PROFILE: This is my story - Vaughan Hendry

SHARE WITH US DETAILS OF A PROJECT YOU HAVE WORKED ON THAT STANDS OUT TO YOU AND YOUR RESPONSIBILITIES ON THE PROJECT

I was the Contracts Manager for the Ngezi Platinum Mine Concentrator Expansion in Zimbabwe on Phase 1 total expansion cost us$340mill of which the Heavy Civils (US$23Mill) 18mths with Stefanutti Stocks 2007 and Phase 2 Concentrator expansion total value us $ 440 Mill of which the Heavy Civils (US$27Mill) 18mths with Basil Read 2010.

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Map to Ngezi Platinum Mine.

Ngezi Mine is situated in the Midlands district of Zimbabwe +- 160 km South East of Harare. You take the Harare main road to Bulawayo and about 90 Km at Selous, (Selous has an old mine which is mothballed but is has an operating process plant which reduces the mined rock to platinum cake which is then transported to SA for final reduction to platinum) and a you take the mine road 60 km South to Ngezi. It is situated in the Great Dyke Zone in Zimbabwe, where there are a large number of mines chrome, Gold, platinum, Bauxite, Diamond, Ruby, Emerald and Semi-precious minerals.). It is a very mineral Rich area. The great Dyke extends as far down as Rustenburg

Phase 2 heavy Civils was awarded in (2010). I had worked on Ngezi on a previous contract with Steff Stocks so knew the area very well. I had been partially (advice from afar only) involved with the tender. The planning and programming of the job was done onsite by myself on CCS and progressed weekly via CCS site plan. The client is Ngezi Platinum mine (part of the Impala Platinum mine group in SA) and the MEP consultants were DRA, a well known South African mining consultancy firm together with the conveyor division of Sandvik Mining and SRK Consulting on the slimes dam Penstocks.

Scope of Phase 2 Work.

Phase 1 and 2 were a very tight program jobs with the added challenges being it was cross border in Zimbabwe with limited local civil engineering resources.

Phase 1 scope of works. - A green field contract

• Ball mill structure
• 3 x circular clarifiers 50mdia,45m dia ,30m dia
• Conveyors and transfer towers
• Bulk surge Silo 45m high a 10 m dia
• Pipe rack Columns and heads
• Filter plant and cake pressing plant.
• Paving to filter plant areas
• Raise bore bases.

Conveyor to Crusher and Radial Conveyor Surge Stockpile.

The Phase 2 scope of works included: 

• Reinforced Earth tip and ramp.
• Crusher Foundation
• Radial Conveyor Surge Stockpile
• 13, 000 ton. Stockpile tunnel 80 m long x 4m high x 4m wide, entrance and exit wing walls.
• +- 6.9 kms. of conveyor trestle foundations & transfer tower foundations.
• 5 vehicle bridges over the conveyor line
• Conveyor bridge foundations over a river.
• Conveyor trestle foundations close to the silos.
• Mini-piles to the trestle foundations
• 2 x silos 10 m dia. 30 m & 45 m high with 300 mm thick walls.
• Ball Mill foundation
• Filter foundation
• Pump stations 5 m deep in rock.
• 3 concrete reservoirs 45 m dia., 30 m dia. &  20 m dia.
• Pipe rack columns and trestle heads.
• Water tanks, misc. foundations and paving in the Mill & Filter building.
• 2 x 50 m high penstocks towers with 1 m thick walls and intermediate slabs, in the Slimes Dam area
• 2 x Double Raise Bore Foundations

 

Tip with Reinforced Earth Walls.

WHAT WERE THE CHALLENGES YOU FACED IN PHASE 1?

Phase 1 was essentially one of the first large civil contracts after Zimbabwe opened up. Zimbabwe supply infrastructure was in a bad state, with very few and limited local materials available and the majority of business were closed.

All major, cement, formwork, reinforcing and minor materials were imported, supplementary food supplies were imported weekly. All plant and vehicles, busses, offices accommodation units were imported. Diesel was supplied by the mine. Major earthworks were subcontracted out to a local contractor assisted by the mine on a plant buy back system and agreed rates.

The contract went through the `Billionaire stage` when the Zimbabwean dollar devalued and inflation dramatically increased. Everyone became billionaires on paper but starved, as the money had no value. Local banks rationed cash draws and the Government unilaterally took spare funds from your account with no recourse and payback. Black market was rife. This presented extreme challenges in the paying of the local labour teams, timeously. Petty cash draws ended up in carry bags full of local cash. At that stage, the local labour was largely untrained and still to be introduced to having their own accounts for bi – weekly and monthly wages payments.

