BHP boss Andrew Mackenzie says the miner will work to overcome a rail shutdown in the Pilbara region after a runaway train was forcibly derailed on Monday morning.
Mackenzie, speaking at the company’s Annual General Meeting on Thursday morning, said 130 staff were working “night and day” to get things back to normal on BHP’s railway, after a loaded, 268-wagon train took off on its own after its driver disembarked to inspect a wagon.
The train was intentionally derailed at a set of points 119 kilometres from Port Hedland, after roughly 90 kilometres of uncontrolled travel.
BHP is working to repair damaged track, and remove wagons and locomotives from the derailment site.
Watch: News footage shows aftermath of BHP derailment
Mackenzie said he expected services to resume “within about a week”.
“In the meantime, mining continues, as does our shipment through supplies at the port, and once we get it back up and running then we will obviously move quickly – but safely – in order to restore the production and satisfy our customers as quickly as we could.”
He said BHP was still trying to work out how the runaway occurred.
“We lost control of the train through an issue with the systems that we’re actually trying to get to the bottom of right now and the very swift thinking of the people on shift at that time realised that if they didn’t force the derailment of this train they could have caused an awful lot more damage and it could have been a real safety risk.”
BHP’s control centre in Perth directed the derailment.
“They threw the points at a time when they knew it was moving quickly to derail the train and stop it before it damaged anybody,” Mackenzie said.
Asked by one audience member whether BHP would invest in safety systems to avoid a similar incident in the future, Mackenzie replied: “Straight answer, yes. We will continue to invest to make our railways – as in line with all of our operations – safer.
“Before this accident happened we already had in plan a number of investments. I don’t want to speculate too much on the cause of this but I want to be clear – and I’m being a little bit cute with my words here – it was actually a deliberate derailment, [the derailment] didn’t happen by accident.”