Production will be affected at the Ok Tedi Mining following a fire on a cable tray underneath the Flotation Motor Control Centre (MCC) at the process plant on Sunday, 22nd December.
The fire caused damage to electrical and communication cables, and some parts of the MCC.
OTML Managing Director & CEO, Musje Werror said, “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.”
Werror praised the processing and emergency response teams.
“The combination of fire protection systems performing as expected and the quick response from the onsite teams helped contain this incident, thus minimising damage to a key piece of infrastructure, and ensuring that no one suffered any injury,” he said.
The incident has been reported to the Chief Inspector Mines and a full investigation is underway to determine the cause.
OTML in a statement said while the incident will affect production for the remainder of the year the Company noted that it has met its scheduled export shipping commitments for the year and have made arrangements to deal with the impact on planned January shipments.
Mr Werror also confirmed that OTML is well positioned to deal with the financial impact of such an incident.
“We maintain adequate cash and liquidity to deal with a short duration outage such as this case with this incident. We also maintain a $600M 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,” said Werror.
