North Queensland Risk Tour

Every year, one of our Gen Re guys takes a group of people on a car trip for a week through Northern Queensland to show different types of risks that we reinsure.  This year I was lucky enough to get invited to attend along with two of the girls in our Shanghai office.  It was a full week of driving of about 700 miles over the 5 days.  In my mind, the landscape of Australia looked like the Crocodile Dundee movie or something shown by Steve Irwin.  I was wrong though!  Parts of it were very lush and overall it was very pretty!

We started up in Cairns, which is home to one of the main places tourists go to see the Great Barrier Reef.  Unfortunately I didn't get to see it, but hopefully one day I will!  From there we stayed nights in Townsville, McKay and Yeppoon.  Little did I know, but Australia grows a TON of sugar cane!  That and coal are two of their main exports.

We saw a lot of sugar mills and sugar warehouses, coal loading terminals and ports, power plants, aluminum smelters and other various industrial places.  It was a very educational trip from a work perspective - it was great to see things in person and to realize that a lot of hurricanes go through this area of Australia.  I wasn't too aware of that, but they've had some big ones in the past few decades.  Not too many people live in these areas which is good, however a lot of Queensland industrial sites are located here so there is a fair amount of damage that can be done. 

Port Douglas

Sugar Warehouse - this was about two football fields long and during the harvest season is filled to the peak of the roof with raw sugar

How they load sugar on to a cargo ship

This jetty is coming from another sugar warehouse to take sugar out to load onto cargo ships.  The jetty though is about 3 miles long as The Great Barrier Reef is along here and they didn't want the ships getting too close to it.  This jetty was severely damaged by a hurricane in 2011 but it is now working again.

The largest sugar mill in Australia

The Dalrymple Bay Coal Terminal - this is one of the largest coal terminals in the world.  This place was massive!

This machine puts the coal in to piles in to piles in the yard, before it gets on the ship.  The piles are based on size and grade.  So if China calls and says we want 50 tons of 'XYZ' grade to be put on the ships, they know where to find it to put it on the conveyor belts to send out to the ships.  The jetty which takes the coal out to the ships is maybe 1.5 miles long.

Cargo ship getting loaded with coal.  This machine dispenses the coal into the various holds on the ship.

Another view of the ship.  Each of these holds on the ship were filled with coal - can hold something like 100,000 tons of coal I think?