Underwater Inspection for BHP Billiton

ROV Innovations received an emergency call from Paul Pengilly, the Electrical Inspector at BHP Billitons Olympic Dam site at 19:30 Tuesday Night (12th May). ROV Innovations had a team on site in the remote South Australian mining site by Thursday Morning (14th May) ready to inspect one of the freshwater reservoirs that BHP were experiencing some issues with.

One of the covered reservoirs at Olympic Dam

The only entry hatch into the reservoir with a Seamor 300F on standby for scale

After completing the intensive inductions and safety requirements for BHP, the ROV Innovations team set to work completing a thorough inspection of the reservoir. Providing a live, high definition video feed for the BHP engineers, we were quickly and efficiently able to identify a few issues with the reservoir infrastructure.

Being a completely enclosed and covered system, the Seamor ROV showed itself to be the ROV of choice for these sorts of surveys. Having high torque thrusters to enable the ROV to access every point within the reservoir, powerful LED lighting to illuminate the zero light environment, and a high definition Sony camera, capable of zooming in of assets underwater without taking the reservoir offline, allowed the BHP engineers to have extreme confidence in what they were seeing, and how to rectify any issues with the least amount of impact to the reservoir operation.

On reviewing the operation, Paul had this to say about the exercise -

We did get very good images and these are now being reviewed by our engineers...
The fast mobilization to site was excellent and Simon and Michael's performance was outstanding.

Having no one in the water also reduced the high risk hazard, and provided a zero risk and zero impact solution to the mine site.

Thanks to Michael and Simon Wright for their level of professionalism, Paul Pengilly at BHP, Darryl Hamlyn from Monadelphous Engineering, and all those who assisted in the extremely fast and efficient mobilisation to an extremely remote part of the country.

We look forward to assisting the guys out at Olympic Dam again in the near future!