The remnants of tropical cyclone Kirrily are confounding locals in north-west Queensland.

Falls of up to 600mm have been recorded on some parts of the McKinlay Shire where mining operations including Cannington and Eloise are isolated by floodwaters.

Directly west at Centrex’s Ardmore mine, the falls can be counted in the early two digits since the cyclone crossed the coast on Thursday night, (25/01/2024).

Main image: View of Ardmore site showing four drying pads in the foreground.

“That’s funny, the Dajarra area, we can have 10mm on site and you think, ‘oh well, we’ll recover from that pretty quick and then at the end of the shift you drive out going back to the Dajarra, and you get the second part, the access road, and it’s absolutely flooded,” general manager Brian Hall said.

“Or it goes the other way. We cop a lot on site and then, when you’re driving out, there’s nothing on the access road. It’s very, very patchy the way it rains.”

It’s the same case north of the Flinders Highway and in the Gulf of Carpentaria. 

There’s been scattered big falls throughout Richmond Shire, according to Mayor John Wharton, and workers in the eastern gulf town of Geogetown have been cut off from the Savannah Gold mine around 120 km south of town. 

But there’ve been few falls in the northern part of the Cloncurry shire, according to Mayor Greg Campbell.

Related: Floods isolating NQ mine sites

Phosphate performance 

The Ardmore operation had been hitting its KPIs since starting operations around two and a half years ago, Mr Hall said.

Related: Ardmore poised to bring new crushing circuit online

“In November we had our first 15,000-tonne harvest for the month and so now our mission is to make 20 (thousand) tonnes (a month). 

“We started off with 5000-tonne ships, we’ve (since) been doing 20,000 ships two-monthly. The focus this year is to be doing 20,000 per month. 

“We just put on a couple of extra loader operators to give us some more stacking out on pads and harvesting capability to quicken that pace up. 

“We’re just now going through a finance-raising scenario to help upgrade the plant. The plan is to be about 420- 424Kta by January next year. At the moment, we’re at a rate of about 240Kta.”

The business had targeted other markets for the additional product, Mr Hall said.

“We just done an experimental trial of getting less than 5 per cent moisture solar dry, which we achieved. 

“We just sent 5,800 tonnes to Taiwan at 4.32 per cent (moisture). So that’s a lot of hard work to get down from seven per cent down to five, but we did it. That opens up another market for us.” 

The aim was to get to 625Kta, Mr Hall said.

“The ultimate aim is to be totally owner-operator, and we’re slowly inching towards that,” he said. 

“In November we moved out the crushing contractor and put our own crushing circuit in. That was about $4.4 million. So that gives us more flexibility to ramp up and do more tonnes at a lower cost per tonne.”