BHP
Pablo Maroma
It's important to note that for FIFO (Fly In Fly Out) workers, Mondays involve an earlier wake up to get to the airport on time (typically a 6.00 am flight) and Thursdays/Fridays are shorter days due to flying back home for the weekend (typically a 5.00 pm flight). My roster is 5-2, 4-3 (meaning five days on, two days off, four days on, three days off).
5.30 AM
Bus to work or catch a ride from someone on the team with an LV (light vehicle). This photo is me and my fellow grad Rahul who is behind the wheel.
5.50 AM
Arrive at site (Nelson Point), water my cactus (once a week).
6.00 AM
Admin – I use this time to establish my workflow (set priorities, prep for meetings, etc.) and answer emails. During shutdowns, this is also a good time to answer any queries from night shift. Finally, graduates in their final rotations must start thinking about permanent positions to roll off into, so I’ve been using this time to check the company’s internal job postings (update: while drafting this, I accepted a role in Finance for the Mobile Equipment Maintenance team at BHP’s Newman West mine!)
7.00 AM
Pre-start meeting - An overview of any relevant safety events, field leadership shares and a time to celebrate success within the team. This meeting includes all disciplines within the Port Engineering team: Structural, Mechanical, Electrical and Control Systems. This photo is the Engineering pre-start meeting – this is my team all coming together.
7.30 AM - 12.00 PM
Work – Typically, I try to get my field time done in the morning, due to the heat of the Pilbara sun (40°C+ afternoons in peak summer). Port Hedland provides graduates access to fixed plant machinery seen on the mines (except the train load out and beneficiation plant), as well as rail and wharf infrastructure. Today I need to do some defect verification in different areas of the plant, as well as blueprint verification in an area which I’ll be designing a new maintenance platform for. This is also a critical time to conduct field leaderships around the plant. Field leadership is a program by BHP which provides a standard platform to help improve safety outcomes through more field time. It incorporates verification of fatality risk controls to ensure elements of BHP’s health, safety and environment management systems are tested.
12.00 PM
Lunch (half-hour) – Giving intermittent fasting a go. Mixed it up today and had lunch by the beach. You can see that the view is pretty good!
12.30 PM - 5.30 PM
Work – With my field time done, these are the hours I spend on my projects. Which is typically a combination of the following:
- Stakeholder engagement – meetings with the Reliability or Production teams to establish scope or update them on the status of their requests
- Risk assessments – Root Cause Analysis (RCA), Construction Risk Assessment Workshops (CRAW), etc.
- Documentation – checking drawings, writing scopes of work, etc.
- Design work – calculations or modelling (see my photo below of me at work)
Today, I’ll be engaging the Reliability Engineering team to create an MOC (Management of Change) request for the new maintenance platform we scoped out earlier in the day. Management of Change is a vital piece in all engineering work, as it declares all changes to the plant and the systems within the site to ensure that it is safe to change and to inform stakeholders of said change. I also finally get to model the platform on Space Gass, after rigorous checks of my calculations by my more senior engineers.
2.00 PM
Team meeting (1 hour) – An overview of the week ahead, team priorities, KPI (Key Performance Indicators) tracking and a general time for the team to raise any concerns, exclusively for the structural engineering team. Key performance indicators are metrics used by management to track personnel in a host of areas, ranging from productivity, to safety, to cultural contribution, etc. This photo shows the team working together on a possible hazard through illustration.
1-Up meeting (1 hour) – A vital one on one for graduates and their leaders, which serves as a forum to address their progress, any concerns and or development opportunities. Since Genevieve (my lead) was once also a graduate, I try to leverage her knowledge of the business and her contacts for my logbook progress, during this time. All BHP WAIO graduates have logbooks which serves as a guide for different disciplines, on the competencies they should be addressing in the two years as a graduate, to be the most equipped professionals come to the end of their programs.
5.45 PM
Bus or LV back to camp.
6.15 PM
Dinner – Port Haven caters dinner and provides a canteen area with lunch options for tomorrow.
You can see from my photos that you have a lot of choices for dinner… sometimes too hard to make a decision!
7.00 PM
It’s time for exercise and this is me on the court. Exercise is especially pertinent if I spent my entire day in the office. Pro tip: do laundry on Wednesdays as it avoids the scrum in the laundry area every Thursday, due to shift changeover typically being mid-week.
8.15 PM
Walk – On certain days there is too much on the mind, so I like to go for walks around the perimeter of the camp and use this time to check in on my stocks, family, and mates (in that order).
9.00 PM
Bedtime – 9.00 pm at the latest. Sleep is the most important thing as a FIFO worker. 12-hour days alone are a challenge, and to compound that with less than 8 hours of sleep would be an unnecessary burden on your physical and mental health.