Central Highlands dragline a costly rust bucket

NEARLY three months after it was marooned, the coal field dragline that highlighted the extent of the Central Highlands floods is out of water.

At the height of the devastation, the $100 million machine used to recover coal at the Ensham mine near Emerald was sitting in a flooded pit – one of six that collectively held 110,000 megalitres or a fifth of Sydney Harbour's volume.

Central Highlands flood pictures

Pumps have since been working around the clock to remove the water so that engineers can get to the dragline, which has to be virtually dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up.

The repair bill will be close to what it cost but the miner, Ensham Resources, expects the final damages bill, including loss of production, will run into hundreds of millions.

"We have not put a final figure on it simply because we cannot at this stage," a spokesman said. "But repairs to the dragline will involve a very big percentage of its original cost. Pit walls have to be repaired and there is a massive amount of earth moving to do.

"Contracts are at risk because we are struggling to meet 50 per cent of planned output and, unfortunately, the worst affected pits have been the most productive and yielded the best coal. All in all it has been quite a devastating blow."

The mine site had been protected with levees designed to contain a one in 100-year flood but no one had anticipated the rain and volume of water that swept into the mine from the 20,000sq km catchment of the Nogoa River.

Emerald and gemfield towns are still recovering as are graziers along the Nogoa River, who are trying to sort out the ownership of cattle that were forced on to different properties or to retrieve beasts that were washed downstream.

Low-risk prisoners have been brought in to help with some of the repairs, following the lead taken 18 years ago when they were used to help residents of the southwest Queensland town of Charleville when it was flooded.

Much of the recovery work in Emerald and its surrounding districts is being co-ordinated by a committee whose spokesman said yesterday that the process was very slow and frustrating for some.

"Emerald looks fairly normal but there is a lot of paddling going on under the surface and full recovery is still a long way off," the spokesman said.

"Businesses say they are optimistic but there have been some big downturns in turnover while transport companies say their revenue flow has fallen by up to $150,000 since the floods did so much damage to the town. It is going to take a long time before one of the country's inland growth centres gets back on top."

Farming enterprises, which had lost millions of dollars in infrastructure and ruined crops, were banking on a good winter season to get a cash flow to see them through, he said.

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