Zimbabwean labour law insists on a morning teatime break with a pre-packed sugared tea brew issue. A cooked daily lunch regime was introduced. This was cooked on open fires at team cook areas, staples being Sadsa, Kapenta and vegetable relish, alternated with beef or chicken vegetable relish , butcher shops being unavailable, local beef was sourced live , price negotiated and meat prepared. Vegetables and staples were sourced from local markets when available, timber for cooking came from the bush clearing for the job.

Kitchen & Eating Area at Main Offices.

The Contract allowed a 50% expat content. This was needed as the local labour and foremen expertise was heavily lacking. As expat R&R, transport and another add-ons are expensive these expat teams were reduced during the contract as local teams became more HSE aware and more experienced as well as experienced Zimbabwean foremen returned to Zimbabwe had become available

We had challenges with a local reinforcing steel fixers due to nonpayment of labour and strikes re-nonpayment.

Bussing. We had our own busses arranged transport routes with pickup points

Accommodation. Labour skilled accommodation. The compound allowed expats and skilled labour accommodation. Distinction was salaried staff as opposed to hourly paid staff. Hourly paid staff stayed in their own homes and were bussed from designated pickup points. Some labour walking 5 km home from the drop off points. The compound was erected in FSM temporary units, ditto the site offices

The Senior accommodation stayed in the nearest game park lodge at least 40 km away. Teams travelled to site and back daily. to be onsite at 06h45 and leave site at 17hoo. During the contract, a mud-brick senior compound was constructed with a canteen and cooks.

This accommodation was sold to the client at contract end, both FSM compound and Senior compound.

Phase 1 Senior Compound Still in use by Mine.

WHAT WERE THE CHALLENGES YOU FACED IN PHASE 2?

Local Resources. We could get cement from PPC in Bulawayo as they had a factory in Bulawayo 450 km away, a truck turnaround time of 2 days up and 2 days return, with driver R&R a week trip per truck.  This became a detailed logistical exercise. We had 4 silo’s 2 x 100t and 2 x 30t supplied by PPC and also a large stockpile of bags We found that 2.5 full cement trucks volume of cement had been stolen on the road up. The seal tags were in place, but they had been taking the cement out the top tanker access lids. PPC had to take this loss. The batch plant was a Namib with extra aggregate load bins to expedite production. The best turnaround achieved was 18m3 /hr on a 30m3/hr batch plant. This after increasing Conveyor tube diameters, Cement and water hopper capacity and extra booster water pumps to force feed the water. We were running 6 trucks with one in overhaul service rotation. Some pours ran greater than 24 hours continuous. The Slides ran for 7 days continuous. Due to high temperatures and distances from batch plant to site, the concrete was retarded.

Namid Karoo Batch Plant with Silos.

The reinforcing steel in Harare was limited and the quality was inconsistent, and the decision was taken to source that from South Africa. This also caused delays as they would send reinforcement in the wrong sequence and all the easy, not critical reinforcement was sent early and the critical reinforcement (big bars) were late. There were bar sizes that were too big to fit on the trucks without permits resulting in some trucks being stopped on the road by the traffic authorities. From previous experience in Phase 1 we imported stock rebar and established a cutting and bending yard on site where we could cut and bend bar shortages and drawing revision changes onsite.

We also established a precast yard near the main offices where the two different sizes of conveyor trestle foundations were precast, the Reinforced Earth panels and the late extra New Jersey barriers were cast and then transported to site via crane truck and installed.

We managed to find a small local earthworks contractor but they had limited resources and especially at the start of the job, they were under pressure to perform, as the job was spread out over a wide area  +-12 km and we needed to get going with a number of different structures in different areas.

The silos were slid by Sanyati Construction from South Africa . The sliding team was competent. They delayed the silo construction due to a late arrival on site with teams and equipment and delayed the removal of equipment and containers after the job was complete.

Crushed aggregates became a bottleneck with the local crusher failing continuously. We ended up importing a surge stockpile from Harare, to cater for the crusher downtimes at huge cost. The jaw crusher and the belts and conveyor pullers were old and needed repair but spare parts and cash-flow was a major challenge for a small crusher operator with  a limited market. 

Skilled Labour. In terms of the contract we needed to use only Zimbabwean labour. Luckily we had worked there previously and had a good local HR officer that could recruit all the experienced skills we needed plus I had foremen that had worked for me before that brought their own teams. That is a tremendous advantage where you have skilled foremen and team leaders with their own local labour. We found that many of the people that had worked on Phase one came back. This obviated training raw labour and a far quicker start.

Senior Concrete Foreman Simba Mbende and Site Engineer Lawrence Mberikwazvo on top of the 14,000 ton Stockpile Tunnel.

Skilled Staff Again we managed to get a lot of the local staff that we had worked with previously. The contract heavily restricted the number of expats allowed. I had a few expats in key team leading and foremen positions. The number of expats were reduced to about 5% of the total team.

