incident. They made reference to the report they would write and made vague suggestions about further action….. I reported all that to HO, pronto.

John had one Hedland trip in the morning. In the afternoon, he did some work around the site.

The dishwasher was repaired. Then the instant hot water unit went on the blink. The cooler man came from Newman to fix the wet mess coolroom.

Fuel tanks were installed at the gensets. It took our men 2 hours to do that, and another 4 hours to fuel up the gensets. I was so busy, these days, keeping tabs of Variation Orders like that work.

A temporary satellite dish was installed for the main office. Spotless could now use that, and their own phones. Hallelujah!

The Perth building company was sending up all sorts of oddments needed to fix the items on the punch lists: strip edging to go around the edges of desks, that had been missing from some, keys, door handles, locksets and the like. They would be sent in one of the units being despatched to RV2. They said that, as of today, they had 18 more units to make, to complete their order. The last of these should be ready for trucking on 4/12. It obviously had been a huge order for them.

A lot of our gear was now being moved down to RV2.

The sports court surface was laid.

It seemed there were supposed to be curtain sets for the mess and some kitchen windows. HO was adamant that these had been supplied and we should have them – but couldn’t actually tell me when or how, just that they would have come inside a building being transported, at some stage. Over the past week or so R and I had searched for these, asked staff if they had seen them – it was a lot of curtains! No one knew anything. Reluctantly, HO agreed to get new ones made up in Alice Springs and despatched to us, urgently. In this climate, windows definitely needed shading!

There was a bushfire burning to the NW, just across the other side of the highway. The Fly Camp manager seemed really worried and was trying to organize for a machine to make the fire break much bigger. It looked really scary at night.

We spent some time starting to dismantle our camp – taking down the tarps, packing stuff away. This was in hope that we would soon be able to relocate to the village.