Mineral Resources hits ‘milestone’ to upgrade troubled Onslow Iron haul road with contractor jobs set to go

Mineral Resources is expected to start letting go scores of trucking contractors after completing upgrades to its 147km-long Onslow Iron haul road following a series of truck rollovers and incidents that raised serious safety concerns. The latest incident was in late August, and marked the seventh truck accident on the private pit-to-port road network since last October — but the first on an upgraded portion of the main road. MinRes announced on Monday that work had now been completed. It is now expected to start sacking contractors brought in to drive road trains, with more than 100 reportedly set to finish up in the coming weeks. The extra workers were needed to keep iron ore moving to port as travelling speeds and load sizes along the route were reduced while works were under way. An average of 64 contractor road trains were running a day during the previous quarter, with MinRes flagging they would start to be wound down from September. The miner in February announced it would spend $230 million to upgrade the vital stretch of infrastructure following cyclone damage and regulatory intervention after the spate of rollovers. It said the sealed width of the road now spans 11m from edge to edge, 2m wider than typical public roads used for heavy haulage in the Pilbara. Works to improve the $2.6 billion road — which is half owned by Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners — included seal binder upgrades and cement stabilisation to enhance pavement strength and moisture resistance. Asphalt was also added along the entire length of the sealed road. Minor ancillary works off the road continue and are scheduled for completion next month. Despite the works, Onslow Iron shipped a record 3.2 million tonnes last month. MinRes managing director Chris Ellison said completion of the works marked a “significant milestone” as the company focused on hitting annual nameplate capacity of 35 million tonnes. “Onslow Iron is now established as a cash generative, low-cost asset that underpins the deleveraging of our balance sheet while driving stable, long-term growth,” Mr Ellison said. Speaking last month, he had pinned the blame for the latest accident on driver error. “It was a little disappointing. We did have a truck that lay on its side on Saturday night, but look, fundamentally, it was just simply driver error,” he said. “The truck driver thought that he was nearing a rest bay, and he was about 180m from it when he took the truck off the side of the road, and when he saw where he was, he applied the brakes and the front prime mover and the two trailers just laid on their side. “We’ve travelled almost 13 million kilometres accident free . . . we want to be totally accident free, of course, but these things are going to happen from time to time.” The private road is used to transport ore from MinRes’ Ken’s Bore mine to the Port of Ashburton. Earlier this year, WorkSafe launched an investigation and issued an enforcement action to ensure appropriate safety controls were in place. All heavy-haul movement was suspended, with contractor vehicles using alternative routes to get the iron ore to port. The West Australian revealed in March that despite the number of incidents, MinRes had lowered the bar to be hired as a haul road truck driver on the road. MinRes at the time was offering truck drivers $166,500 a year with a $15,000 “contract completion bonus” and “$13,128 operational bonus”, according to an active job advertisement posted on the company’s website earlier that month. Applicants needed to have at least “three years’ recent experience multi-combination driving history” and a “minimum six months heavy haulage experience within a mining or similar environment”. It was also revealed a 225-page report presented to MinRes by mining advisers AMC Consultants said a truck would have to leave every five minutes throughout the day to hit the miner’s iron ore export targets. AMC said that would mean “more than 550 ‘truck passing interactions’ every hour on the haul road, day and night”.