We had an immense logistical problem in the motivation of bringing in expats with at least 12 columns of information per person required to be submitted to immigration and the Department of Labour. Unfortunately, there was a definite aspect of ‘graft’ required in order to get applications processed.

Logistics. Getting plant and equipment through the border was a nightmare. The HO logistics department really let us down by sending loads to the border with incomplete paperwork. Some of our equipment sat at the border for +- 4 weeks.

 Key pieces of equipment like the batch plant and the 4 tower cranes were late getting onto site resulting in unnecessary and pressure at the start of the job. The tower cranes were at the border for so long that all the copper wiring was stolen and when we eventually got them to site, we needed a specialist crane mechanic to come to site and rewire them resulting in more delays.

Poker vibrators that were bought by the buying department in Johannesburg were of such poor quality that they broke down. There were none available in Zimbabwe and at one stage we had +- 30 broken on site and a 2-week lead time to get more on site. This delayed us a further +- 2 weeks with the few remaining pokers being transported from pour to pour to enable work to continue..

PPE provided was also of poor quality, with boots lasting +-3 weeks before soles broke and delaminated.

We arranged that the Basil Read labour was in green overalls as most other companies were in blue and other colours. As the site is essentially 20 km in extent, it was easy to pick out labour not working or travelling to the local shops, +-10 km away. These shops, bank and supermarket had been erected in the period between Phase 1 and 2 at an area called Ngezi Village. 

Bussing.The contract required that the local labour be drawn from the local communities within a 30 km radius of the site. No poaching of mine labour was allowed. Rates were to be on par with mine labour rates per category. Civils categories and mine labour categories do not overlap much resulting in some un-happiness.

 We therefore had 3 routes for labour pickup at designated pickup points and after work offloading points. We had brought in our own busses, one of these was locked up at the Department of Transport due to some obscure law requiring tax payment of kms. travelled on public roads. All our routes were along mine roads. We ended up paying a reduced fine, whilst struggling for 3 weeks to get the bus out of the vehicle pound.

Skilled Labour Flat-Pack Camp.

Staff Accommodation & Labour Accommodation. We knew that there was very limited accommodation on the mine, so we had ordered flat-pack container accommodation from China. This was a major challenge as the supplier was late in dispatching it from China and then instead of offloading it in Beira it was off loaded in Port Elisabeth. The Chinese fittings, plumbing are very inferior, The toilets having a 50mm discharge outlet and kept on jamming so ended up changing to SA toilets and cisterns with a 100mm dia outlet. We were unable to get replacement fittings from china. The subcontractor had a supply and erect contract. Site had to provide the electrical, water and plumbing reticulation, Septic tanks, DB Board, Water tanks and trestles and demand pressure water pumps. As the Mine water boreholes where often out of use the water supply was a challenge when there are 200 people in camp.

The senior staff started off staying at the same game farm 60 km from site, Pamazinda and Chengeta lodges until the flat-pack accommodation was erected. The mine did not allow us to stay in the previous Stef-Stocks compound. A local Zimbabwe timber house supplier (Wendy) house had moved off site 9 they had a small building and earthworks contract) and some of these units became available during the contract allowing overflow skilled labour, to be accommodated.

We also managed to arrange to take over and purchase an existing senior compound in prefab units, the mine allocated a piece of bush for a senior’s camp. This we fenced cut and trimmed and erected a mud-brick thatched dining, lounge, kitchen, and circular braai area with seating. Senior flat-pack units were erected in this bush camp.

 

HOW DID YOU OVERCOME YOUR CHALLENGES?  

I was fortunate that I had worked at Ngezi on phase1. I also had a very experienced and hardworking construction manager Chris Lorets, and an experienced team of core foremen and that I had made good contacts with local suppliers and contractors. There are limited resources in Zimbabwe, but the local contractors, suppliers, DRA and the client are used to this and if they could not help you, they could put you on to somebody that might. Our senior and mid management staff had many contacts and we managed through contacts to find relevant suppliers etc. We eally learnt the ins and outs of Harare business community and quickly. It required a huge amount of effort to procure even the simplest of things and when there were unexpected changes or requirements it required extra effort.

 WHAT WERE THE COMMUNICATION FACILITIES LIKE IN ZIMBABWE?

Local cell phone network was intermittent and dependent on the traffic. There are 2 main cellphone networks in Zimbabwe and either one or the other did not work. Many Zimbabweans have 2 cell phones with the the two different service providers so if the one doesn't work the other should, but there would be times when neither worked. Internet signal was also a huge problem with some e-mails taking 2 days to go through. Not a good situation when you are depending on supplies and material from South Africa. Peak call times were difficult to get calls through.

Internet traffic was setup via VSat connection, which is expensive, but it was workable but had intermittent down time when technicians had to come to site and redirect the disc orientation. We found the disc pole had to be stiff and stable else the disc moved due to storm wind etc.

