CAQA Deepridge Resources
CAQA Deepridge Resources is a mid-sized resources and infrastructure company. It operates a hard rock quarry at Wattle Creek producing road base, aggregates and manufactured sand, an open cut coal mine in the Bowen Basin producing thermal coal for export, a drilling services division that carries out exploration, water bore, geotechnical and horizontal directional drilling, and a civil infrastructure division that builds and maintains haul roads, drainage, pavements and mine site infrastructure. Customers include state road authorities, local councils, larger mining houses, utilities and civil contractors across New South Wales and Queensland.
The company runs six departments across its three sites: Surface Extraction Operations, Processing Plant, Drilling Services, Civil Infrastructure, Plant and Maintenance, and Health, Safety, Environment and Training. The open cut runs two twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, on a seven-days-on, seven-days-off roster with a fly-in fly-out and drive-in drive-out workforce. The quarry works day shift Monday to Saturday with a night crushing shift during peak road construction season. Drilling crews mobilise to client sites for two to four weeks at a time and civil crews work on projects from the Toowoomba depot.
Deepridge operates under the mine safety and health laws of both states, the general work health and safety laws, the explosives laws and its environmental authorities. Every site has a safety management system with principal hazard management plans, a permit to work and isolation system, mobile plant prestart checks, a hazard and incident register and a training and authorisation matrix that controls who can operate what. Fitness for work is managed through drug and alcohol testing and fatigue rules. Inspectors from the state resources regulators visit each site, and the company reports high potential incidents and environmental exceedances as the law requires.