Study & Findings into the Effects of FIFO Lifestyle

Susan Clifford has investigated the positive and negative aspects of working in the Western Australian mining industry.

More than 200 employees and partners discussed their experiences of 12-hour shifts, night shifts and fly-in/fly-out travelling, and the impact of these working arrangements on their stress levels, lifestyle, relationships and health.

There are about 50,000 mining employees in Western Australia, many working on fly-in/fly-out contracts and demanding work rosters.

The mining industry pays well, but overseas research shows that working conditions can affect the lifestyle and health of miners, their partners and their families.

View report here: http://www.ihs.uwa.edu.au/research/?a=409988

The New Yankee Stadium

Yankee Stadium Inagural Season 2009

What could only make the special event of being able to attend the first game of the Yankee Stadium Inagural Season 2009 even more special, was attending in a Private Box. Forget standing in queues as monumentous as the stadium itself and being frisked by security guards name "Toiney", it was straight up for a VLS. The Stadium is ORRRRSUM, the atmosphere and the game great!

While the spread of delicious gourmet food was inviting and copious amounts of alcohol were available, well a trip to a baseball stadium just wouldn't be complete with a hot dog, now would it? No problem......

View baseball hotdogs private box style

The view from the balcony

Even though my take home memorabilia includes, key rings, ball, photos hat and Jacket, I still managed to steal one poor guests bag of popcorn for the "Official Popcorn of the New York Yankees" bag. I swear she'd finished all the popcorn really......she had!

New York City is ORRRRRSUM!

Speaking of Flying In and Flying Out, I recently spent some time in New York City. How much time, not enough of course! Can one ever spend enough time in NYC?

Painting on Building in Greenwich Village

It was great to finally see in person all those iconic landmarks that you know so well thanks to the movies and television, to actually realise this is a real place and those buildings are real and ground zero really is a hole in the ground.

Ground Zero Construction Site

The tiles on this fence are from local school children and replace pieces of paper with names left by relatives looking for loved ones during the 911 disaster. The fence is adjacent the main emergency centre during the disaster.

Interesting point, did you know a plane also once flew in the 79th floor of the Empire State Building, which still stands tall and proud, yet a plane flew into the World Trade Centre and completely imploded the structure, I mean WOW the building didn’t even explode, it imploded – who would of thought, I suppose they just don’t make buildings like they use to.

Empire State Building

It really is amazing that a place so far away can be so familiar to us, yet the closest relation one New Yorker could make to the Land of Oz was “Australia – that’s that place where some nature guy got killed by some kind of wild animal Riiiiiiggght?”

Or another interesting NYC take on how we could lower the spate of shark attacks; “those people just shouldn’t be swimming outside of the nets!”


Anyway, stick with me on this blog and let me take you on my NYC journey, by the way, being an Australian in NYC is, according to the locals – ORRRRRRSUM!!!!!!

A bit about Gold

At the end of 2001, it is estimated that all the gold ever mined amounts to about 145,000 tons. If national gold reserves are taken into account, most gold is owned by the USA followed by Germany and the IMF. If we include jewellery ownership, then India is the largest repository of gold in terms of total gold within the national boundaries.

Around 70% of gold demand is jewellery, 11% is industrial (dental, electronics) and 13% is investment (such as bars & coins).
Gold's great virtues of malleability, ductility, reflectivity, resistance to corrosion and unparalleled ability as a thermal and electrical conductor mean it is used in a wide variety of industrial applications consuming close to 300 tonnes annually.

The prime use is in electronics. Our age of high technology finds it indispensable in everything from pocket calculators to computers, washing machines to television and missiles to spacecraft. The plating of such contacts in switches, relays and connectors is the major application of gold in electronics. Dental gold is the second important sector. Other applications for gold include decorative plating of costume jewellery, watchcases, pens and pencils, spectacle frames and bathroom fittings.

(source Kingsgate Consolidated Limited, March 2009)

An Understanding and Brief History of the Fly In Fly Out Lifestyle

Understanding

Fly In Fly Out (FIFO) operations are those where food and lodging is provided for employees at their work site, e.g. mining operations, offshore platforms, FPSO, support vessels and remote construction sites.

Fly In Fly Out operations require that workers live at their work site for the period of their work roster and return home, or elsewhere offsite, for their Rest & Recreation (R&R).

Work and R&R periods differ from company to company and can depend on the distance from the company’s point of operating origin to their remote location site. For example an Australian company sending workers to a Vessel in the Gulf of Mexico may stipulate a month on month off period, due to the time and cost of getting a FIFO worker to site. Some other typical roster periods for closer sites could be could be 10 days on 4 days off, 3 weeks on 1 week off commonly referred to in the industry as 10 on 4 off, 3 on 1 off, respectively.

Working this way enables employees the luxury of living with their partners, friends and families in the areas they prefer and to send their children to the schools of their choice. FIFO working operations negate the need for companies, governments and communities to create small unsustainable towns for limited project life and/or in difficult to service remote locations.

A lot of FIFO workers often spend their R&R period visiting other countries during their time off, instead of returning to their country of origin, taking advantage of this transient working lifestyle.

The Fly In Fly Out lifestyle creates a tight-knit, loyal community spread across a wide geographic area, with a unique set of attributes, issues and concerns.

Brief History

Offshore Operations
According to a CMEWA Report 2005, FIFO had its origins during the late 1940s in the offshore oil sector in the Gulf of Mexico, and has been further developed by the offshore oil industry around the world. There has been rapid growth in FIFO operations since the late 1970’s, driven largely by the expansion of the offshore oil industry due to rising oil prices and exploration imperatives.
There were an estimated 60,000 FIFO workers in the North Sea in the late 1980s.

Onshore operations

The first modern FIFO operation was in Canada, a country whose geographical dispersion of resource deposits and population [hubs], are in some ways similar to that of Australia. The last new residential mining town constructed in Canada was Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia in the late 1970s, while the last mining town constructed in Australia was Olympic Dam, South Australia in the mid 1980s (CMEWA, January 2005)

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