HOW WELL DID YOUR LABOUR DO AND HOW DID THEY COMPARE WITH SA CIVIL LABOUR?

Phase 1 skilled expat core staff was essential as the local labour were very inexperienced in major civil construction work. Team leaders were expats and then phased out when suitable trained Zimbabweans staff was found or trained.

Phase 2 labour had been trained during phase 1 and as the labour pool was from local community and with skills ex Harare the competence of the labour force was far greater. We were thus able and forced to work with a greatly reduced expat staff. Fortunately, word of mouth and name reputation from phase 1 allowed Phase 2 recruitment to be far easier, we also knew the troublemakers and managed to weed these people out during recruitment.

 SAFETY IS A MAJOR ISSUE WORKING ON THE MINES. HOW DID YOU MANAGE IT?

Daily Safety and Tool Box Talks

 

It took a huge amount of effort by the site team and safety officers to instill a safety mentality into the staff and labour on site. DRA had a very rigorous safety requirement and standards. It helped by having a fair amount of people that had worked on the previous contract but all the new people had to undergo basic safety training at the start of their contracts and ongoing training during the contract. Each team had a daily morning safety and toolbox meeting where the risks of the days work where discussed and highlighted. Both the silos were high and the two penstocks towers were 50 m high with a 5 m high hand over hand shutter which needed special safety attention.

Kefus (Senior Cook) and camp staff with Vegetable Garden.

HOW DID YOU MANAGE THE FEEDING OF YOUR LABOUR FORCE AND STAFF?

Onsite teams had local site fireplace and shed cooking areas with women cooks. The site was spread over 20km and supplying cooked lunch packs from Servicor (Mine food supply contractor similar to IFS and others) was extremely expensive and with a major logistic challenge to get hot food on to site timeously, at many different team locations.  The food cooked was basic and freshly cooked from dry goods, with a fresh vegetable supplement. Tea was the same Zimbabwean sugar tea brew required by law. We started our own vegetable garden with the camp staff which was very successful.

HOW DID YOU DO FROM A PROGRAM POINT OF VIEW?

W  We kept to program and finished within the program including a number of significant VO’s that were added. We also worked closely with the DRA team accelerating areas that were crucial for them and the following contractors and pushing out some non critical areas to ensure the overall program stayed on track.

Silo Slide under Construction.

  

DID YOU HAVE A TEAMWORK RELATIONSHIP WITH THE PROJECT MANAGERS AND CLIENT TO ENSURE THE CONTRACT WAS A SUCCESS? 

The client, our client was DRA, MEP contractor. We managed to meet all their milestones without incurring any penalties. Working relationships had been established from Phase 1 as it was the same DRA team. They are experienced project managers and had a good HO team and team on site. 

WHAT DID YOU DO WITH YOUR FLAT PACK LABOUT AND SUPERVISOR CONTAINER CAMPS AT THE END OF THE JOB?

These were sold at the same cost of supply, erection (material and labour) and purchase costs. As the Camps were good quality and well-constructed and laid out there was no problem on passing them onto the mine and other contractors at no loss and slight gain.

50 m High Penstocks Foundation. 

   

HOW EASY WAS IT TO GET YOUR PLANT AND EQUIPMENT BACK TO SA AT THE END OF THE JOB?

The return of equipment and hired materials at contract end for a cross border contract is an immense logistical problem with these costs, difficulties, fines and delays being completely overlooked at tender stage. 

Import documentation must be carefully collected and filed with backup, as these docs are required for tempory import. A CDi document with all supporting documentation needs to be compiled to return the equipment. The import agent SA side and the import agent on the Zimbabwean side, not the same company are supposed to keep and file these documents. They sometimes lose them, causing confusion, delay, and fines. Site must have trained experienced import- export people who develop contacts and arrange a smoothing over of difficulties, often made by these border officials, with an objective in mind.

We found that taking pictures of the trucker’s passport face picture, trucks, and trailer registration numbers and loads helped immensely for identifying loads in trouble as well as preventing theft.

50 m High Penstock Tower. 

HOW DID YOU RATE THE JOB FROM A SUCCESS POINT OF VIEW?

Phase 2 was keenly priced, much more so that phase 1 which made double profit. Phase 2 also had allowable problems with the concrete sand being total underpriced. We ended up excavating sand and stockpiling from local riverbeds and sieving it. A large extra expense mitigated by sourcing our own material ex- bush riverbeds and the client helping in the hire of a sand screen. The contract basically broke even on allowable, and profits were obtained from the exchange rate Rand to US$. Quality and program milestone achievements were very good.

Snr. Civils Foreman, Lawrence Mberikwazvo, Site Engineer, Construction Manager, Chris Lorets, Vaughan Hendry, P.M., Snr Civils foreman Pkamisa Ferai 

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