A FIRE on a cable tray underneath the flotation motor control centre (MCC) at Ok Tedi Mining Ltd’s process plant has caused damage to electrical and communication cables, and some parts of the MCC, according to the company.
The company said in a statement that the fire occurred on Sunday.
OTML managing director and chief executive Musje Werror praised the processing and emergency response teams noting that: “The combination of fire protection systems performing as expected and the quick response from the onsite teams helped contained this incident, thus, minimising damage to a key piece of infrastructure, and ensuring that no one was hurt.
“At this stage, the initial assessment is that the damage sustained will cause a plant outage for a period in the order of two to three weeks although services to one of the two processing circuits may be restored earlier than that.”
The company said the incident had been reported to the chief inspector of mines and a full investigation was underway to determine the cause.
While the incident will affect production for the remainder of the year the company noted that it had met its scheduled export shipping commitments for the year and had made arrangements to deal with the impact on planned January shipments. Werror also confirmed that OTML was well positioned to deal with the financial impact of such an incident.
“We maintain adequate cash and liquidity to deal with a short duration outages such as this case with this incident,” he said.
“We also maintain a US$600mil (K2.1bil) business interruption insurance policy to cover a longer duration outage.
“At this time, when many are taking their Christmas breaks, the team at Ok Tedi will be working 24/7 to repair the damage and minimise the disruption and impact.
“We are grateful to our dedicated and committed workforce for their efforts.”
Statement
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