BIG PLANT FOR LOADING PHOSPHATES

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 81, 27 June 1927, Page 12

BIG PLANT FOR LOADING PHOSPHATES

LARGE ORDER PLACED NAURU AND OCEAN ISLANDS (From Our Resident Reporter.) WELLINGTON, Friday. The development of the phosphate resources of Nauru and Ocean Island will be greatly facilitated by an order for machinery which has been placed by the British Phosphates Commission in the hands of an English firm of engineers The order, which is mentioned in the trade bulletin of the Department of Overseas Trade, now in the hands of the British Trade Commissioner for New Zealand, is for a very extensive shiploading plant, and handling and storage equipment for dealing with the huge deposits of phosphate of lime which are to be found on the island of Nauru and on Ocean Island, in the South Pacific The extent of the deposits available on the two islands is estimated at about 100 million tons.

The two islands formerly belonged to Germany, but were taken over by Great Britain during the war. It is pointed out that the great difficulty experienced has been to load the phosphate into ships, owing to the fact that there are no harbours. In addition, there is a shelving beach which runs out several hundreds of feet, and which even at high tide is covered by only very shallow water. The ships have to lie off shore for loading purposes, and steam has to be kept up all the time, so that they can be moved quickly out to sea in case of a sudden squall

In order to improve yie loading facilities and to increase the rate at which the phosphate can be jhandled. Messrs. Simon are. to instal up-to-date mechanical loading plant on both islands. The bulk of the work is to be done at Nauru, where mechanical conveyors are to be installed to bring the phosphates from the quarries to the shore, and a storage building, capable of holding 12,000 tons of the material, is to be erected. The phosphates will be loaded direct to ships by means of two swinging cantilever arms reaching out 200 feet over the sea. Each cantilever will carry a loading-out conveyor and will be capable of handling 300 tons of phosphate an hour.

At Ocean Island a considerable amount of plant is existing, and here a- new handling plant and a big loading jetty, 350 feet long, is to be installed to work in conjunction with the existing mechanical conveyors. The plant on both islands will be electric-ally-driven throughout: this equipment is also included in the contract